The boar whose tusks killed Adonis embodies eroticism, which finds expression as madness and excess. After Adonis’s death, the boar is said to have protested that it had not meant to injure the beautiful youth with its “eroticized teeth” (erotikous odontas)—only to caress him. In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Marsilio Ficino describes the “eroticized eye” (erotikon omma) of lovers.1 Like the boar’s tusks, such a gaze is commanded by a deadly passion: “For those eyes of yours, gliding through my eyes to the depths of my heart, stir the hottest fire in my marrow. Therefore, have mercy on me, who die because of you.”2 Here, blood serves as the medium of erotic communication. A kind of transfusion occurs between the eyes of the lover and the beloved:
Put before your eyes, I pray, Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian and that Theban who was captivated by love for him, the orator Lysias. Lysias stares open-mouthed at the face of Phaedrus. Phaedrus sends into the eyes of Lysias the sparks of his own eyes, and with the sparks sends along a spirit. The light of Phaedrus is easily joined by the light of Lysias, and the spirit also easily joins his spirit. The vapor of this sort springing from the heart of Phaedrus immediately seeks the heart of Lysias. By the hardness of this heart it is made denser and returns to its former state, as the blood of Phaedrus, so that the blood of Phaedrus is not in the heart of Lysias—a truly remarkable phenomenon.3
As conceived in antiquity, erotic communication is anything but contented. According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.”4 Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.
In Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz claims that love is now becoming “feminized.” Adjectives used to describe romantic love-scenes—“nice,” “intimate,” “quiet,” “peaceful,” “comfortable,” “sweet,” “gentle,” and so on—are extremely “feminine.” The prevailing image of romantic love makes men and women alike occupy a female sphere of sentiment.5 But counter to Illouz’s diagnosis, love is not simply being “feminized.” Rather, in the course of a positivization of all spheres of life, it is being domesticated into a consumer formula devoid of risk and daring, without excess or madness. All negativity, all negative feeling, is avoided. Passion and pain are giving way to pleasant feelings and inconsequential arousal. In the age of the “quickie,” the casual encounter, and sex as stress-relief, sexuality is losing all negativity, too. The wholesale absence of negativity is degrading love into an object of consumption, a matter of hedonistic calculation. The desire for the Other is giving way to the comfort of the Same. The aim is to procure the comfortable and, ultimately, dull immanence of the wholly identical. Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression.
Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave describes the battle for life and death. The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. Physical superiority does not determine the outcome of the struggle. Instead, what proves decisive is the “ability to die,”6 or a capacity for death. Those who do not have freedom unto death (Freiheit zum Tod) do not risk their life. Instead of “following through to the point of death” (mit sich selbst bis auf den Tod zu gehen), they remain “standing alone within death” (an sich selbst innerhalb des Todes stehen).7 The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.
Work and bare life are closely related. Both constitute reactions to the negativity of death. Today, the defense of bare life is intensifying into the absolutization and fetishization of health. The modern-day slave prefers it to sovereignty and freedom. He or she resembles the “last human beings” Nietzsche describes, for whom health per se represents an absolute value. It is exalted and made the “great goddess”: “one honors health. ‘We invented happiness,’ say the last human beings, and they blink.”8 Where bare life is hallowed, theology gives way to therapy. Or therapy becomes theological. Death has no place in the chronicle of bare life’s achievements. So long as one remains a slave and clings to bare life, one remains subordinate to the master: “But your grinning death, the one that creeps up like a thief and yet comes as master—it is hated as much by the fighter as by the victor.”9
Eros as excess and transgression denies both work and bare life. Thus the slave, who holds fast to life and labors, proves incapable of erotic experience—of erotic desire. Today’s achievement-subject is equal to the Hegelian slave in all respects except for the fact that he does not work for the master, but rather exploits himself of his own volition. As an entrepreneur of the self, he is master and slave at once. The issue here concerns a fateful unity that Hegel did not consider in his dialectic of master and slave. The subject of auto-exploitation is just as unfree as the subject of allo-exploitation. If we understand the dialectic of master and slave as the history of freedom, there can be no talk of the “end of history,” for we are still far from being truly free. Following this logic, we are witnessing a stage of history when slave and master form a unit. It means that we are enslaved masters or slaves who think themselves masters, not free human beings who will achieve reality at the end of history. History, understood as the history of freedom, is not over, then. It would only be over if we were really free—if we were neither master nor slave: neither enslaved masters nor slaves who think themselves masters.
Capitalism absolutizes bare life. Its telos is not the good life. Capitalism’s compulsive accumulation and growth is specifically aimed against death, which counts as absolute loss. For Aristotle, merely accumulating capital merits scorn because it has no concern for the good life—only for bare life:
So some people believe that this is the task of household management, and go on thinking that they should maintain their store of money or increase it without limit. The reason they are so disposed, however, is that they are preoccupied with living, not with living well.10
The process of capitalization and production is assuming infinite dimensions by doing away with the teleology of the good life. Its motion forward is speeding up more and more by losing all sense of direction. This is how capitalism becomes obscene.
Hegel is receptive to the Other like no other thinker. Such a sensibility cannot be dismissed as an idiosyncrasy. One should read Hegel differently than, say, Derrida, Deleuze, or even Bataille have done. According to their mode of reading, the “Absolute” points to violence and totality. But for Hegel it represents love, above all: “In love … those phases are present, in its content, which we [have] cited as the fundamental essence of the absolute Spirit: the reconciled return out of another into self.”11 Absolute means unrestricted. It is precisely the restricted spirit (or mind, Geist) that wants immediacy with itself and turns away from the Other. In contrast, acknowledging the negativity of the Other is what distinguishes absolute Spirit. According to Hegel, the “life of Spirit” is not bare life, which merely “shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation”; rather, it is “life that endures [devastation] and maintains itself in it.” Spirit owes its liveliness specifically to the capacity for death. The Absolute is not “something positive, which closes its eyes.” Rather, “Spirit … [looks] the negative in the face and [tarries] with it.”12 It is absolute because it dares to venture into outermost negativity—which it incorporates, or, more precisely, encloses within itself. Where the purely positive—positivity to excess—prevails, no Spirit exists.
The “definition of the Absolute,” according to Hegel, is “that it is the syllogistic inference.”13 The word for inference in German, Schluss, also means “conclusion” (from schliessen, “to close”—cf. con-cludere, in Latin). Schluss is not a category of formal logic in this context. Hegel would call life itself a conclusion, in the sense of an “end.” It would amount to violence, the violent ex-clusion of the Other, if it were restricted: bypassing the end, it would yield a short-circuit (Kurzschluss). However, the absolute conclusion is long and slow; it is preceded by tarrying: abiding or dwelling. The dialectic itself is a movement of closing, opening, and closing again. The Spirit would bleed to death from the wounds inflicted by the Other’s negativity, were it not capable of reaching a conclusion. Not every end amounts to violence. Peace is concluded. Friendship is an end unto itself. Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self.”14 The consciousness of the Hegelian slave is restricted; the slave is incapable of admitting an absolute end because he cannot relinquish self-consciousness—that is, he has no ability to die, no capacity for death. As an absolute end, love passes through death. Although one dies in the Other, this death is followed by a return to oneself. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other; wrongly, this has been declared the main figure of Hegelian thought. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.
The depressive-narcissistic subject has no capacity for conclusion. Yet without a conclusion, everything dissolves and becomes a blur. It is not by chance that indecision, or inconclusiveness (Unentschlossenheit)—the inability to arrive at a decision or finish anything (die Unfähigkeit zum Ent-Schluss)—constitutes a symptom of depression. Depression characterizes our age; thanks to excessive openness and unlimitedness, the capacity to close and conclude has disappeared. The ability to die is vanishing, too, because no one can conclude his or her life. The achievement-subject has no capacity for bringing things to an end—for concluding, even provisionally. The subject breaks down under the compulsion to perform and produce accomplishments over and over.
Love means dying in the Other for Marsilio Ficino, too: “When you love me … and as I love you … I recover myself, lost in the first place by my own neglect of myself, in you, who preserve me.”15 When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning and oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) of eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”16 Bataille begins his discussion of eroticism as follows: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”17 What is affirmed here is not bare life—which flees the negativity of death. Instead, 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.” To give this paradox “some semblance of justification,” Bataille refers to Sade: “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”18
The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience: “If love exists at all it is … like death … within us.”19 Above all, death concerns the ego, the I. Erotic life-impulses overwhelm and dissolve its narcissistic and imaginary identity. Because of their negativity, they express themselves as death-impulses. Death that puts an end to bare life is not the only death. Relinquishing the imaginary identity of the ego and suspending the symbolic order to which it owes its societal and social existence represents a weightier death than the end of bare life:
The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. … Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals.20
Everyday life consists of discontinuities. Erotic experience opens the way to “continuity of being”—which only death, as the end of “the discontinuity of beings,” can provide.21
In a society where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, the economy of survival reigns. It stands diametrically opposed to the non-economy of eros and death. Neoliberalism, with its uninhibited ego- and achievement-impulses, constitutes a social order from which eros has vanished entirely. The society of positivity, from which negativity has disappeared, is a society of bare life, which is dominated exclusively by the concern “to make sure of survival”22 in the face of discontinuity. This is a slave’s life. Concern for bare life, for survival alone, strips life of all vitality, which is in fact a very complex phenomenon. Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality: “Something is alive … only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, [its] force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.”23 Thus, vitality differs from the vigor or fitness of bare life, which lacks all negativity. A survivor is like the undead: too dead to live, and too alive to die.
The Flying Dutchman’s ship—manned by the undead, according to legend—offers an analogy to contemporary burnout society. The Dutchman, “flying like an arrow without aim, without rest, without peace,”24 is like today’s exhausted and depressive achievement-subject, whose freedom amounts to being condemned to perpetual self-exploitation. Capitalist production is aimless, too. It no longer has any concern for the good life. The Dutchman is undead, unable either to live or to die. Damned to journey eternally in the inferno of the same, he yearns for an apocalypse that would set him free from torment:
Great day of judgment, nearing slow
When wilt thou dawn and chase my night?
When comes it, that o’erwhelming blow,
Which strikes the world with crushing might?
When all the dead are rais’d again
Destruction I shall then attain,
Ye worlds, your course continue not!25
Likewise, the society of blind production and performance at whose mercy Senta stands is without eros or happiness:
Hum, hum, hum—good wheel be whirling!
Gaily, gaily turn thee round!
Spin, spin, spin—the threads be twirling!
Turn, good wheel, with humming sound!26
Eros follows a wholly different logic. Senta’s suicide, which is also a Liebestod, stands diametrically opposed to the capitalist economy of production and performance. Her declaration of love is a promise—a form of decision and conclusion (Schlussform). It is absolute and, indeed, sublime, transcending the purely additive and accumulative operations of the capitalist economy. It brings forth a duration—a “clearing,” Heidegger would say—in time. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time. It encloses the former within the latter: “But love, the essence of which is fidelity …, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself. Happiness, in a word! Yes, happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.”27