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.” 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.

— The Agony of Eros

Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death.

Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality. As Hegel says: “Something is alive… only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, [its] force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.”

Today, sexuality is not threatened by that “pure reason” which puritanically avoids sex as something “dirty,” but by pornography. Porn is not sex in virtual space. Today, even real sex is turning into porn.

In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process. In this, it differs from data storage. Technological data storage strips all life from what has been. It is without time. Thus, a total present prevails today.

Anecdotes of fortitude and bravery abound in nursery tales. Does a little [boy] cry for any ache? The mother scolds him in this fashion: “What a coward to cry for a trifling pain! What will you do when your arm is cut off in battle? What when you are called upon to commit harakiri?”

— Inazo Notibé, Bushido

Harakiri: also known as Seppuku. It was a ritualized suicide committed by Japanese Samurai to preserve their honor.

“But love, the essence of which is fidelity…, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself

— Alain Badiou

Illouz also assumes that increasing choice entails the “rationalization” of desire. Desire, she argues, is no longer determined by the unconscious mind so much as by conscious selection. The subject of desire is “made incessantly aware of and responsible for choice, for spelling out rationally desirable criteria in another.” Moreover, heightened imagination is supposed to have “raised the thresholds of women’s and men’s expectations about the desirable attributes of a partner and/or about the prospects of shared life.” In consequence, one is now “disappointed” more often. And disappointment is a “notorious handmaid of imagination.”

the Internet is “position[ing] the modern individual as a desiring subject, longing for experiences, daydreaming about objects or forms of life, and living experiences in an imaginary and virtual mode.” Increasingly, the modern self realizes its wishes and feelings in imaginary ways, through commodities and media images. Its imaginative faculty is determined by the market and mass culture.

— The Agony of Eros

Courage, The Spirit of Daring and Bearing
Courage was scarcely deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless it was exercised in the cause of Righteousness. Confucius defines Courage by explaining what its negative is. ‘Perceiving what is right, and doing it not, argues lack of courage.’ To run all kinds of hazards, to jeopardize one's self, to rush into the jaws of death – these are too often identified with Valour, and in the profession of arms such rushness of conduct – what Shakespeare calls, ‘valour misbegot’ – is unjustly applauded; but not so in the Precepts of Knighthood. Death for a cause unworthy of dying for was called a ‘dog's death.’ ‘To rush into the thick of battle and to be slain in it,’ says a Prince of Mito, ‘is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task; but it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die,’ and yet the Prince had not even heard of the name of Plato, who defines courage as ‘the knowledge of things that a man should fear and that he should not fear.’

— Inazo Notibé, Bushido