The central concern of this book is the idea that love is something that is under strain by modern society. Much of modern society forces us to make our lives projects. This makes us almost entirely concerned with ourselves - nearly completely self-centred. This form of narcissism means that too often we think of other people mostly for what they can do for us. Bauman talks about this too - he says that we now live in a time when 'teams' are no longer the central metaphor of work, but rather 'networks' have taken their place - and this difference is anything but insignificant. In a team people have different roles, as they do in a network, but their main power is in their working together. And teams generally work together over an extended time. But a network only really exists for the time of the project it is involved in - networks form and dissolve, they are fluid and time-limited. A network is also different from a team in that a network is always centred on the individual. That is, everyone in society is the central node of their own network - and so, while other branches may be added or taken away, the centre is always the individual themselves. There is no T.S. Eliot pining that he is not Hamlet at the centre of our network - we are all Hamlet, we are all the heroes of our own lives.
But this narcissism has its costs - the obsession with being the central hero of our lives means that we are attracted to others for what they can do for us - what positive role they can play in our lives. And the major point in this work is that love is about the negation of the self - it is about being prepared to sacrifice ourselves for the loved other. That if love is to change us it can only achieve this if we allow it to also move us beyond the limits of ourselves. This negative dialectic - that is, being prepared to no longer exist and to choose that for the sake of the other, to forgo everything for their sake - is what allows for the Hegalian negation of the negation, the rebirth of the self at a higher level than is available when love is based solely on self-gratification.
In this sense of love, love is becoming increasingly antithetical toward modern society - especially in the sense that modern society demands an obsessive focus on the self and views the other as merely a stepping stone towards the achievement of one's own goals and desires.
The problem of our age is one of endless positivity. And this goes to the heart of our social psychology. You are no longer allowed to be negative in any sense, positive psychology (even while dying of cancer) is now an obligation. But as he says here, "But without negativity, only the Same exists. Spirit-which originally meant unrest-owes its spiritedness, its animacy, to negativity".
And this sits within a world dominated by a kind of bland pornography - and that this is what is now confused with eros. He quotes Fifty Shades of Grey as a case in point, where the characters in the book look like they are going to transgress the mundane, but in fact begin their S&M journey by promising not to cross certain already defined boundaries. The potential for escape here seems closed off before the door is even opened. Now, I'm not saying that eros is only possible once we accept unrestrained S&M, but rather that love itself isn't a positive thing, but rather something, if it is to transform us at all, must 'kill' at least some part of us. Because, ultimately, that is what change means.
This very short book begins with an introduction from Alain Badiou. Like the previous book of Han's I read, this one could have been much more than its 70 pages, but its power is not diminished by its brevity.
Part of me is unsure how to engage with this book, but I do feel the need to engage with it personally. The nature of love is something that I stumble over and have for most of my life. I find it very hard to lose myself in love, there is part of me that always remains cynical (rather than merely sceptical) of the transformative power of love. And having nearly been destroyed by love in the past, that is, found myself in positions where any move I might make would only cause infinite pain to those I would otherwise want to protect from the slightest harm, means I struggle to accept even the most complex theories of the nature of love. I think perhaps love has caused me the most psychological damage I'm capable of bearing.
This book is attractive to me for a whole range of reasons - firstly, I do believe change is only possible on the basis of the metaphorical 'death' of part of ourselves. Otherwise, what can 'change' possibly mean? So, being open to the idea that if love is to change us, then we must be open to that change as an essentially a negative force makes logical sense to me. However, Han's vision of the acceptance of this negation strikes me as a little odd. And perhaps this goes some way to helping to explain why I have never felt love has brought about a resolution in my life I might have otherwise hoped for. That is, I have never experienced the full redemptive power love in my own life and perhaps the point this book makes is that is because I've never been open to the kind of death required for such redemption.
Love has always seemed negative to me in quite other senses - love has often been associated in my mind with renunciation more than mere negation, with a turning away from and a giving up of. And not just in the sense of fidelity and the rejection of all others other than The Other (the demand for monogamy - which has more or less been how I've lived my life anyway) - although, obviously enough, that plays a part in my feeling of love as renuciation. Rather, love also feels like a negotiation and one that, as I get older in particular, means needing to choose to between desire and comfort. Worse, because desire never seems to actually shut up, the choice seems to be to forsake all power in my relationships with those I love over my own desires because these seem like destructive forces to my relationships. Ultimately, this is impotence, it is this constraint, and it is this impotence that is becoming increasingly associated in my mind with love. That is, if there is a choice at all, love means a rejection of virtually all desires other than the desire for the other to be happy.
The problem is that I don't know how sustainable that really is. Often I feel crushed by the choices I am making - I'm also aware that desire is not silenced just because we know our desire is not reciprocated. When does self-negation become self-loathing? I struggle to believe self-loathing can be a positive force in our lives - or rather, the kind of negative force that might lead to a higher awareness.
I've never found love to be the redemptive force I think I would have liked it to have been. Rather, too often it has been a force of near infinite and pointless pain.