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Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (1864 – 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist,
who is regarded today as one of the most important theorists on the development of modern Western society.
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In one of his most beautiful essays, Max Weber stated that the greatest irrational force in life is sexual love.
The problem is that the two parts of that strength, love and sex, were culturally separated from the moment they regulated sexual relations in favor of marriage. And, due to the fundamentally ethical and not really affective character of that institution, with the imposition of rights and duties on the feelings of the spouses, this love, without its root, sought ways to exist in art, literature or any human creation that it would make it possible to mark its difference from other loves: brotherly love, maternal love, filial love, love for the country, so many loves, in short, that are entitled to their objects. Without having the right to his own, but with deep hopes of finding him again, that love wished to be the most beautiful of all loves, and succeeded. That is why the word eroticism, which could be valid for everyone, he conquered just for himself.
Art and literature that we call erotics dealt exclusively with that love. In return, they received the sexuality that, because it was impossible to disappear, although it could not be lived by the loving bodies, gained another life, embellishing and developing in paintings, sculptures, words, where it passed so often disguised, pretending to be an apple , angel, curves, colors, verses, rhymes or calls from letters without addressee. Meanwhile, removed from that love, which even in intangible forms tried to cultivate it, sex was attacked by what was most utilitarian in this world. Under repression, the more strength he showed and the closer he came to brutality and violence, the more he was treated as a mere physiological need.
Thus, it was easy prey for any attempt at commercialization aimed at transforming it not into an object of consumption, but into a consumer. That's right: sex is not an object of consumption; he is a consumer. Without major difficulties, it was discovered that it is an innocent force, one that can be deceived by anyone who is willing to deceive him. That is why they provoke you, they stir you up. He has to be transformed into a force like thirst and hunger to be helpless, so that he can, more than he wishes, consume. It is the function of pornography. It turns out that this result of the commercialization of non-affective sex objects did not occur in a world empty of values. As imperative as they are, trade rules are not absolute or exhaust the possibilities of life. For all non-accounting values of men, whether religious, humanistic, artistic or existential values in general, pornography represented, to a greater or lesser extent, an intolerable degradation of the human condition. This is because pornography meant, above all, to awaken, develop and satisfy sex completely removed from its affective origins.
Thus, contributing to marginalize him even more, he ended up marginalizing himself. And, in an attempt to present himself in accordance with values that do not concern him and tired of disrespecting, he tried to dress himself in eroticism without having anything to do with him. It is not art, because it is just practices of excitement; much less love, the raison d'être of eroticism, because it never cultivates it, although it wants its name for commercial purposes. In the confrontation between the cultural destiny of love and sex, the hard assessment: love took sexuality to eroticism and pornography contributed to eliminate the affectivity of sex. Nowadays, if it is possible to do something for them, that is to give them the right to live culturally together. In us, its carriers, this disunity has generated tensions and suffering that have caused many times irreparable, incurable damage.
It was perhaps a very severe penance, although in favor of the not inconsiderable desire to live in order in groups or societies. Anyway, it's worth a little reflection on the inspired title of Mário de Andrade's idyll: Amar, an intransitive verb. For it is in this intransitivity, in this total absence of objects, that this power, love, appears. It can be awakened by someone or by something, for what gives it an object, for what gives it transitivity, but that will never be its creator, its origin.
That's the love of that title. Its source is our animality in all its sexual innocence, in all its purity. To divide it, giving its parts different cultural destinations, is to run the risk of seeing them corrupted. If love, through the work and grace of its possibilities of intellectualization, can escape through eroticism; sex, without the same possibilities, has not escaped corruption, a victim of pornography. But who, after all, still wants it in pure form, which is his affective, original form, must not forget his full, erotic and anti-pornographic name: sexual love.
Carol Mercedes
Pink Hot Publisher / United Photo Press Magazine
www.unitedphotopressworld.org
