Eros became erotic

November 21, 2017

After Freud, eros became the erotic, and love became identified with sex. Or rather, we had sex without love. The erotic became merely that which gave pleasure. You drink the water, you forget the glass. There is no communication of person with person. Real love implies the irreplaceability of persons. No one can take the place of a father or a mother, a brother or a sister and so forth. But sex is replaceable. And it has moved in our American life to the mind. It is not just a body phenomenon.    That is one of the reasons for the love of pornography. Pornography is a love of the abstract, when the concrete use of the thing has been forgotten. I once met a woman who told me that she paid $250 for a coffee grinder. She paid this sum in order to have this coffee grinder, but she never intended to grind coffee. Well, that is what might be known as coffee pornography. And so when the concrete use of sex is forgotten, and it comes to be used for the purposes of advertising and excitement and so forth, then it becomes pornographic.