Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Society and Social Sciences
  3. Philosophy

Read and listen for free for 42 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
3.7(3)

The Agony of Eros

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

This audiobook is skillfully read by Peter Noble, and was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. Audio engineering by Allie McSwain.


Author:

  • Byung-Chul Han

Narrator:

  • Peter Noble

Format:

  • Audiobook

Duration:

  • 1 h 59 min

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Society and Social Sciences
  • Philosophy

More by Byung-Chul Han

Skip the list
  1. The Burnout Society

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobook
  2. Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobook
  3. El espíritu de la esperanza

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobookbook
  4. La sociedad del cansancio : Cuarta Edición Especial

    Byung-Chul Han

    book
  5. En el enjambre

    Byung-Chul Han

    book
  6. La sociedad del cansancio

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobook
  7. La crisis de la narración

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobookbook
  8. Trötthetssamhället

    Byung-Chul Han

    book
  9. La salvación de lo bello

    Byung-Chul Han

    book
  10. La agonía del Eros

    Byung-Chul Han

    book
  11. La expulsión de lo distinto (nueva ed.)

    Byung-Chul Han

    book

Byung-Chul Han: The Collected Audio Works Series

Skip the list
  1. The Burnout Society

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobook
  2. Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

    Byung-Chul Han

    audiobook

Others have also read

Skip the list
  1. Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein : A Novel

    Anne Eekhout

    audiobook
  2. They Were Her Property

    Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

    audiobook
  3. The Quest for a Moral Compass

    Kenan Malik

    audiobook
  4. Filosofiske fiksérbilleder

    Ole Fogh Kirkeby

    book
  5. Den unge Søren Kierkegaard

    Frithiof Brandt

    book
  6. The Women Writers Handbook 2020

    A.S. Byatt, Philippa Gregory, Anne Sebba, Sarah Waters, Claire Tomalin, Carol Ann Duffy, Ida Vitale, Emma Woolf, Madeleine Thien, Kit de Waal, Suchen Christine Lim, Jasvinder Sanghera, Jackie Kay, Jaki McCarrick, Laura Miles, April De Angelis, Bryony Lavery, Djamila Ribeiro, Kalista Sy, Fiona Rintoul, Sian Evans, Debbie Taylor

    book
  7. Rødstrømperne. Den danske Rødstrømpebevægelses udvikling, nytænkning og gennemslag 1970-1985. Bind 2

    Drude Dahlerup

    book
  8. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

    Adam Rutherford

    audiobook
  9. The Divine Comedy 1: Hell

    Dante Alighieri

    audiobookbook
  10. End of History and the Last Man

    Francis Fukuyama

    book
  11. Lesson Learned from Original Sin

    Tessa Belmont

    book
  12. 1915 - Da kvinder og tyende blev borgere

    Pia Fris Laneth

    audiobookbook

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5