Beloved Inability
I will be presenting a guest lecture and workshop in May, around the state of relationships in a digitally saturated context.
In both of these, I will be applying what I have learned from reading Byung-Chul Han’s work on technology and eros, in particular his books The Agony of Eros, The Transparent Society and Non-Things.
I suspect a lot of Han’s work will be unfamiliar for both the audiences I will be presenting to, and at least in my mind, my biggest challenge might be to relay Han’s metaphysical couplet of “positivity” and “negativity”.
The proposed hook was to equate “positivity” with human agency and control, while “negativity” referred to categories that escaped such agency and control. Negativity is therefore not negative as such, but rather those mysteries that our egos are not able comprehend, control and ultimately, consume. Furthermore, what I want to bring out is that far from a liability, negativity constitutes an important part of our experience with reality in its fullness. More specifically, the hope is to show that negativity - here constituted by what Han calls the “negativity of the other” - is what is needed to plumb the full depths of human relations.
More specifically, what underwrites coming to grips with the depth of relations is made up of the negativity of things that are beyond our comprehension of the person. These complex or hidden dimensions of a person are not obstacles to deepening a relationship. Indeed, these hidden dimensions are mysteries that, as Hans Urs von Balthasar once put it, are necessities to enable one to be loved.
When the drive to control another is met with the negativity of hiddenness (which by definition eludes control), what results is what Han calls in Eros as a “being able not to be able”. There is a certain failure that is needed, Han suggests, in order for the one we wish to relate to properly emerge. The zone of inability is precisely that area of safety for another person to be, and to be loved.
In short, the negativity of the other is what underwrites fidelity.
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