The Agony of Eros

Byung-Chul Han · Alain Badiou

Oct 2024 · Dreamscape Media · Narrated by Peter Noble

About this audiobook

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.

Ratings and reviews

This review is more about the features of the audiobook than the content of the book itself... This is a long form essay which is heavily academic so it isn't for the novice. While I found little to be critical regarding the content, the presentation in this specific audiobook release has flaws. Because the content is so academic, it can be lifeless and stiff even though the concepts are deep. Unfortunately the narrator's style is Shakespearean: stilted, lofty, and with a subtle percussive nature that lacks inflection. The result is a performative reading instead of an informative and challenging one that prompts thoughtfulness, which is what the essay strove to do. When every sentence is read with the same lack of emphasis, core points get lost in the material. This would have been better narrated with someone with a conversational style.