"Lust in Action" : possesion, transformation, and the exorcising of eros

Abstract

"Culture generates eroticism as a form of discourse; I would like to propose this statement, combining as it does the insights of Bataille (cultural genealogy of eroticism) and Barthes (eroticism’s discursive potential),1 as a motto for my essay, which is intended to focus on the overwhelming ontological complexities of eroticism. The occidental cultural legacy is marked by an ascendancy of the idiom of possession and transformation which, with respect to Eros, towers over other discourses. Eros and possession seem to have been chained together and used to define one another, even if by way of privation. It was of course Plato who initiated this bonding for it was Plato who, in the Symposium, defined Eros or Love as “the everlasting possession of the good.” Thus, if Emmanuel Levinas, centuries later, seeks to disengage Eros from the possession idiom (“Nothing is further from Eros than possession,”1 2 in contradiction to Sartre’s statement that even “the caress is an appropriation of the Other’s body”3) he still moves within the same paradigm, and the apparent disparity can be reconciled. A typical sorting out is found in Ortega у Gasset, who defines sensual desire (lust?) as desire to take possession of the object, to make it part of our being4; this completed, desire goes away. Love, on the other hand, is an everlasting yearning for satisfaction." (fragm.)