Haley Baumeister’s Reviews > The Agony of Eros > Status Update

"A society of positivity, from which negativity has disappeared, is a society of bare life--which is dominated by the exclusive concern of making sure of survival in the face of discontinuity. This is a slave's life. Concern for bare life, for survival alone, strips life of all vitality... Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality."

"The impulse to live, heightened to the utmost and affirmed, approaches the impulse to die. Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death. Indeed, although erotic activity is, in the first place, an exuberance of life, the object of this psychological quest--independent of any concern to reproduce life--is not alien to death."

"The crisis of love does not derive from too many others, so much as from the erosion of the other."