Agony of Eros

Regular price €18.99
A01=Byung-Chul Han
A01=Cristina Carballo-Perelman
A12=Suzanne Parrott
A23=Alain Badiou
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Byung-Chul Han
Author_Cristina Carballo-Perelman
automatic-update
B06=Erik Butler
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HPX
Category=JBFV
Category=JFM
Category=QDX
contemporary society
COP=United States
culture
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
depression
desire
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotic
facebook
Fifty Shades of Gray
individualism
Language_English
loss
love
Mass.
Melancholia
narcissism
online pornography
PA=Available
philosophy
porn
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
radical Other
social interaction
social media
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9780262533379
  • Dimensions: 114 x 178mm
  • Publication Date: 07 Apr 2017
  • Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.”

Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde,Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication” of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.” To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.

Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society.

This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention” of love.
—from the foreword by Alain Badiou

Byung-Chul Han, born in Seoul, is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK). One of the most widely read philosophers in Europe, he is the author of more than twenty books, includingincluding four previous volumes in the MIT Press Untimely Meditations series, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, The Agony of Eros, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, and Topology of Violence. Alain Badiou is a French philosopher. He has published a number of major philosophical works, including The Immanence of Truths, the final installment of his Being and Event trilogy, released in French in 2018.