PERCEPTIBLE REALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE of surprises to me. Of proofs as well. In a long-ago article, written in 1940, I referred to poetry as “the testimony of the senses”. True testimony: its images are palpable, visible and audible. To be sure, poetry is made up of words linked together, which give off reflections, glints, iridescences. But what it shows us, are they realities or illusions? Rimbaud said: “Et j’ai quelquefois vu / ce que l’homme a cru voir” (And I sometimes saw / what man believed he saw). Fusion of seeing and believing. In the joining of these two words lies the secret of poetry and its testimony: what the poem shows us we do not see with our carnal eyes but with the eyes of the spirit. Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world inside this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, become servants of the imagination and let us hear the inaudible and see the invisible. But isn’t this what happens in dreams and in the erotic encounter? When we dream and when we couple, we embrace phantoms. Each of the two who constitute the couple possesses a body, a face and a name, but their real reality, precisely at the most intense moment of the embrace, disperses in a cascade of sensation which disperses in turn. There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer … The senses are and are not of this world. By means of them, poetry traces a bridge between seeing and believing. By that bridge, imagination is embodied and bodies turn into images.

The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language. They are in complementary opposition. Language – sound that carries meanings, a material trace that denotes non-material things – is able to give a name to what is most fleeting and evanescent: sensation. Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme is a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is erotic to begin with. Likewise eroticism is a metaphor of animal sexuality. What does this metaphor say? Like all metaphors, it points to something that is beyond the reality that gave rise to it, something new and different from the terms that it comprises. If Góngora says “blood-red snowfall”, he invents or discovers a reality that, though containing both, is neither blood nor snow. The same happens with eroticism; it says, or, rather, it is, something different from mere sexuality.

eternal heat accompany humankind in all its peregrinations and adventures

The general belief was that some day the soul would return to the empyrean, and the body to formless matter.

In the figure of the libertine there is no union between religion and eroticism; on the contrary, there is a sharp and clear division. The libertine sees pleasure as an aim that excludes any other. He is almost always passionately opposed to values and beliefs, whether religious or ethical, that subordinate the body to a transcendent purpose. At one of its extremes, libertinism borders on criticism and becomes a philosophy; at the other, it borders on blasphemy, sacrilege, profanation, things that are the reverse of religious devotion. Sade boasted of professing an intransigent philosophical atheism, but in his books passages of irreligious religious fervour abound, and in his life he had to face a number of accusations of sacrilege and impiety, such as those brought against him at his trial in 1772 in Marseilles. André Breton once told me that Sade’s atheism was a belief: it could also be said that libertinism is a religion in reverse. The libertine denies the supernatural world with such vehemence that his attacks are a homage and, at times, a consecration. The real difference between the ascetic and the libertine is that the eroticism of the former is a solitary sublimation, one without intermediaries, while the eroticism of the latter is an act that, if it is to be carried out, requires the presence of an accomplice or a victim. The libertine always needs the Other, and this is his damnation: he depends on his object and is the slave of his victim.