The critic Roland Barthes once said, after visiting the United States, that «sexuality is everywhere except in sex.» Perhaps Barthes’ phrase was referring to the fact that, in the United States, thanks to the advertising that made use of sex to sell products, the sexual was ubiquitous and, in its ubiquity, made the truly erotic conspicuous by its absence. The erotic, as Octavio Paz says, is «sex and something else.» That something else is what cannot be made merely explicit: fantasy, imagination, desire and its subtle and wild gestures. Follow Peace in The Double Flame:
Sex, eroticism and love are aspects of the same phenomenon, manifestations of what we would call life. The oldest of the three, the broadest and most basic, is sex. It is the primary source. Eroticism and love are forms derived from the sexual instinct: crystallizations, sublimations, perversions, and condensations that transform sexuality and often make it unknowable. As in the case of concentric circles, sex is the center and pivot of this passionate geometry.
Sex is obviously the biological instinct whose end is reproduction. To activate this important behavior, nature uses pleasure. This is what defines sex and at the same time begins its transcendence: sex is a sensation of pleasure. This fact triggers a whole series of aggregates, a whole surrounding mythology. Man fantasizes, imagines, covets, becomes obsessed, even divines sex for this essential fact: sex delivers a pleasure that he does not find anywhere else. Here sexuality is transfigured by eroticism. If we follow Paz and materialistic biology, we can say that sex is loved and sex produces a passionate love. It is filled with culture and poetry and becomes a substance not only material, but eminently mental and even spiritual. Eroticism, says Paz, «is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of men… eroticism is invention, incessant variation, sex is always the same… in every erotic encounter there is an invisible person and always active: imagination, desire» who also suggests that in eroticism there are always two (when it is autoerotic) and at least three when it is a couple: that other is fantasy. Fantasy, as Jung suggests, is a reality-creating force. Sex creates other bodies, but eroticism creates other realities, other worlds for the mind to experience.
Paz says that sex is repetition, it is a mechanical impulse, while eroticism is various inventions, it is the imaginative game that makes sex green again. Without eroticism, sex is something merely animal and even robotic, with eroticism, on the other hand, sex can be something divine or demonic. Eroticism denies mere reproduction and flirts with a transcendence of one’s own being in the embrace or fusion. «I wish: a shot into the afterlife,» says Paz. The desire behind eroticism is lost unity, to recover the sensation of completeness, to annihilate separation, to drink from an inexhaustible sea.
We then see the importance of the erotic, which is what can animate, give spirit and refresh a sexual life. It is what could give sexuality an energy that goes beyond the physical, a psychic energy in which imagination, emotion, tenderness and compassion are mixed. Eroticism is the perpetual reinvention of desire, of the primary act of tending towards the other, the electric sensation of an arrow that is buried, the promise that makes the pleasure of transcending.