The Agony of Eros. Love and Desire in a Narcissistic Society

In the dynamic essay The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han examines the control over passions in modern society as the most important tool for taming and manipulating by power. Under the weight of this control, a person is no longer capable of love and merely indulges their sexuality. Today, sex is a performance, sexuality is capital. Pornography is the anticipation of dead sex in virtual space, not living sexuality. A society of burnout, in which a person depletes themselves without the possibility of liberation in relation to the Other, is a society without Eros.