Madaeleine

Eroticism is the experience of a full life that appears to us as a palpable whole and through which we enter a totality. At the same time, it is an empty life that looks at itself, that represents itself. It imitates, and invents itself; it invents, and imitates itself. A total experience that never realizes totality because its essence is something that is always beyond. Someone else's body is an obstacle or a bridge; either way, one must cross it. Desire, the erotic imagination, the erotic life, all cross through bodies and make them transparent. Or they destroy them. Beyond you, beyond me, through the body, in the body, beyond the body, we want to see something. That something is erotic fascination, that which takes me from myself and brings me to you: that which makes me go beyond you. We do not know precisely what it is, except that it is something more. More than history, more than sex, more than life, more than death.

“They lived so peacefully that, if they brushed up against a moment of joy, they’d exchange rapid, almost ironic, glances, and both would say with their eyes: let’s not waste it, let’s not use it up frivolously. As if they’d been alive forever.”

The persona is necessary because people at different levels of consciousness respond to a situation with very different antennae. Naively or deliberately, making oneself vulnerable to psychic wounding without good reason is foolish. To be wary of casting pearls before swine is not conceit but plain common sense.