Fantasias Eroticas.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Classical and Renaissance thinkers made a clear distinction between sex and Eros. Sex was simply a biological craving that could be easily satisfied, while Eros was an uplifting, creative force that motivated the individual to strive for perfection. In today's fast-moving world of quick fixes and instant gratification, this contrast has been largely lost. However, in her new collection of essays, Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi once again attempts to define the differences between sex and Eros.

Peri Rossi does not delve into the moral aspects of Eros, but rather explores the role of the erotic in the creative process. She explains that desire stimulates the imagination, which results in the victory of art over nature, of fantasy over reality. Peri Rossi writes: "Eroticism is to sexuality what gastronomy is to hunger: the triumph of culture over instinct, culture being the long, diverse, complex process by which human beings have attempted, since the beginning, to dominate, transform and guide primitive instinct." Although diverse societies have produced treatises and manuals on the art of making love, eroticism cannot be reduced to mere technique, for it derives from the generative impulse that alchemizes desire into a personal, subjective and symbolic creation.

The author contends that eroticism is the source of art, for art originates in fantasy. Art, like desire, transforms, embellishes or idealizes reality. Our desires tell us more about ourselves than about the loved-one, for each of us personalizes the object of our desires according to our own special needs. Like the artist, the lover "sees" the object in a unique way that may or may not correspond to reality, but does define his own particular perspective.

In erotic love, as in art and in dreams, says Perri Rossi, individuals express desires that they are required to suppress by society. In order to exist harmoniously and prevent anarchy, societies invent rules; they prohibit certain practices, such as incest, homosexuality, public nudity, for example, that are deemed harmful to the common good. Religions reinforce social convention by designating unacceptable practices sinful. But the individual evades these restrictions in his erotic fantasies, in his dreams, and in art. Indeed, prohibitions are...