Living through eros and touch

We experience attraction to the world through our senses, through our organismic, animal bodies. The sensuous experience of being living flesh among other living flesh determines much of how we relate with the world. Our profound desire to relate is felt in our bodies and realised through the contact between bodies, in gentle touch, wild embrace, violent rupture and bacchanalian feasts.

For too long Western culture has tried to understand and dominate the world from a detached, rational view. This is a delusion. Our bodies know better. Our bodies know that to be alive is to be in an erotic relationship with other living bodies and ultimately with the world itself. Western society has regrettably forgotten about this profound Eros of existence, as much of it has been branded as ‘sexual’ by Christian institutions, only to reemerge as hollow hedonistic gratification within an estranged civilisation. The original Eros embraces the sexual, but is much larger: it is the desire to become a self through the other.

Eroticism inhabits the space inbetween, the relational field, the separations which paradoxically draw us together. This is the yearning of all life, to dwell in and simultaneously traverse this domain of profound enlivenment. This desire is always a desire of the flesh. Ecosystems, as the realms of living relationships in which life feeds more life, are incarnations of Eros: they are embodied love processes. Eros, then, is the poetic logic of life visible in every ecosystem. We are attracted to ‘nature’ because it charges us with the realisation of our erotic desire for life. In an erotic ecology, to live means to love.