What is erotic desire?

Michel Onfay is one of the most interesting #philosophers of our time. Because of its French origin, it belongs to a tradition of uncomfortable polemicists and intellectuals who have sought to go against the current of established thought. In this sense he can be aligned with Michel Foucault or Jean-Paul Sartre, but only for that quality of contestation, because the path his work has followed has remarkable differences.

Against what fight Michel Onfray? A simple answer could show him as a philosopher bent on telling another history of philosophy. With remarkable Nietzschean spirit, Onfray has built a work that recovers vague points of view, authors considered minor, ideas discarded in certain periods of #philosophical thought, all because, in the corresponding circumstances, there was someone else who prevailed, for different reasons: Socrates and Plato on the Sophists, the Neoplatonism of the Fathers of the Church on more hedonistic and epicurean ideas, the analytic logic of Wittgenstein over a philosophy closer to the tradition of eudaimonia, and so on.

And it is that, in part, that is the place from where Onfray sustains his struggle: the certainty that philosophy is, from its origin, a series of principles, organized under a certain coherence, that have the purpose of helping us to live, to understand the existence, to face the contrariedades own of the life. From Aristotle to Nietzsche, philosophy was essentially concerned with life in the world.

In this sense, in his work Onfray has a book dedicated to #eroticism. As we know, throughout history love, #sexual desire and eroticism have had different manifestations, but except for certain specific moments, in general it has been sought to contain, deform, adjust to certain guidelines. Onfray follows part of that history from a philosophical perspective and taking a clear position, that of the defense of the body and its #sexuality that, when exercised freely, is also a source of knowledge.

As a stimulus to curiosity, this time we share a short fragment of that "theory of the body in love", which is the title of the book. In a few lines, Onfray elaborates one of the most beautiful and precise definitions that have been made of desire, which he understands as what he should never have been: the force that keeps us with our feet on Earth, lovers of the things we have and the people with whom we relate, put our desire in each of the actions we carry out daily, at every moment. Write Onfray:

Consulting my etymology dictionaries, I was happy to learn that the term desire comes from the stars. We are not, then, far from the sphere and the sky inhabited by magnificent and poetic planets. Stop contemplating the star, this is what the ethos says: de and sidere. This is as much as to say that desire breaks with the celestial, the divine, the intelligible, the universe of pure ideas, that where Saturn and Venus, Mars and Jupiter dance, melancholy and #love, war and power. The one who desires looks down, renounces the Milky Way, the overwhelming blue and roots his will on earth, in the things of life, in the details of the real, in pure immanence. Some, I will return to this subject when I deal with the Epicurean pigs, they celebrate the animal with its snout at ground level and its gaze unable to address the stars. Desiring is less about finding a lost unit than worrying about the #Earth and looking away from the sky. Far from the Pleiades and other constellations that absorb the body and restore an ecstatic soul of absolute, the desire forces to happily reconcile with the chthonic deities.