Desire is Dead
How Modern Love Is Preventing Us from Experiencing Eros (Featuring Anne Carson! Emmanuel Levinas! Byung-Chul Han! Roland Barthes! Sheila Heti! Socrates!)
Eros: A Brief Introduction
If we killed God in the 20th century, in the 21st century we killed love.
Love, the claim goes, is dead because of endless freedom of choice, an overabundance of options, a compulsion for perfection. But there is another crisis—one far more devastating and complex: the erosion of the Other.
Pop into almost any good independent bookstore and you’ll see a book featured from contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han—probably near a reprinting of Simone de Beauvoir or new release of Slavoj Žižek. In The Agony of Eros he perfectly summarizes our modern condition, where, today, love is being “positivized into a formula for enjoyment.” Modern love views love as a path towards generating pleasant feelings, affirming our own desires for success, ambition, comfort, and happiness. We avoid negativity, depth, and complexity at all costs, positivizing the future into an optimized present that excludes all disaster. Today, love means nothing more than need, satisfaction, secure attachment, and enjoyment.
And yet in the literature on eros there is one common thread. Eros is BRUTAL—it’s debilitating, devastating, overwhelming—even if it is one of the greatest driving motivations for humans. Why? Because at the heart of desire is wanting something you do not have. The desired—the Other—is always over there:
In The Symposium, Plato said, “Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has.”
In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson describes eros as “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
In a Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes said, “Am I in love?—Yes, since I’m waiting.”
In the Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han said, “The Other whom I desire and who fascinates me is placeless.”
Today’s love abolishes the desire for what is absent—anything that cannot be found, understood, seized, possessed, consumed. But! It is the absent—more specifically, the waiting, the unknowable, incomprehensible, the negative in both in space and experience—that embodies the erotic.
Philosopher Martin Buber gave that space between us and the Other a name: Urdistanz, or “primal distance”—Buber claims that such distance serves as the “very principle of being-human” and creates the transcendent condition for any alterity existing at all. By having this primal distance, it provides the ability of experiencing the Other in terms of their otherness. Their unknowability! Their ineffability!
In Buber’s words:
“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
This reminds me of a beloved passage from Sheila Heti’s novel, Pure Colour, that I think about—no kidding—probably every day:
“The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them. When they brighten the characteristics of another person, it is like turning on a light in a darkened room. We might remember that moment of seeing better than any of the other moments in our lives.”
The word Plato used is atopia, a concept describing the ineffability of things or emotions that are seldom experienced, that are outstanding, and that are original in the strict sense. It is a certain quality (of experience) that can be observed within oneself or within others. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes defines atopia as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality", referring to the circumstance, an atopia, in which atopy is intercommunicated in interest and love. In The Pleasure of the Text he regarded pleasure (specifically when it comes to the written word) itself as atopic saying that "the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic.”
To return back to The Agony of Eros, Han says:
“Eros concerns the Other in a strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.”
(Also, let’s just take a moment to appreciate that phrase: inferno of the same.)
And yet, today, we pursue romantic partners as if they are an accessory. How will this person fit in my life, my desires, what I want in another person. Having standards is critical, sure (and in case I need to say it, pursuing an emotionally or literally available person is OF COURSE a wise thing to do) but what of the unknown? The unexpected? We strip the Other of their otherness or—on the Other end of that spectrum—imprison them in some kind of fantasy or chain them to some pedestal where who they truly are (their Otherness) has nothing to do with how they are being perceived and seen.
At the heart of love—of eros—is embracing the sacrosanct, atopic otherness. A “not yet.” An “over there.” An understanding that, we are not (despite what society reinforces) transactional beings seeking transactions. Eros displaces the ego by centering The Other (which is why Han says that eros and depression are opposites—you cannot ruthlessly wear yourself down with overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference when you enter the world of The Other.)
The Other is elusive.
The Other cannot be an extension, a possession, an attachment.
The Other is nothingness.
Which is why eros is agony—eros is bittersweet—because eros is, well, to die.
The Death of Adonis
It’s been said that there is nothing that embodies the erotic more than the tusks that killed Adonis.
Here is how it went.
Adonis was young and beautiful. Ideal in his form. So ideal that even Aphrodite herself, the goddess of love and beauty couldn’t resist him. Her desire so intense, in fact, that she twisted the fates to have her love.
While Aphrodite adored him, another goddess, Artemis, watched from the shadows, her heart twisting with jealousy. Not over Adonis himself, but over the attention Aphrodite lavished on him (Artemis hated Aphrodite for killing a devoted disciple). Artemis, the huntress, knew the woods better than the back of her hand, knew every creature, every threat. So, she conjured a plan, a deadly test for this mortal so loved by her rival.
She summoned a boar. And not just a boar—a fucking colossal boar with massive tusks—hardly an animal and more of a weapon, born of divine vengeance and set loose in the wilds where Adonis often meandered.
One day Adonis went hunting. At that same moment the boar charged through the underbrush, snarling, violent, drunkenly driven by the will of a goddess. A single moment, that’s all it took. Adonis saw the boar too late. The beast barreled into him with a force so strong it could only come from the wrath of gods. Its tusks, sharp and unforgiving, pierced, penetrated, tore through his flesh. The earth beneath him stained with his blood.
Aphrodite, sensing her lover's agony, raced to his side, but the damage was done. She wept as she held his broken body, her tears mingling with his blood, and where they fell, crimson anemones bloomed—flowers as fleeting as his youth and beauty, as tragic as their love.
After Adonis’s death, the boar is said to have protested that it had not meant to injure the beautiful youth with its erotikous odantas, or “eroticized teeth.”
The boar meant only to caress him.
The Phenomenology of the Caress
Eros isn’t in the romance between Aphrodite and Adonis; nor in the jealousy or vengeance that surrounds Artemis. It is found in the beast, and yes, specifically the boar’s tusks—the tusks that pierced and killed that which it wanted to caress.
Twentieth-century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, described the caress as a “game with something slipping away.”
While many philosophers were concerned with how we perceive and understand the world as a unified whole, 20th century philosopher Emannuel Lévinas turned his attention to the face of the Other—the person standing before us—and how this encounter breaks through the desire for completeness that we often seek in our understanding (shaking up Western philosophy’s obsession with totalizing knowledge). Levinas offered an invitation: to rethink how we relate to others and to embrace the unknown and the infinite. Knowing that you can be deeply moved—intellectually and physically—but you can never fully grasp another in their entirety.
To illustrate, Lévinas provides a phenomenology of the caress.
So often sex and romance is about grasping, possessing, knowing. But the caress, eros, isn’t about any of that—it’s about the failure of all that.
When the boar made contact—when his eroticized teeth penetrated Adonis’s flesh—was that the moment that he achieved the object of his desire (which, arguably, is the death of desire itself)? Was eros embodied in the god-willed charge—moving drunkenly through the forest for something unknown? Is it that we are so messy in our desire that our intensity is what often ruins it? Or is it that ultimately, Artemis dies only to be reborn and that is the cyclical way that love often takes? (Interestingly, Han references Hegel saying Society’s “ability to die is vanishing…the true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in the other self.”)
If you could possess, grasp, or know the Other fully, they wouldn’t be Other. The caress points to a different path: it seeks without knowing what it seeks. This “not knowing” is the essence of the caress (and the essence of eros). Again, a game where something is always slipping away, a game without a plan, not with something that can become ours, but with something other, always other, always unreachable, and always still to come.
Lévinas’s atopic caressing and Other-driven eros shatters one of the core ideas of Western philosophy: to know. To know all. To know everything.
Instead, eros calls us to not know. To meet each new day, thing, interaction, object as some new, striking phenomena (which no matter the method, interpretation or approach is the essence of phenomenology). To be drunk on unknowing—and be willing to be enraptured by the unknowability of everything. Even ourselves. No, especially ourselves.
Which is why it seems for Barthes, nuance is at the heart of desire, eros, love. “Nuance—a shimmer beyond good and evil, beyond detection, beyond system—enjoys the privileges of satiated passivity: it never combusts.” Satiated passivity! It means being utterly fulfilled in letting nature take its course. It’s about subtlety, about following your wiles, about keeping an open eye, seeing signs, making connections. The ability to see beyond—beyond good and evil sure, but also beyond comfort, success, achievement, domesticity, beyond even our selves—and look toward nuance (towards the erotic!) which means engulfment, annihilation, death.
The tusk pierces Adonis.
Cupid’s dart takes aim at St. Sebastian.
The nail is driven into Christ’s flesh spilling out his passion. (As communion goes: This is my blood, poured out for you. This is my body which is given for you. How are Christians not the most eros obsessed folks out there?)
It’s no wonder why Roland Barthes said: “Where there is a wound, there is a subject.” In his book A Lover’s Discourse, lacerations take centerstage. He wasn’t a masochist, he liked the metaphor of lacerations because they made appearances complex and banished banalities.
It’s ironic that philosophy has this obsession with knowing—because at the very beginning, Plato placed Socrates centerstage as not teacher, nor all-knowing god, but as lover; because of this singularity he is called Atopos: out of place or the one without a place.
When Socrates speaks his words unfurl as erotic seduction. He caresses his the ears of his listeners. In fact, Plato compares him to the satyr—and satyrs are among the friends of Dionysos (god of pleasure, ecstasy, insanity). Plato understood the importance of the erotic in thought. In Symposium, Plato made Poros the father of Eros—Poros means “way” (an embodiment of resourcefulness). Drunk at Aphrodite’s party, Poros fucked Penia (the embodiment of poverty) and gave birth to Eros.
Because of this parentage, Eros shows the way.
All in all, desire, romance, eros, pleasure is about following the path of ineffability and unknowingness. Phenomenologically it’s about keeping the Other as not an extension of you—your wants, your desires, your understandings—but their own distinct, distanced essence. They are not you. They are not for you. They are other. And it is because of that that they are desirable. That space between you—Urdistanz—is the erotic. If you allow that space to exist.
We need to be tantalized not tyrannized. We need to be wooed, intrigued, made curious, enticed, follow some faint perfume. But instead, we are offered a boiled down human essence based on what another may offer us. We make lists of things we want in a potential partner—career, hobbies, height—in hopes of finding someone that checks off some list that we deem is meant for us. It’s no wonder in this culture of desirelessness we are fixated on attachment theory. We only know how to view people in relation to us. How they make us feel. How their behavior influences our own. This is touted as some form of self-love (often times it’s more like self-protection).
What if we were to look toward the Other with curiosity, to follow some mysterious way? To follow the nuance, follow the mystery, and see someone not for what they may offer us but for sake of discovery and deep appreciation of Other? Surely, we would begin to see the erotic in everyone and everything. Ancient eros is an existing in a state of constant interplay and experiencing of the aura that surrounds beauty. It is to look at someone not for what they may offer you but for what their existence might communicate so that you, ever the philosopher, ever the lover may be able to translate the wordless—even if only for yourself. As Barthes said: “It’s my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
Because eros is more than romance. So much more. It’s an existential vibration of experiencing the Other around you. And Other can be a lover, certainly (and perhaps most delightfully!) but it can also be found in the dripping juice of seasonal fruit, the soft touch of a woven fabric, a sweet, unplaceable scent, the first chill of autumn—anyone and anything where pleasure can be found.
Nietzschean accent:”‘Not to pray any longer—to bless!”
Mystical accent: “The best and most delectable wine, and also the most intoxicating…by which without drinking it, the annihilated soul is intoxicated, a soul at once free and intoxicated! Forgetting, forgotten, intoxicated by what it does not drink and will never drink!”
- Roland Barthes
This was a really interesting post to read, and I completely agree—modern love often feels more like a selfish transaction than ever before.
"What’s in it for me?" has become the foundation of our relationships—the lens through which we try to comprehend another person’s humanity. But this mindset strips away the complexity, the infinite mystery of the other—the human being in front of us, struggling to be a person themselves, looking back through that same transactional lens.
It turns love into a bitter exchange—favor for favor, emotion for emotion. Everything becomes a negotiation, where compromise is impossible unless the “winnings” are split exactly 50/50. And the list goes on.
But recently, I’ve started to realize how that game was rigged against me all along. I’m beginning to see that you can’t mold a person to fit your desires—and if you can, they’re not really a person anymore.
Instead, embracing their otherness is the key to something real. Something sacred. Without that, love is nothing more than just another transaction.
I agree up to a point. Do you really support such a sweeping statement as desire is dead? For whom is desire dead? Older humans, tucked away in their sanctuary's may yet feel the faint pull of latent desires and ignore them out of fear of inconvienence and making a fool of oneself. But your fifteen year, caught in the bloom of coursing hormones? Pretty sure they will be feeling desire hot and heavy regardless of the ability of their cell phones to bring knowlege as close as they want it, regardless of limnality. Desire once satiated doesn't disappear but will come around for another crack at you. Your larger point is, or should be, that our culture bombards us with so many analogues for eros, cars and cruises and wines and sleek technologies, that they displace the more visceral human expressions. There's just not enough bandwidth for it all and it is society that selects the objects of our desire not ourselves. After a certain point, we fall to the ground satiated, unable to desire, because we have been overcome by the knowlege that all these representations are not only false, but unattainable.