Building off of my essay on eros, centering on the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, I came across this quote from him today:

Depression can be understood as a pathogenic development of this modern ontology of the self. It is, as Alain Ehrenberg puts it, fatigue d’être soi tiredness of being oneself. In the neoliberal conditions of production, that ontological burden increases to the point of excess. The maximization of the burden ultimately serves the purpose of maximizing productivity.

This thought seems very apt after watching what might be the saddest movie ever made, the 2008 Charlie Kaufman film “Synecdoche, New York.” I’m a big fan of Kaufman. I count “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” among my favorite films and I wrote a book about his more recent film “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” And “Synecdoche, New York” is undoubtedly a brave, fascinating film.

But it’s also a terrifying display of that kind of depressive narcissism that Han calls out in that quote. I am hesitant to say what the film is “about” because in a sense it is a movie about life. But it centers on a man, played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is a regional theater director in suburban New York. One day his wife takes his daughter and leaves for Berlin and never comes back. Soon afterward, he wins a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and begins work on a massive play that is, in a sense, a restaging of his life.

Time speeds up for this character, rapidly. Love interests drop in and out of his life, his parents die, he loses touch with his child — and all the while, he keeps working on this massive play that keeps becoming more complicated, but is never staged for an audience. It exists purely for his own narrative purposes.

He’s tired of being himself — exhausted, riddled with maladies — but most of all, he’s endlessly wrapped up in himself and his own condition. He can only relate to other people by connecting them to his own grand life narrative.

Han’s description of this modern condition is also a succinct gloss of the film:

When all duality is wiped out, one drowns in the self. Without any duality, one merges with oneself. This narcissistic meltdown is fatal. Alain Badiou also calls love the ‘stage of the Two’. It enables us to re-create the world from the perspective of the Other and leave behind the habitual. It is an event that allows something entirely Other to begin. Today, on the other hand, we inhabit the stage of the One.

One could criticize Kaufman’s film on this score, but I think it’s extremely valuable as a full examination of this modern artistic point of view. The heroic view of the modern creator valorizes this dive into one’s self. What Kaufman is telling us here is that the end result of it all isn’t some grand work of art, it’s just death. The individual dies. If that individual doesn’t connect with others and allow himself to be changed by the process of creation, he leaves behind just a spectacle of despair and decay.

I am grateful that my creative life has always included others. I have written for, and in the voice of, others throughout my career. Even in my personal writing, I have always had others to bounce off of — Montaigne, Proust, Kieslowski. And my best works have always come from some kind of collaboration — direct or indirect.

What Han describes as eros, to me, is the creative spark that I need to pull myself out of slumber and self involvement, to try to tell my own story while integrating the perspectives of others.

Han states it beautifully in this quote, punctuating it with one of Nietzsche’s most luminous aphorisms:

Love always presupposes otherness – not only the otherness of the Other, but also the otherness of one’s own person. The duality of the person is constitutive of love for oneself:

“What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, acts and feels in a way different from and opposite to ours? If love is to bridge these antitheses through joy it may not deny or seek to abolish them. – Even self-love presupposes an unblendable duality (or multiplicity) in one person.”