Article ID: CBB001213730

The Fascination with Eros: The Role of Passionate Interests under Communism (2013)

unapi

Horvath, Agnes (Author)


History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 26, no. 5
Issue: 5
Pages: 79-97


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Part of a special section, “The Gravity of Eros in the Contemporary”
Language: English

Plato's work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber's notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world -- an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault's insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality.

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Description On “the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics.” (from the abstract)


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Article Horvath, Agnes; Szakolczai, Arpad (2013) The Gravity of Eros in the Contemporary: Introduction to the Special Section. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 69-78). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001213730/

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Authors & Contributors
Szakolczai, Arpad
Gnoinska, Margaret K.
James Nikopoulos
Calandri, Elena
Trecker, Max
Adler, Jeffrey S.
Concepts
Psychology
Emotions; passions
Social sciences
Political science
Philosophy
Platonism
Time Periods
Ancient
20th century, late
21st century
20th century, early
20th century
19th century
Places
Greece
Americas
Poland
China
Soviet Union
Japan
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