The Fall of Eros: Marc Gafni

However we cannot live in non erotic world. So unconsciously we seek compensation. We look to get our erotic fix in the sexual. But this doesn’t work either. For when you de-eroticize all of the world except sex, then the sexual collapses as well. You see, we all have erotic needs. These needs require attention in all of life, but if we ignore them in all of life then we demand that the sexual fill all of our erotic needs. And so sexuality shrugs, collapsing under the weight of an impossible demand.

So as you can now see, the fall of eros brings in its wake the collapse of sex as well. The modern zeitgeist has slain all the gods save Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexual love. Yet she cannot survive alone. We wonder why she has abandoned us. Why is sex not working, we ask ourselves incessantly. Foucault in The History of Sexuality suggests mockingly that we vaunt sex as our great secret and yet talk about it incessantly. Behind all our talk about sexuality we are all frantically asking, why has the Goddess not redeemed me? I finally got some… and I am just as depressed, lonely and confused as I was yesterday.

It is something like the biblical story about Bilaam and his donkey, on their way to curse the wandering Hebrews100. The donkey is unable to proceed on the path because an angel is blocking his way. Bilaam – the great magical seer of the ancient world – is unable to see this angel. So he blames the ass and starts to beat it. The donkey surprisingly speaks up, “I’ve only done good for you, why do you beat ME up when things don’t go right?”

The reason of course is because Bilaam wants something more than the donkey can give. So he blames it when the journey fails. …We are much the same way with the horse of sex. We think the problem is with sex — Sex refuses to take us where we need to go. But in actuality, the adamant refusal of sex to take us forward is simply symptomatic of the larger malfunction. The erotic endeavor has been betrayed. But with all of our information and sophistication we cannot see. So we invest all of our energy in sex little realizing that we crave Eros and not ‘mere sex’

marc gafni
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