The Subjectivity in Eros

Abstract

Voluptuosity, as the coinciding of the lover and the beloved, is charged by their duality: it is simultaneously fusion and distinction. The maintenance of duality does not mean that in love the egoism of the lover wills to obtain the testimony of a recognition in the love received. To love to be loved is not an intention, is not the thought of a subject thinking his voluptuosity and thus finding himself exterior to the community of the sensed (despite the cerebral extrapolations of voluptuosity possible, despite the desire for reciprocity guiding lovers to voluptuosity). Voluptuosity transfigures the subject himself, who henceforth owes his identity not to his initiative of power, but to the passivity of the love received. He is passion and trouble, constant initiation into a mystery rather than initiative. Eros cannot be interpreted as a superstructure having the individual as basis and subject. The subject in voluptuosity finds himself again as the self (which does not mean the object or the theme) of another, and not only as the self of himself. The relationship with the carnal and the tender precisely makes this self arise incessantly: the subject’s trouble is not assumed by his mastery as a subject, but is his being moved [attendrissement], his elimination, which the heroic and virile I will remember as one of those things that stand apart from “serious things.” There is in the erotic relationship a characteristic reversal of the subjectivity issued from position, a reversion of the virile and heroic I which in positing itself put an end to the anonymity of the there is, and determined a mode of existence that opens forth the light.