The Agony of Eros

Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns—in itself.

The final chapter affirms that love is necessary for thought to exist at all. “To be able to think, one must first have been a friend, a lover.” So concludes an encomium of love joined to a radical critique of a world that refuses it: to be dead to love is to be dead to thought.

In the inferno of the same, the arrival of the atopic Other can assume apocalyptic form. In other words: today, only an apocalypse can liberate—indeed, redeem—us from the inferno of the same, and lead us toward the Other.