Politics of Eros, Nihilism and the Time of Care. A diagnosis of the present

Abstract

This article aims to make a diagnosis of the present, in the wake of the Foucauldian project of the "critical understanding of the present", paying particular attention to what Wendy Brown has recently called our "nihilistic times". The narrative of our history is no longer a narrative structured by a teleological time of progress; rather, it maintains a specific relationship with pessimism.

The paper proposes an analysis of the concept of "eros" that allows us to reactivate critical readings of a present dominated by thanatological narratives, and to promote narratives in which the subject as a subject of desire is related to the ethics of care, that is to say, that makes the subject an ontological participant in the common. To this end, the relations of the concept of eros with nihilism, with care-risk, with the political imagination of literature, with the time of care and with resistance or the will not to be governed are analyzed.