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Ana de Armas

David and Goliath,
By Caravaggio

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative.

The performance principle that dominates all spheres of life today also encompasses love and sexuality. Thus, the heroine of the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey is surprised when her partner construes their relationship as “a job offer. It has set hours, a job description, and a rather harsh grievance procedure.” The performance principle cannot accommodate the negativity of excess and transgression.

— The Agony of Eros

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,” 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). The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.

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.