Max’s Reviews > The Agony of Eros > Status Update
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Max
is on page 46 of 88
Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same. Calculating thought lacks the negativity of atopia. It is work on the positive. No negativity inspires disquiet or unrest in it.
— Jun 07, 2026 02:41PM
Max
is on page 44 of 88
In contrast, love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. […] Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society. Thereby, it remains faithful to what is yet to come.
… but how?
— Jun 07, 2026 05:56AM
… but how?
Max
is on page 40 of 88
When borders and thresholds vanish, fantasies of the Other disappear too.
Without the negativity of thresholds or threshold-experiences, fantasy withers. The contemporary crisis in literature and the arts stems from a crisis of fantasy: the disappearance of the Other. This is the agony of eros.
— Jun 06, 2026 10:09AM
Without the negativity of thresholds or threshold-experiences, fantasy withers. The contemporary crisis in literature and the arts stems from a crisis of fantasy: the disappearance of the Other. This is the agony of eros.
Max
is on page 38 of 88
Desire is not “rationalized” today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. Desire is always desire for the Other. The negativity of privation and absence nourishes it. As the object of desire, the Other escapes the positivity of choice.
— Jun 06, 2026 10:01AM
Max
is on page 34 of 88
However, nudity that is displayed without secrecy or expression approaches pornographic bareness. What is more, the pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery. […] In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy.
— Jun 05, 2026 10:10AM
Max
is on page 25 of 88
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.
— Jun 05, 2026 08:30AM
Max
is on page 23 of 88
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.
— Jun 05, 2026 08:26AM
Max
is on page 20 of 88
Erotic desire is tied to a particular absence of the Other—not the absence of nothingness, but rather “absence in a horizon of the future.”
— Jun 03, 2026 10:51PM
[…] information society has no access to the wholly Other. It lacks eros—which transforms. Sexuality also represents a positive formula for experiencing love. Therefore it, too, is additive and cumulative.