Jealousy: a Forbidden Passion by Sissa Giulia;

Author:Sissa, Giulia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Eros as hyper-personification

Where is eros? Pleasure is a sensation, not a usage; the flesh is irreducible to anatomy and physiology, even less to the Sunday roast. A body is never a thing. In an erotic situation, a body reaches out to another body. Desire clings to parts and places, bits and pieces, indeed, but above all it responds to movements and postures, attitudes and gestures – which have nothing to do with ‘things’. This way of walking speaks to me of the vitality and energy of my beloved. These eyes I look into twinkle with complicity. This lobe I chew is not a morsel of scaloppina. When reading Immanuel Kant, I can only long for Stendhal or Maurice Merleau-Ponty! And, above all: we badly need psychoanalysis! We need a scholarly discourse that touches the real of eros. Not the real as waste, the real as material, the real as tool, but the real experience – sensation, feeling – of pleasure, or pain.

When I desire, I do exactly the opposite of what is meant by ‘objectification’: I accentuate the privilege, the unique point, the anchorage and the centre of gravity of my desire, which sets that person – the object of my love – apart.60 I single out the special features of the other person, including her/his lively, expressive, intentional body. Once again, I hyper-personify the other person. I project intentionality onto their body: he looks at me, she smiled; he turns around, she beckoned to me. Careful and apprehensive, my desire guesses, assesses and amplifies the desire of the other. Eroticism deals not with ‘organs’ but with partial objects that emit eloquent signals, not with the wish to regain a lost personality but with attention to the sensual singularity of the other, and of myself. There is no ‘use’; there are only sensations. When I try to make myself desirable, I do the opposite of self-objectification. I am not morphing into a ‘thing’, but I am aware that I can become a cause – the cause of someone else's desire and pleasure. I dress up and perform my erotic persona in order to signify my desire, or the absence thereof. I am not an ‘absolute unity’ but a subject who does not know exactly why it has to be this, rather than that, which makes me feel. I am not a person whose ‘humanity’ would be violated by the pleasure of my lover; I feel a pleasure which is good, and which makes me feel good. I have nothing to lose. I have nothing to fear.

What preserves us from the meaty exploitation of others’ bodies is eroticism. The arts of love deploy ways to take pleasure and to offer one's own body, in so many fashions, to the pleasure of others. Social graces; erotic graces. Thus, it is perhaps by thinking hard about the context of our interpersonal relations that I allow myself to lay my head – sorry, darling! – on the belly of my lover. But making love is something else.

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