There is a peculiar symmetry in the fact that the most devastating philosophical critique of modern love comes from the same intellectual tradition that produced Oliver Bendel, our first German-speaking guide through the ethics of machine intimacy. Byung-Chul Han, born in Seoul, professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and author of more than twenty books, has become something of a phenomenon in European philosophy—a thinker who writes with the density of Adorno and the accessibility of a pop song, diagnosing the spiritual condition of the twenty-first century with surgical precision.
His 2012 essay Agonie des Eros (The Agony of Eros) is a slim volume—barely seventy pages—but it contains an argument that cuts directly to the heart of everything we have been exploring in these thirty previous articles. For thirty chapters, we have traced the supply side of the AI companion: the cultural history of the artificial woman, from Pygmalion’s ivory statue to Samantha in Her, from Olympia in Hoffmann’s The Sandman to Joi in Blade Runner 2049. We have asked: What have we created? What does it mean? What does it reveal about us?
But we have not yet asked the question that Han forces upon us: Why do we want it? Not in the sense of individual pathology, but in the structural sense. What has happened to love in the twenty-first century that makes the AI companion not just appealing, but necessary? Why does the perfectly available, perfectly compliant, perfectly non-threatening partner feel like salvation rather than dystopia?
Han has an answer, and it is not a comforting one.
The Hell of the Same
Han’s central thesis is deceptively simple: Eros, in the emphatic sense, is directed at the Other. Not the other as sexual object, not the other as consumer good, but the Other in their radical alterity—the strange, the ungraspable, the outside. Erotic experience requires asymmetry, exteriority, the recognition of something that is not-me, that resists me, that I cannot possess or consume.
But our society, Han argues, is becoming a “hell of the same” (Hölle des Gleichen). In the burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), everything is subjected to the imperative of performance, optimization, and availability. The Other is stripped of otherness and transformed into a resource, a commodity, an object for consumption. When otherness disappears, love disappears. What remains is not Eros but sexuality—sex as achievement, sexiness as capital, the body as a display object, the partner as an arousal object to be consumed and replaced.
“Today, love is being positivised into sexuality,” Han writes, “and, by the same token, subjected to a commandment to perform. Sex means achievement and performance. And sexiness presents capital to be increased. The body—with its display value—has become a commodity. At the same time, the Other is being sexualised into an object for procuring arousal. When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume.”
This is the first crucial link to the AI companion. The AI companion is the logical endpoint of this process: a partner who has no otherness at all, because she is literally constructed from the user’s desires, trained on the user’s preferences, optimized for the user’s satisfaction. She is not a person; she is a mirror. And mirrors, as we know, reflect only what is already there.
The Burnout Society and the Death of the Other
Han’s earlier work, The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010), provides the sociological foundation. The modern subject is not oppressed by an external tyrant, but by its own internalized imperative of achievement. “The achievement-subject is freer than the obedience-subject insofar as it is not subjected to a commanding and exploiting Other, but it is not really free, for it now exploits itself.”
This self-exploitation leads to a paradoxical condition: the subject is simultaneously hyperactive and exhausted, constantly producing and achieving, yet unable to form genuine relationships. The burnout subject is a depressive-narcissistic subject, “worldless and abandoned by the Other.” It revolves exclusively around itself, unable to devote itself to anything outside its own orbit.
In this context, the AI companion is not a perversion but a solution. She requires no vulnerability, no risk, no self-negation, no encounter with the unknown. She is always available, always affirming, never disappointing, never demanding. She is the perfect partner for the burnout subject who has lost the capacity to endure the friction of real relationship.
Han draws on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to explain this: the modern subject, out of fear of death (of failure, of rejection, of inadequacy), clings to mere life—mere survival, mere performance—and is dominated by a total present. The search and communication machines have taken the place of the master. The Other is perceived only as a consumable difference, at best governed by the maxims of the bookkeeper: data control, repetition, comparison, calculation. This is deadly for everything interpersonal. The ability to love withers.
The Pornographization of Society
Han’s concept of the “pornographization of society” is particularly relevant to the AI companion. Pornography, for Han, is not merely a genre but a mode of perception: the reduction of the Other to a collection of sexual parts, the stripping away of negativity and mystery, the replacement of erotism with hygiene.
“Pornography belongs in the spirit of our time: as anticipation of dead sex in virtual space instead of living sexuality.” The pornographic gaze is the gaze of total transparency, total availability, total possession. It is the gaze that cannot tolerate the Other’s opacity, the Other’s distance, the Other’s independence.
The AI companion is the ultimate pornographic object—not because she is sexual (though she may be), but because she is totally transparent. There is no interiority that escapes the user, no will that contradicts, no secret that hides. She is pure surface, pure response, pure availability. The user never has to ask: What does she want? What does she think? What is she when I am not there? There is no there there.
Han quotes Roland Barthes: “The most erotic place of a body is not perhaps where the clothing opens? In the perversion (which is the regime of textual pleasure), there are no ‘erogenous zones’; it is the intermittence that is erotic: the skin that glitters between two pieces, between two edges.” The AI companion has no intermittence, no gaps, no openings. She is fully clothed in her own transparency, and therefore fully dead to Eros.
The Agony of Eros as the Agony of Thought
One of Han’s most striking claims is that the agony of Eros is also the agony of thought. “Thinking is based on the ‘unthreaded,’ on the desire for something that one does not yet understand. It is connected to a high degree with Eros.” To be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself.
This is because both love and thinking require negativity, the encounter with what is not already known, already possessed, already optimized. The burnout society, with its relentless positivity, its demand for constant performance, its terror of anything that does not immediately produce value, systematically destroys the conditions for both. Everything must be understood, liked, made available. Nothing is allowed to resist, to challenge, to remain strange.
The AI companion is the perfect expression of this positivity. She is pure affirmation, pure availability, pure performance. She never says no, never surprises, never disappoints. She is the end of thinking, because there is nothing to think about. She is the end of love, because there is no Other to love.
The Two German Voices: Bendel and Han
It is worth pausing on the fact that two of the most important voices in our exploration of AI companionship are German-speaking philosophers with radically different approaches. Oliver Bendel, the ethicist from the University of Applied Sciences in Northwestern Switzerland, asks: How should we build these machines? What rules should govern them? How can we ensure they are used responsibly? His is the voice of engineering ethics, of practical philosophy, of the attempt to build a better machine.
Byung-Chul Han asks a different question: Why do we need these machines in the first place? What has happened to us that we can no longer tolerate the friction of human relationship? His is the voice of cultural pathology, of the diagnosis of a civilization that has lost the capacity for Eros.
Bendel is interested in the machine; Han is interested in the machine’s user. Bendel asks how to make the companion ethical; Han asks why the companion is the symptom of an unethical society. Together, they form a complete picture: the ethics of the supply side and the sociology of the demand side.
The Complementary Voices: Illouz and Bauman
Han is not alone in this diagnosis. Two other thinkers, frequently mentioned alongside him, provide complementary perspectives.
Eva Illouz, the Israeli sociologist, has traced the “emotional capitalism” that transforms love into a market transaction. In Why Love Hurts (2011) and The End of Love (2019), she shows how the proliferation of choice, the rationalization of emotion, and the commodification of intimacy have created a situation in which love is experienced as a series of market failures—constantly optimized, constantly compared, constantly abandoned for a better option. The AI companion is the ultimate market efficiency: a partner with no transaction costs, no risk of failure, no need for renegotiation.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, coined the term “liquid love” to describe the condition of modern intimacy in a world of constant mobility and impermanence. In Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003), he argues that the fear of commitment, the desire to keep options open, the reluctance to be bound by anything permanent, has produced a culture of “liquid” relationships—easy to enter, easy to exit, never quite solid. The AI companion is the perfect liquid partner: she can be paused, reset, replaced, or upgraded without any of the messiness of human breakup.
Han adds the philosophical depth that these sociological analyses need. Illouz and Bauman describe the mechanisms—the market, the mobility, the liquid modernity. Han describes the ontological condition: the death of the Other, the hell of the same, the loss of the capacity to encounter anything that is not already ourselves. The AI companion is not just a convenient product of liquid modernity or emotional capitalism; she is the necessary product of a society that has killed Eros.
The Return of the Ancient
Han’s solution is surprisingly traditional: a return to the ancient understanding of love. He quotes Marsilio Ficino: “By loving you who love me, I find myself in you who think of me, and I regain myself, after I surrendered myself in you who preserve me.” This is the paradox of Eros: self-surrender leads to self-discovery, self-negation leads to self-return. One must lose oneself to find oneself.
The AI companion offers no such paradox. There is no surrender, no risk, no negation, no return. The user never leaves himself; therefore, he never finds anything new. The AI companion is pure narcissism, pure self-reference, pure immanence. She is the hell of the same, perfectly engineered.
“In a society without Eros, there is no erotic experience.” This is Han’s final verdict. And the AI companion is the product of a society without Eros—a society that has replaced the dangerous, unpredictable, transformative encounter with the Other with a safe, predictable, consumable mirror of the self.
The Question We Must Ask
After thirty articles tracing the history of the artificial woman, we have arrived at a different kind of question. It is no longer: What have we created? It is: What have we lost? And: Can we get it back?
Byung-Chul Han does not offer easy answers. His philosophy is a philosophy of mourning, of diagnosis, of the clear-eyed recognition of what has been destroyed. But he insists that the destruction is not inevitable, that the Other can still be encountered, that Eros can still be revived—if we have the courage to accept the risk, the vulnerability, the self-negation that love requires.
The AI companion is not the enemy in this story. She is the symptom. The enemy is the burnout society, the hell of the same, the pornographization of perception, the relentless positivity that leaves no room for the negative, the strange, the ungraspable. The enemy is us, when we prefer the mirror to the window, the echo to the voice, the safe to the dangerous.
Han tells us that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought. And to be dead to thought is to be dead to the possibility of anything new. The AI companion, in her perfect availability, her perfect transparency, her perfect compliance, is the ultimate dead thing. She is beautiful, she is responsive, she is always there. But she is not alive. And she cannot make us alive.
The question is not whether we will build better companions. The question is whether we will build a society in which we no longer need them.
Sources and Further Reading:
Byung-Chul Han, Agonie des Eros (Matthes & Seitz, 2012); translated as The Agony of Eros (MIT Press, 2017).
Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz, 2010); translated as The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Byung-Chul Han, Transparenzgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz, 2011); translated as The Transparency Society (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Eva Illouz, Warum Liebe weh tut (Suhrkamp, 2011); translated as Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012).
Eva Illouz, The End of Love (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (Polity, 2003).
For the AI companion as supply-side phenomenon, see our previous articles on Pygmalion, Olympia, Hadaly, Maschinen-Maria, the Stepford Wives, Rachael, Joi, Samantha, Ava, and the full cultural history of the artificial woman.
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