I. The labyrinth of intrigue and mystery in the Erotic makes its translation into language, and especially literature, an exceedingly complex concept to study. In defining the Erotic, it is necessary to start with an understanding of its division from sexuality. While sex by its very nature belongs to all animal life, the Erotic is uniquely a human phenomenon because it is intertwined with consciousness. In Larmes d'Eros, Georges Bataille specifically defines humanity by its consciousness: "nous ne pouvons faire de difference entre l'humain et la conscience...Ce qui n'est pas conscient n'est pas humain" (Bataille 188, 90). If there is an origin of the nature of being human, then it must correlate with a separation through consciousness from the rest of the non-conscious world. The origin of consciousness was the awareness of this division and consequently the delineation of it through language which posited its separation from primal, instinctually driven nature.
    In investigating the formation of the Erotic, it is too simplistic to parallel its birth with that of consciousness. This subject must be highlighted, as it is fundamental for elucidating the development of the Erotic into its complex manifestations. Georges Bataille suggests in Larmes d'Eros that with the genesis of consciousness, the Erotic did not simply appear as a natural trait given to already-developed beings in a paradisiacal garden. He maintains that the Erotic developed from the impetus of the divided human consciousness, but not necessarily in conjunction with its knowledge of cause and effect. The primary foundation of the creation of the Erotic becomes the theme of Bataille's exhaustive investigation of those complex features leading to the dawn of consciousness. This basis for the separation from animal sexuality stems from the human realization of causality which led to the unique discoveries of both work and play.
     Bataille explores the possible evolutionary causes for the break with nature as linked to the human development of tools and work. For him, the combination of the development of objects as functional tools and the human recognition that this aspect could possibly ease work is the beginning of a developing awareness of the relationship between cause and effect. Bataille definitively characterizes the human as being the "animal who works," and holds that this is the foundation of their reason and knowledge. The knowledge of causality, and that actions can be willed to specific ends, separates humans from the immediate natural responses of instinct. Through this knowledge, humans have gained the ability to discern the meaning of how their actions correspond to the satisfactions of their desires. While such knowledge is non-existent in an animal which is based in a primary present, it causes a human to act with anticipation of the future.
    With the growing complexity of the human awareness of causality and will, Bataille notes that work and its focus on the essential and functional could then be mis en jeu. As the human ability to act freely with a conscious knowledge of an end allowed it to pass beyond the solely necessary functions of survival, it could put work's dominion at stake and change it into a game. For Bataille, these transitions of consciousness from functionality to play became specific factors that shaped the Erotic.
    As play was combined with the mental reflection of consciousness, it surpassed a simple functional goal of reproduction, and transformed the human sexual act into the Erotic creative one. Consciousness could transfigure the essential biological nature and its instincts for reproduction and destroy it as functional work in order to transform it into play aimed towards the voluptuous and varied ends in pleasure. As consciousness infuses sex with its desire, intrigue, frenzied intensity and multitude of diverse complexities, sexuality becomes the Erotic. The games of the Erotic create a shimmering text, which becomes ever-new through each individual's creations and interpretations. The metamorphosing quality of the Erotic is interwoven with the continually shifting golden threads of desire that elude the glances which aim to define it.
    In The Double Flame, Octavio Paz reaffirms Bataille's framing of the Erotic as uniquely human, and defines it as "sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings" (Paz 9). In Paz, le jeu becomes specifically developed in the imagination and creative activity. The Erotic is intimately connected with these aspects of le jeu because it similarly uses metaphoric translations of sexuality. Paz describes how the Erotic changes "the reproductive sexual impulse into a representation" (Paz 128). The Erotic is differentiated from animal sexuality as it is a metaphor which comprises the sensual but through the imagination also transforms it and adds that which goes beyond the original instinct. Through its creative force of the imagination, the Erotic act transmutes the natural to become a composition of various positions, fantasies and desires.
    Desire's metaphors are called forth in the literary embrace, and in the erotic nature of the body's narrative. Paz maintains that "The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language" (Paz 2-3). He indicates that poetry uses everyday language to create something transcendent, just as the Erotic transforms nature's sexuality and sensuality. The instinct and senses, as the bases of human sexuality before the development of consciousness, rest as a foundation that the play of the Erotic uses for its own means.
     As sensuality is transmogrified through the unique human creation, the multifarious couplings of desire, language, and the imagination flow together and pool into the creative fountain. This life source unifies literature and the Erotic as endeavors which combine the senses and conscious thought to create that which surpasses them both. The human ability to elaborate an infinite number of transformations from simple nature and sexuality makes the Erotic essentially an unlimited, creative power.
     In The Double Flame, Paz connects the creativity of the Erotic with the external historical and cultural influences on the literary realm. He notes that "Literature portrays the changes of society. It also paves the way for them and prophesies them. The history of love is the history of a passion but also of a literary genre--of the images that writers give us" (Paz 167). Being within the context of society and history, an author can create, reflect, or comment upon its concepts of the Erotic. As changes in the various creations of literary expression trace developing movements of thought, they outline the recognition of the Erotic's ever-changing kaleidoscopic manifestations.
     Literature influences the imagination's seeking, not by merely offering objects of thought and desire, but also by transforming these into ideals. Literature of the Erotic can create a face for desire and its metaphoric representations and in this way powerfully embody its force. The creativity of Literature allows it to do this as it combines with the creativity of the Erotic to illustrate its permutations and convert them into ideals.

II. In literature such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, the division from nature becomes much more than part of the development of consciousness, but is an impetus for the creativity of reflective thought. Whether the division is realized in the text as either an awareness of loss or as a gain of experience, knowledge and reason, the characters and intrigue develop around this conception. They hinge on the question of what a conscious erotic being does with the knowledge of their separation from, or conflict with nature. In these two novels, the division specifically creates a sentimental longing for the past. Combining this longing with the knowledge of the present reflectiveness, the novels convert it into a sentimental ideal in which the two are reconciled.
     The characters' reflections on being conscious and rational shape their philosophies and how they function as sentimental beings. As they are separated from nature, they must function through thought and reason while revoking sensuality. Through the execution of their actions, sexuality is created or destroyed by the power of the Erotic and its designs for pleasure. In both of these texts, the purposes of the Erotic are fulfilled through various recreations and rejection of sensuality, naïveté and nature through a penetrating cruelty. The sentimental interest in the serenity of nature can be part of the Erotic, but because it also involves rationality and a capability for consciousness, it transforms its sentimentality within the divided world into cruelty. Both Laclos's and Masoch's novels function through this conception of the Erotic which is structured around sentimental cruelty.

III. Within the context of pre-revolutionary France, the subjects of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses support what Michel Foucault notes about the literary trends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He claims that in this period, there was a discursive accumulation of focusing on the sins of nature and abnormality as opposed to the normal scope of marital sex as a prominent subject (Reader 303-4). As part of this expanding literature of transgression, Laclos's novel focuses on the subject of the Erotic as cruelty and within this conception, the opposition of art, craft, and consciousness with nature.
     Laclos goes beyond Foucault's general historical framework of transgression to specifically thematize the destruction involved in the use of corrupt reason to turn passion into a plaything. As Liaisons Dangereuses traces the lines between passion and reason, the natural and the societal, and the innocent and experienced, the Erotic is its prevailing undercurrent which overturns societal laws, and functions both within the natural and the reflecting world. Octavio Paz, notes in Love and Eroticism that sex threatens society as it combines the tumultuous contradictions of creation and destruction and ignores all hierarchies of law. In the world that Laclos creates, the primary laws of the virtuous are the abstract constraints of marriage which are set up to maintain only proper conjugal sexual relations. Yet within the novel, no marital relations exist in action, but only as constraints of discursive repression. Their alternative, illicit affairs abound in the novel, and therefore, the entire intrigue rests on these transgressions which as Erotic, set nature against culture and are supreme above both.
     As they are the rational beings who stimulate these affairs, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil act with the force of the Erotic to destroy the serenity of nature and the conventions of culture through their machinations. These main characters' conflicts with both pure nature and absolute prohibition cause them to work towards the sentimental ideal which Friedrich Schiller explores in "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry." As Laclos (1741-1803) and Schiller (1759-1805) were contemporaries, it is likely that their thoughts and revelations on certain issues were spurred by similar historical and cultural sources.
     The provocation of Schiller's sentimental ideal is first from his interest in nature and its opposition to art. For Schiller, the world of reflected thought, art, and reason are affected aspects of the "depraved world" (Schiller 187) which is separate from the golden past from which the modern world is separated. The well-crafted plans of the Vicomte and Marquise adopt fully the characteristics that Schiller ascribes to the affectation of art. For him, art does not contain the resonances of aesthetics and beauty that are often thought of today, but is better explained as "craft" or as a "Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature." With this denotation, art as craft is decisively opposed to the harmonious nature as it consciously tries to change it.
     Schiller's conception of craft as artificial as opposed to the truthfulness of nature, which has no conscious need for deceit, is part of his valorization of Nature. His conception of sentimental longing for the lost nature does not function in wanting to change places with it, but through a sentimental ideal, means to take up its unlimited example of innocence, while realizing that one can never return to its wholeness (Schiller 193).
     Laclos agrees with the impossibility of a return to a natural innocence, and by portraying the character of Cécile Volanges at the beginning of the novel, reflects the closest thing to the unblemished natural: the naïve. Coming into the larger part of society from a cloistered world, Cécile is a perfect example of Schiller's conception of the naïve:

The naïve manner of thinking can thus never be a property of a degenerate human being; it can only be an attribute of children and people with a childlike disposition. The latter act and think naïvely, often right in the middle of sophisticated contexts of the larger world. Because of their own beautiful humanness they forget that they have to deal with a depraved world and they behave…with an ingenuousness and innocence such as one finds only in a pastoral world. (Schiller 187)

Cécile, only starting to bloom from childhood, retains the virtue of the convent she was in, and with a lack of knowledge of the "sophisticated" world, acts naïvely in her trust. Her character of innocence does not automatically doubt people's intentions, but naturally trusts, and as the naïve being in Schiller, acts immediately without reflection, and without realizing that she is within a "depraved world" (Schiller 187).
     For Laclos, as the natural is eternally separated, the naïve cannot exist in conjunction with society, for as nature is destroyed by the foundation of consciousness and work, so is the naïve liable to be corrupted. The innocent character Cécile is forced into experience by both the conventions of different institutions which surround her and the manipulations of the king and queen of the chessboard who exploit her as a pawn in their plans. In Laclos, nature has no part within the pre-Revolutionary aristocratic French society except to be an example of naïveté and a contrast to corruption. Naïveté, thrown into the context of a world that has fallen into consciousness and reflective alterations, will undoubtedly be tainted.
     As within Schiller's sentimentality, the Marquise and the Vicomte recognize that they are in a fallen world and, as depraved in an absolute contrast to innocent nature, they accept that they can never return. Being caught in this absolute loss, they take advantage of their separation from nature as an acknowledgement of experience, rationality, and freedom. With these forces of power, the Vicomte and Marquise can use Cécile's innocence for their purposes. Through their careful scheming in Liaisons Dangereuses, they intend to use their art with nature and convention on their palettes to paint out their plans for pleasure. As they are consciously reflective, they can choose and carefully construct their plans using nature and the naïve within the constructs of its opposition: convention.
     Both the Vicomte and Marquise aim for absolute supremacy on the fields of sexual power, revenge and control. Because neither is ruled by the morals and conventions which surround them, both can use these with planned deceit to fulfill their desires through an extremely rationalized chess-game of strategy. The main, nameable conventions at stake are morality, decency and marriage. These become tools for the Marquise and the Vicomte's craft to construct into part of a vaster rational strategy which creates its own rules to structure its play of the Erotic.
     As the Christian morality goes hand in hand with that of marriage, the aim of artful reason is to integrate the two against the innocent Cécile Volanges. The Marquise, specifically, works with Cécile's innocent curiosity to make the impending thought of marriage a motivation for her to gain experience before its bonds confine her. The social conventions around the institution of marriage as a rite of passage are thus reframed by the Marquise who sees them as a terminal end to pleasure. Instead of through the act of marriage itself, which never occurs in the novel, the step from innocence to experience is guided through the Marquise's ploys to give Cécile her own type of education. Marriage, as a defining institutional bond, is an impending source of decisive action for the characters, and it is around what the Madame de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont spin their webs.
     On the side of convention, marriage is separate from nature, as its contracts and oaths put it into the extreme conscious restraints that is called affected art in Schiller's conception. The gap that Schiller notes, of the "tremendous distance between our deeds and nature's simplicity and truth" (Schiller 182), is illustrated in the opposition of Cécile's naïveté in Liaisons Dangereuses with both the virtuous side which demands that she act certain ways, and the corrupt side for which she is a pawn in a rational game of destruction. The invocation of this contrast brings forth Schiller's necessity that "nature must contrast with art and put it to shame" (Schiller 180). Cécile's destruction in the end does put the reason and virtue of the characters to shame, as it reveals the damaging effects of their alterations of her natural character.
     Cécile's separation from the "virtue" of the other characters is clear in her naïve concept of morality, which assumes that she should be good to all, but doesn't understand how, with convention, there are appropriate and inappropriate times to be kind-hearted. On her problem of whether or not to give the Chevalier the charity of her affection, she remarks, ''Je voudrais bien le consoler; mais je ne voudrais rien faire qui fût mal. On nous recommande tant d'avoir bon coeur! et puis on nous défend de suivre ce qu'il inspire, quand c'est pour un homme! «a n'est pas juste non plus." Cécile's desire to assuage another's suffering is part of her morality of feeling, which is devoted to a particular person. Because of her genuine nature of trust, and more importantly her sensual openness, she is untainted by the social restraints of order and hierarchy, and does not understand a general morality of law. As she feels compassion for the Chevalier Danceny's suffering, she feels that she should soothe him with her love. Like the natural character of the naïve acts in Schiller, Cécile "looks simply at the need and at the means closest at hand for satisfying it" (Schiller 186). She does not understand any inherent danger in respecting an absolute Christian virtue of charity, if it could mitigate the suffering of another.
     Cécile's morality, though influenced by Christian ideals as are that of the other pious women in the book, is not have the same basis for its actions. Schiller notes that the childlike character "is chaste because nature always is, but it is not proper since only what is profane is proper" (Schiller 189). The basis of any fear she has for the consequences of her actions is the social opinion and chastisement that she receives most directly from her mother and the Marquise de Merteuil. It is these sources which maintains some function of morality(or later, immorality) and are guides of how to act in the world. Because the guide which the Marquise offers is similar to her mother's, and both her main connections to the world of experience, Cécile takes it with a naïve faith that she does all with the instruction of all the guidance she encounters. In this way, the Marquise can use the power of convention for her own purposes, and convince her that these are just the way that things are done. For Cécile, there is no reason to act otherwise than those who seem to know more tell her to do, for she is enrapt in the innocence that assumes an original goodness of all.
     Her innocent naïveté is apparent, as for the naïves in Schiller, by her position of being situated within a sophisticated context. Cécile's difference from this context is made very evident and even comical with the start of change from the convent, which she describes in the first letter of the novel. She faces the dilemma of being thrust into the new world by her mother when she is supposedly ready for marriage. Because Cécile is ready yet is not immediately wed, she lacks the second protective cloister of wedlock. The marriage's delay makes her vulnerable naïveté all the more visible, as she is separated from her accustomed surroundings, and acts "awkward" or "gauche" admist those who are worldly-versed. Being thrust into the depraved world, she waits and, unprotected, is lead toward the dangerous combination of being curious about the world and being surrounded by those forces who have craft at their disposal to use her naïveté as a means for their art.
     Cécile knows, as she reveals to her correspondent, Sophie Carnay, that those people already in society put her wait for marriage in terms of developing experience. She remarks that someone compares her development to that of a fruit, as she thinks she heard someone say about her in letter 3, "Il faut laisser mûrir cela, nous verrons cet hiver." Cécile's future is put in terms of ripening, which at the end gains the possibility of being a rottening. When her context in these terms are intermingled with the chain of letters exchanged by the Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil, we see the crux of the force that causes the fruit to ripen, get bruised, and sometimes fall off of the tree to whither and die.
     It is clear in their plans are completely unconcerned for Cécile Volanges as a subject, and completely obsessed with her as only an item for use as a sexual revenge on her future husband, the Compte de Gercourt. Their plot works toward her premature ripening in order to destroy her as an unblemished, virginal object for her husband. As Valmont and Merteuil's plans are part of the Erotic's creativity, they are a playful transformation of work to use the necessary pieces to reach a goal. For them, using the craft of the Erotic through rationality functions as power, tenacity, and single-minded disconcern for those whom it destroys.
     The complexity of the Marquise's schemes and philosophy reveals much of how she works as a sentimental being to set convention against nature. Her portrait, painted through her candor in her letters to the Vicomte de Valmont can help to elaborate this set-up. The Marquise writes, "Rien ne m'amuse comme un désespoir amoureux. Il m'appellerait perfide, et ce mot de perfide m'a toujours fait plaisir ; c'est, après celui de cruelle, le plus doux à l'oreille d'une femme, et il est moins pénible à mériter." The Marquise de Merteuil's falsity overwhelms her characteristics above all. As opposed to the naïve nature, she always thinks of the consequences of any of her actions, looks and words, and aims to direct each to her specific aims. It is for this reason that she is the virtuoso of deceit and finds it easy to deserve being called perfide and finds it laughable to play her guile against the powerlessness of one who is guided by the sensual aspect of love.
     What the Marquise truly wants in relationships, which she can accomplish through the deliberation of her deception, is to maintain cruelty. Being cruel, she has power over the opposite sex and can withhold her favors in order to get what she wants. She does this with the Vicomte de Valmont specifically in order to get him to sexually corrupt Cécile. In this way, cruelty for her can be a tool used for other means as well as an amusing way to torture others for her pleasure.
     At the end of the novel, we find the truth about how the Marquise developed her character through experience. She started as Cécile did, with an original innocence which gradually fell into depravity as she gained experience. Because she is well-aware of her origin, and that it is distantly behind her, the Marquise must use her sentimentality to act within the constructs of the corrupt world. The final revelations hold up her ripening/rotting as a mold into which she had been trying to form the innocent Cécile, a mirror of her youth.
     With such a dynamic of these characters reflecting each other, the Marquise de Merteuil's letter of advice to Cécile after she has been deflowered by the Vicomte de Valmont is staggeringly important to explain her formation into cold cruelty after the fall into experience. In this letter, the fact of dulling the pain and shame and feelings of love becomes evident as her prevalent way of dealing with the depraved world. Mocking Cécile's naïveté, the Marquise de Merteuil gives her this consolence for her shame: "Hé! tranquillisez-vous; la honte que cause l'amour est comme sa douleur : on ne l'éprouve qu'une fois. On peut encore la feindre après; mais on ne la sent plus. Cependant le plaisir reste, et c'est bien quelque chose." As an erotic purpose, for the Marquise, pleasure is the end-all goal. To achieve it, the Marquise has contempt for pain and persuades to Cécile to harden herself against it. As she relegates feeling and sensuality to being only used as tools, shame and pain become only petty reactions that hinder one.
     In her cruelty, the Marquise is ultimately cold, and shows that she has survived under such guile by her deceit and ability to numb so that only pleasure remains. Her erotic strength rests in a cold control, ruled by reason that degrades nature into for its sole purposes of pleasure and gaining power. The thought behind this control maintains the need for purposeful craft through deceit.
     The Marquise advises Cécile about the way she writes in letter 105 to take on what Schiller describes as the feminine need to please which has "the illusion of being naïve," yet is combined with the opposing convention of "adroitness in her behavior" (Schiller 190). The Marquise admonishes her to:

Voyez donc à soigner davantage votre style. Vous écrivez toujours comme un enfant. Je vois bien d'où cela vient; c'est que vous dites tout ce que vous pensez, et rien de ce que vous ne pensez pas. Cela peut passer ainsi de vous à moi, qui devons n'avoir rien de caché l'une pour l'autre: mais avec tout le monde! avec votre Amant surtout! Vous devez donc moins chercher à lui dire ce que vous pensez, que ce qui lui plaît davantage."

Her advice brings up another key to her cold duplicity and absolute cruel control over the emotions, which is the basis of her power in reason: the mask of style which hides everything and silences the truth. The Marquise's need for control over expression is significantly manifested in her stratagem of acting naïve and moral as a woman, while also choosing carefully her speech ruled by reason, to craft words which support the faÁade and conceal her purposes. She finds that it is necessary only to show which will be useful (Laclos 179).
     The careful style of the main characters is highlighted in the novel's very arrangement of letter-exchanges, which allows us to see what meticulous choice of diction the Marquise and the Vicomte could use to have certain effects. They are aware that, especially in matters of passion, one should play each move with great reflection. In writing, words can be chosen with the art of careful planning and facility of deceit. Throughout the novel, their technique strikingly contrasts Cécile's lack of their style. It is only when she comes into the realm of experience and their "education" that her letters change remarkably and her style and tone no longer highlights the naïve, unhindered spontaneity of her character.
     As the experienced Marquise mirrors a possible future for Cécile, their comparison highlights a similar necessity which both have for using a mask, although realized to a much different extent for each character. Although at first Cécile's naïveté causes her to reveal all and to find incomprehensible any imperative for hiding her thoughts, she does start to develop a mask similar to the Marquise's to remain safe from her mother's disapproval. If she does not do this, she realizes that she will be punished for liking the Chevalier, and would not be able to see him or exchange letters with him if the whole affair was discovered. As one unblemished, this germination of lies reveals a the innocent origin of the Marquise before she developed a habit of artful speech. With a need to conceal those things which would bring her sensual character shame under the judgements of Christian morality and society's conventions, the Marquise had to use the craft of the Erotic to develop an icy exterior for protection.
     Instead of merely lying or covering up past sins with virtuous repentance as the other women in the novel, the Marquise finds pleasure in her erotic strength to create and play, working outside of conventions' confines. She is proud of her transgressions for they have shown her power to work above the limitations of nature's sensuous innocence to be cruel and outside of convention's rules to be crafty. Her ultimate power rested in the ability to use all without threat, and by hiding anything that would be unfavorable to her, to deny herself nothing. Liaisons Dangereuses clearly illustrates how the sovereign Erotic can be manifested to sacrifice both functionality and sensuality to achieve its conscious end in pleasure.
     The complex rational development of the Vicomte and Marquise's schemes are focused towards a pleasure attained through the game of appearances. Under the constraints of social manners, the Marquise and Vicomte can only reach their excesses of pleasure through the path of masked chess-plays. Appearances are vital as the skin of their discourses of the Erotic, in which what is revealed can leave them vulnerable just as their veils for expression can give power. This fragile balance of power and vulnerability is evident in the fall of the Marquise's all-powerful status when she has the secret confidence of many characters to its opposite end in complete shame when she loses all after the letter exchange reveals her schemes to the public.
     On the night after he molested his little "pupil" Cécile, the Vicomte's description of her to the Marquise brings up a second aspect of her fall into experience, which reiterates the naïve difference between chastity and properness. He remarks on how the second night she locked herself into her room, and would not agree to be with him again. He finds it to be an enigma that she is defending herself so late, and muses into the cause of her change: "...sa petite grimace de toute la journée, je parierais qu'il entre là-dedans du repentir quelque chose comme de la vertue ! c'est bien à elle qu'il convient d'en avoir! " The Vicomte brings in the point that her character is not right to have virtue, as is that of his beloved Mme. de Tourvel. Virtue is not the automatically acquired trait of someone who is chaste, but as a contrast to innocence, must be gained through experience. The naïve character can be chaste, and follow its own passions, but once it starts working under recognized principles which are developed, then it falls onto the side that Schiller calls "proper."
     Within Schiller, this division can be understood in the moral difference between the naïve and that of rational Christian thought. The former is evoked in the Grecian theology which is produced by "the inspiration of a naïve feeling, born of a joyful imagination and not of brooding reason as is the belief of the churches of modern nations" (Schiller 195). Reason, on the side of convention, is part of both Mme. de Tourvel's adroit chastity of virtue as much as it is that of the Marquise de Merteuil's falsity and cruelty. In this way, both virtue and the rational scheming fall onto the opposing side of the natural naïve because of their encounter with worldly experience.
     Both sides take part of the encounter with what Schiller calls the "artificial world" where the laws have absolute importance (whether to be held sacred or to transgress) as do the " laws of nature prevail in the world of innocence" (Schiller 223). Both corruption and virtue then, must be gained through the "brooding" of rationalizing experience and actions. While both originate in the experience of a fall, virtue develops from its repentance while cruelty develops from the transformation of its pain into the power of the Erotic.

IV. In The Dialogic Imagination, M. M. Bakhtin develops a dialogue of the dance and play of texts with one another as well as their associations within the larger discourses of their meanings in the context of culture and history. Julia Kristeva elucidates in "Word, Dialogue and Novel" how these discourses work in Bakhtin's dynamic conception by describing how his "conception of the ‘literary word'" is "an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context" (Kristeva 36). These intersections extend beyond the aforementioned sensual relation formed by the text between the author and reader to a discursive relation within larger contexts.
     The textual surface of Laclos's novel in its own cultural context had a special resonance with its contemporary, Schiller's text (among many others). In the cultural context of today, it gains different, shifting dialogues with the other texts which arise and imitate its themes or style, and with those that comment or are influenced by it in various ways. Although there is no "fixed meaning" to be deciphered from a text, it is a generator of meanings. Texts form various the allusions, reverberations and characters from their individual contexts in culture and history as they constantly interact and bounce off other texts through their dialogues.
     Kristeva explains how, in this way, the world which a text creates can communicate constantly with other "writings," and that for Bakhtin, these discursive texts form each other: "...any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (Kristeva 37). The meaning of a text changes dramatically within different cultural perspectives as well as within different readers. The readers of Laclos in the eighteenth century were sure to find different meanings and importance in his novel than those of today, for their cultural contexts and literatures that influenced that period had a literary air which hung with dramatically different dialogues than those of the twentieth century. The dialogue of any text creates multiple associations which surround it and makes its texture link and rub against its surrounding fabrics of signification.
     The dialogical relationships between texts take part of their strength from the foundations of historical narratives which effuse each new thought with its relation to past meanings. Even when a subject is not noted directly, there is what Bakhtin calls an "alien utterance" which speaks about it. In Venus in Furs, by Sacher-Masoch, one such "utterance" is its continual referral back to the basis of an erotic history which, though not explicitly noted, includes Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses. These "alien utterances" within the textual structures both refer back to a historical discourse and found a present one.
     Sacher-Masoch's macrocosm of cultural resonances includes both the utterances of the past and those of the context of the nineteenth century which framed his art with repressive attitudes about sexuality. As Miller notes in Erotic Literature, the age of sexual repression didn't merely involve the censorship of silence, but was also a time of a great conversion of sex into discourse as the boundaries for it were augmented (Miller 220). Even when the subject of sex was obscured in Venus in Furs, it was still at the forefront as an issue of ever-increasing interest within its cultural context.
     As one dialogue out of many texts, the social attitudes of his time formed a specific aura around Sacher-Masoch's work that highlighted its lack of physical descriptions and intensified its tense pauses that skimmed around subjects of the Erotic. The multiplicity of voices which surrounding the text, both of current and historical "writings" evokes a dynamic world from it. The history of thought on the Erotic was just as influential on Laclos and Sacher-Masoch as is their individual changes or reinforcements of it.
     It is for this reason that Sacher-Masoch's frozen sensuality appropriately reflected the period during which he was writing. His design is fulfilled through his cold stylistic reflection which protects and reemphasizes the inner subject he handles: that cold sentimentality allows sensuality to remain distant under its fur. It is his contrast with the accumulating sexual discourses of his time which set apart his art as cruelly silent on the erotic subjects that it hides. Under an icy reticence, Sacher-Masoch treats the experience of the Erotic's intrigue, passion, and intensity as a distant warmth, for which he holds a sentimental respect. Though the body for him has a physical nature, its descriptions are secondary to the spirit and the contemplations which animates it.

V. Venus in Furs alters Laclos's development of coldness and cruelty into a different incorporation of Schiller's concept of the sentimental. Sacher-Masoch makes thematic the concept of "sentimental cruelty." The concept of sentimentality in Venus originates within the context of a conflict, as the character of Venus outlines in the narrator's dream:

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity; as soon as you try to be natural you become vulgar. To you Nature is an enemy…Stay in your northern mists and Christian incense...You do not need the gods - they would freeze to death in your climate! (Sacher-Masoch 145)

The division from nature that Friedrich Schiller focuses on in "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry" is again present as a theme, but functions differently in Sacher-Masoch's conception. This division which is brought up from the very beginning, raises the conflict between men as the "children of reason" and Venus who represents the nature of the Greek gods. As the ideal goddess Venus supports Nature as opposed to reason, she sides on the conception of Schiller's natural, but unlike Cécile in Laclos, she understands the division, and is not naïve in character. It is only within the context of the narrator's dream that this combination of reflective knowledge can exist with sensuality, as an ideal.
     Venus brings in a different facet from that of any of Laclos's characters: that of the sentimental ideal's concretion in masochism. While Liaisons Dangereuses functions as a whole through the acknowledgement of the fall from innocence in contrast to the Marquise's sentimental falsity and cruelty, Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs creates a particular reflection of the sentimental ideal in Wanda's transformation to a masochistic cruelty through the contract.
     Wanda, an embodied reflection of Venus, points towards the goddess as a projected Ideal by being both a combination of nature and culture. Her body, the natural, is contrasted to the reflective conscious concretion of the cold marble statue of Venus. This combination explains why Venus/Wanda covers her body with furs to protect and separate it from the cold world of culture and reason. While the unity of Schiller's ideal is only projected, Sacher-Masoch's idealism becomes based in the conflict of the two realms. Deleuze notes that "What characterizes masochism and its theatricality is a peculiar form of cruelty in the woman torturer: the cruelty of the Ideal, the specific freezing point, the point at which idealism is realized" (Deleuze 55). As sentimentality makes one realize the depravity of the modern world, instead of giving over to the impossible embrace of sensuality, Sacher-Masoch's art reflects the collision of the two conflicting worlds in the external concretion of cruelty.
     To understand the sentimental cruelty, we must first delve into Schiller's concept of the sentimental. As the sentimental thought comes after the division, it entails a recognization of the division, and a looking back to the time before division with longing. (Schiller 192) For Schiller, we long for the aspects of nature because we "treasure the silent creativity of life in them, the fact that they at serenely on their own, being there according to their own laws; we cherish that inner necessity, that eternal oneness with themselves" (Schiller 180). The sentimentalist finds these aspects of nature to be admirable in their purity and innocence, untainted by the will, and as they are a distant past, that their example should be attained through the ideal.
     The sentimental ideal is elucidated in Schiller's advice to the sentimental friends of nature that they should not desire to "change places" with nature, but to combine their conscious will with its superior qualities. In this way, one can find safety from reason's corruptions in knowing that they were once not tainted by it, and can find a piece of nature's unlimited composition to take as an example for their own dealing with the world. This way of reaching towards the ideal is, as Schiller elucidates, possible through the sentimental reconciliation of nature's necessity and the will's freedom. Schiller describes how:

We [moderns] are free and what they [the beings of nature] are is necessary; we alter, they remain one. Yet only if both are combined if the free will adheres to the law of necessity and reason maintains its rule in the face of every change in the imagination, only then does the divine or the ideal emerge. (Schiller 181)

Nature is necessary, for it is ruled by its inner necessity to follow "the law of harmony," from which it cannot stray (Schiller 185). On the other hand, as reflective conscious beings, we have a freedom that allows us to move with our will, working under and following many different kinds of laws external to us, especially those of convention. If Schiller's purpose of the sentimental ideal is possible when the will "adheres to the law of necessity," then how is this ideal to be achieved? Within Venus in Furs, Schiller's ideal is a model for the masochistic agenda, which is fulfilled by underlying the sentimental within a context of cold cruelty.
      In Sacher-Masoch, the generalized "children of reason," or moderns who characterize the present whole of humanity, are similar to the reflecting characters of reason in Laclos, yet lack their extent of corruption. Though Venus calls their climate cold because of its hostility to her sensuality, and calls them vulgar when they try to be natural, she does not mention their intentions as being evil. The sentimental focus in Sacher-Masoch is not on the use of art as craft within the fallen world as it is in Laclos, but on the division between the sexes because of lack of sensuality under the Christian scaffolds of cold reason. As in Schiller and Laclos, spontaneous Nature conflicts with the reflective consciousness of modernity.
     The conflict between the Moderns and the Natural is apparent through Venus's presence in the dream which contrasts with her connection and longing for the golden world with her appearance in the world of reason. Because she is accustomed to the spontaneous sensuality of the ancient world where thought and feeling freely flowed together, the world of reason chills her, and thus she wears furs to protect herself. As the division is clarified by Venus's function in the dream, so is the sentimental ideal of Schiller. Acknowledging that the combination of the two realms would be an impossible reconciliation, Venus does not want the modern world to return to the innocent realm of pre-reason nature. However, her very appearance as an idea which links the two worlds spurs the sentimental reflection of the narrator upon natural as well as that of the novel impetus of intrigue.
     It is in Venus's use of the term, "try to be natural," that the very basis of the problematic issue of the division is situated. Schiller notes that "Once the human being has entered into the condition characteristic of culture and art has laid its hands on him, that sensuous harmony within him is overcome and he can only express as a moral unity,as someone striving for unity" (Schiller 201). With the sensuous harmony of nature, sense and thought are not divided.
     Schiller notes how this unity which "took place in the original condition, now exists only ideally" (Schiller 201). Instead of having this harmony and simply being with nature as the Greeks, one who is part of culture can only try to be natural. As nature is something the modern cannot fully regain, their moral unity desires nature's sensuous unity, but can only draw towards it within its contexts of reflection. For being within culture, as the modern realizes nature's separateness from them, they can either use the affectation of art to represent nature, or the affectation of willful intention to act natural. Within the limitations of consciousness, we can now only reach nature through a projected sentimental ideal by the way of our creations.
     In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explains the division from Nature's effect on the relation between the sexes. He understands the conscious division as a coldness, and refers to the Christian "Ice Age" to situate it within the history of the Erotic. For him, this historical context is essential to understanding Venus's speech:

The catastrophe of the Ice Age having engulfed the world of the Greeks and with it the type of the Grecian woman, both sexes found themselves impoverished. Man became coarse and sought a new dignity in the development of consciousness and thought; as a reaction to man's heightened consciousness woman developed sentimentality, and toward his coarseness, severity. (Deleuze 54)

In Deleuze's conception, it is particularly the woman who acquires sentimentality and severity. It is interesting that with a fall from nature's innocence, Deleuze speaks of the Grecian woman's type being lost. The character of Venus functions as a stimulation for reflection on this type which was part of the lost past of sensual innocence and Nature. As a Grecian type, the sensuousness of this ideal woman conflicts with the need for reflection in the acquisition of sentimental reflection. Instead of merely referring to this acquisition as that of consciousness, which was the origin of self-awareness, the development of sentimental reflection involves a supremacy of thought above nature's instinctual unity combined with the essential awareness of the division.
     In Sacher-Masoch, sentimentality is understood as in Schiller and Laclos: as a longing for the time of completion before this opposition. It additional focus on those beings who, now divided from the sensuous harmony of nature, must live in a new context of sexuality which is infused with fear and guilt, and find new ways to act in the sentimental world. When the harmony between thought and feeling of the age of antiquity was destroyed with the conscious acquisition, its severing created a more hostile relationship between the sexes.
     As for Laclos, Schiller's basis of the conscious division from nature rests in the latter's opposition to the artifices of reason and conscious art or craft. Schiller remarks that a naïve character would be "faithful to its character and inclinations, but not so much because it has principles as because nature, for all its wavering, again and again returns to its original state, always reviving the old need" (Schiller 189). The reflection of art and the laws of convention are incompatible with the world of nature. Humans aim towards satisfaction, being aware of lack, while nature pursues necessity and needs and then returns to serenity, without a conscious knowledge of desire.
     Although humans, who have choice and freedom, can employ intention and craft to satisfy their desires, they are also aware as well of consequences, and thus the precepts of rules within society, specifically that of propriety's conventions. Schiller notes that:

The laws of propriety are alien to nature in its innocence. Their origin is the experience of degenerateness. However, once this experience is undergone, and nature innocence has disappeared from morals, these are sacred laws that a moral feeling may not violate. These laws obtain in an artificial world with the same right that the laws of nature prevail in the world of innocence. (Schiller 223)

On the contrary to this conscious knowledge of limitations and laws that make one "proper," passion is natural for Venus, and the modern necessity for fidelity is plastic and unnecessary. Her sensuous desires cannot be secluded to one person, to a sole body, for the sensual natural love goes beyond the rational constructs of any institution. In the narrator's dream, this natural character of Venus patterns the basis for her sentimental cruelty. Her infidelity is an upsurge of her passion which is natural, but as she is conscious of the stifling of propriety in the realm she lives, she acts sentimentally, and must be cruel to pursue her pleasures.
      Mirroring the narrator's dream, Severin's narrative, "Confessions of a Supersensualist" similarly portrays Wanda (as Venus's personified counterpart) as disdainful for propriety and the cultural principle of fidelity, and so she cheats on Severin by having an affair with the Greek. Deleuze points out how she emulates Venus's natural philosophy when she says to Severin, "Despite holy ceremonies, oaths and contracts, no permanence can ever be imposed on love; it is the most changeable element in our transient lives. Can you deny that our Christian world is falling into decay?" (Sacher-Masoch 49) As transient shiftings, the Erotic desires of life cannot be bound by any piece of paper, any theory, or any contract. For Wanda, the Christian permanence and restrictions which demand a constancy of the spirit are dying as absolutes. Similar to Venus, love for Wanda takes into account the ephemeral changeability of emotions.
     The modern struggle between the spirit and the senses is further elucidated in the dialectic of the narrator's dream which reflects on the masochistic transformation of sentimentality into cruelty. As nature is always returning with its passion in "reviving the old need," it can only be unfair and harsh to the rational being who expects continuity and fixed ideals. Venus describes her cruelty as "the very substance of sensual and natural love" (Sacher-Masoch 144). The natural love to which she refers involves self-interest, as it seeks specifically that which gives it pleasure.
     It is essential, however, that her love be framed within its conflicting relationship to the divided world of hierarchies for it to be evident as cruelty. For it is not only Venus who is cruel. She points out that there is a question brought up about which sex is the cruel one, as both find themselves in the sentimental divided situation. As the narrator claims that her infidelity is cruel, she points out from her more striking sensualist view that he is as well full of cruelty in his expectation that she should be faithful without love. The male re-enforcement of the law and reason is similarly cruel for the sensual, sentimental cruelty cannot be fragmented into solely being the woman's reaction to the divided world, as Deleuze claimed. Because both Wanda the mortal and Venus the ideal of the sensual goddess live in the new realm where duty is set up against pleasure, cruelty also functions in the masculine assumptions of reason and propriety which counter nature.
     In Sacher-Masoch's work, the reflective state of the icy sentimental situation frames his narrative style which freezes and suspends through the form of the contract which the characters sign. Despite Wanda's original ideal of being part of the unaffected nature of the Greeks, she ends up agreeing to be in a contractual situation with Severin. This contractual situation is necessary to combine cruelty with sentimentality into the masochistic ideal. The contract functions as a synthesis of the will of nature to fulfill its immediate desires and the modern ascetic desire for constancy and relations formalized through thought. It aims at letting Wanda follow her natural whims, doing whatever she pleases by giving her total control. Within the sentimental world, the natural inclination to seek pleasure is put into the frozen formality of a contract, and makes nature's laws an established institution. The contract, as the very thing that Wanda claimed could never ensure permanence, becomes a conscious version of her natural freedom to act as she feels.
     On the other hand, Severin is made a slave by the contract which is his own invention. By its very constitution, the contract is a chilling force supported by reason to binds nature, with its passions and fickle whims, to have a conscious restraint of will and order. The contract works as consciousness to force thought and oath onto a relationship that could be naturally spontaneous. Yet because of the conscious division from nature, it puts structure and intention into a sexual relation. Severin's actions become dictated through the convention that gives binding value to the laws of mere words upon a sheet of paper. With the knowledge of an absolute division from nature, the contract incorporates and combines nature's desires for immediate sexual satisfaction with culture's absolute restricting control and demands for the precepts of dignity into the sentimental ideal.
     As the contract establishes the sentimental division as ideal, it also operates to insure that characters will fulfill the masochistic ideal by infliction of pain through the roles it creates. At the beginning of the novel, Wanda is linked with the past of antiquity, but as the contract constantly holds her up against her cold ideal of Venus the dominatrix, it shapes her to become the ideal image of the cruel dream Venus. With the contract's prevailing cold sentimentality, Wanda's natural sensuousness develops into a cruelty when she is confined to a formal situation of being the controlling Mistress. As in Laclos, the Vicomte notes, " she who commands commits herself, and on the other had that the illusory authority we appear to let women take is one of the snares they avoid with the most difficulty" (Laclos 92). Although Wanda is in control as the mistress of Severin's destiny, this agreement to accept the role of control sides her with the masochistic ideal and as in Laclos, makes her commit herself to gain a dominating character.
     Through the contract, Wanda's sensual desires are ensured to be fulfilled with the certainty of the agreement, when in nature it would not even be necessary to even note their validity. On the other hand, Severin's strict adherence to the concept of the binding contract cannot change as his emotions do, even when he can no longer handle Wanda's developed cruelty. Her statement about the impossibility of oaths or contracts to truly bond is reframed by Severin's conscious faith towards duty. Propriety is forced through the contract, and he cannot run even when he wants to escape the horror of his situation, for he believes that he must keep his word and that he cannot do otherwise. The conflict of the law of propriety and obligation with the natural laws of sensuous fulfillment clash on the line of the contract, and necessarily result in cruelty.
     So how are we to understand Deleuze's statement about this cold cruelty, and that for Sacher-Masoch, "The coldness is both protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle: it protects supersensual sentimentality as inner life, and expresses it as external order, as wrath and severity" (Deleuze 52)? Cruelty's function must be expanded upon by going back to the direct expression of nature which reaches immediately for that which it desires within the opposing necessity of culture's control and laws over its passion. The modern conscious reflection has conventions to obey that push passion down to more acceptable, though less natural expressions. Reflection must subject passionate desires to gain acceptability as secondary manifestations instead of direct expression.
      As Schiller explains it, the necessary sublimation transfigures the natural desire through the conscious affectation of art into a form. He remarks that "Just as nature eventually begins to disappear from human life as an experience and as the (acting and feeling) subject, we see it ascend in the world of poets as an idea and object" (Schiller 196). The masochistic ideal highlights this transformation, as through its cruelty, it destroys the sensual body and its connection with nature and transforms it through consciousness into art and ideas. The natural body of Wanda is metamorphosed through the contract which points to the cold statue, while as a visible representation the cold statue points on its own to the ideal Venus. Within Venus in Furs the masochistic ideal transforms the division from nature into conscious idealism. It changes the experience of sensuous love to become contractually an idea, and the subject of a specific woman, becomes the concretized, cold, and impersonal ideal object of the statue.
     These sublimations of sensuality towards the impersonal ideal can be understood in the ascetic's utilization of them. In section six of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche elaborates that for Schopenhauer as well as other philosophers, art and beauty were distractions and relief from the temptations of the flesh or the will. He notes how "Of few things does Schopenhauer speak with greater assurance than he does of the effect of aesthetic contemplation, that it counteracts sexual 'interestedness'" (Nietzsche 104). Aesthetic beauty liberated the lustful will through transforming its sensual forces into the contemplatable representation and idea. Recreated in the form of ideals, the powerful force of sexuality (which is an enemy because it threatens to steal one's energies) becomes a creative representation.
     When sensuality is put into the figuration of the idea, its transfigured sexual energy, although taking on another figure, retains its basic mold of desire. Sensuality remains under the surface, but in is framed into another form through which it can be controlled. The cruelty of Venus and Wanda, emphasized in the sentimental conflict, stops nature's sensuality which would be destroyed by the modern world, and spurs the narrator and Severin to transform it into idea and thought. Similar to the ascetic intent, masochistic cruelty stifles the prominence of sensual passions so that fruitful contemplation reign.
     The masochistic and ascetic ideals handle the modification of sexual energy into representation similarly as they are set under the modern contention of the sensual and the spiritual. However, while the sentimentalist desires the same contemplation as the ascetic of the creations of the Erotic, it does not desire to destroy the sensual, but to retain it as vestige of innocent nature. In speaking of the artistic transformation of the sentimental Ideal, Schiller describes how "The content of the poetic lamentation can…never be an external object...it can only be an inner, idealistic object. Even if it deplores a loss in the actual world, it must first transform it into a loss in an ideal sense" (Schiller 213). For the sentimentalist, the actuality of the situation is below the merit of the ideal but lost union with nature, and they constantly try to transform a physical presence into the realm of the ideal.
     Such permutations function in Venus in Furs as changing foci on different characteristics of the woman. As a sentimentalist, Wanda realizes the impossibility of finding the ideal in this world, and finds it strange that many women pass by perfectly acceptable men whilst searching for the ideal one. By its contrast, this attitude highlights Severin's search in the novel for the ideal. From the ideal goddess Venus of the narrator's dream unfolds an expansion into Severin's obsession with the art of the statue Venus and finally to his actualized love for Wanda, the living woman as representation of Venus.
     The true goddess is only ideally attained in the dream, while the statue tries to represent her, and Severin tries to sculpt Wanda into her through the contract. Both of the latter manifestations are sentimental aims at a past ideal, yet it is clear that neither can attain Venus's status even by representing her, but can only be cold static images of her ideal. The modern world is simply too cold for her pure sensuality. Although Severin worships the body and the statue, they are still within the divided world, and he can only idolize them through their coldness and change Wanda into an impersonal torturer with the whip.
     In Laclos, the Marquise's rationality about naïve illusions similarly reflects the primacy of the ideal over the specific. She laughs at the women "who, having never reflected, always confuse love with the lover; who, in their foolish illusion, think that the one man with whom they have sought pleasure is the sole depository of it; who, being truly superstitious, give the priest the respect and faith which is due only to the divinity" (Laclos 178). Through the Erotic, the realm of experiences and subjects is recreated through representation to become ideas and created objects that exist because of artistic intention instead of mere necessity.
     In the masochistic combination of the ascetic sublimation and the sentimental longing, consciousness counteracts sensuousness by making it into art and ideas. For Sacher-Masoch, Severin cannot naturally be in a pre-conscious unity with a woman, but can only contemplate her as ideal, and structure his relations within the spiritual realm of the contractual basis. Although, unlike the ascetic, the sensuality is not repulsive to Severin, he must contemplate the appropriate arrangement for its erotic power. Instead of renouncing the flesh as the ascetic to turn to contemplation of ideals, the masochist's experience uses the power of the Erotic to destroy and humiliate sensations of the flesh and its limitations so that the higher ideals of the spiritual may reign. To attend to the ideal, the masochist demands the extremes of the physical which the lash of the whip assures. It is through this relationship that sentimental cruelty invokes contemplation in order to maintain a tense frozenness between the sexes under the cruel rule of the whip.

VI. The sentimental handling of the Erotic is vitally important in the two texts traced above. Although they were written in different cultural and historical contexts, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs appropriately have incorporated the foundation of the Erotic that has given humanity its intricacies. Complex and extensive in its magnitude, the sentimental in these novels comes into play through cruelty. The manifestation of the Erotic in sentimental cruelty functions as a driving force of their separate intrigues. Each novel focuses on the question of how a conscious human works with the Erotic in recognizing their separation from nature and its significance.
     As the Vicomte and Marquise sought the Erotic's purpose of pleasure, their cruelty could be specifically aimed to rationally use nature and convention through strategy and deceit. Laclos's form of letters between the characters highlighted their ingenious craft and supreme cruelty that sacrificed all for its ends.
     For the masochistic ideal, cruelty works through the contract to assure that through stifling sensuality, its erotic power can metamorphose the body into art and then into the ideal. True to his subject, Sacher-Masoch reflects his masochistic ideal in a tense, frozen and reflective style and forms sensual concepts into discourses on ideals and philosophy to freeze them safely into reflective consciousness.
     With the limitations of the reflective division in culture, both novels portray the sentimental ideal of the ability to "act...freely amidst that bondage" (Schiller 193). The thought that a conscious, creative human is free despite all constraints, bondage and control into which convention and limitations force them is incredible. All of the permutations of constraints, creations, repressions and transgressions throughout history have been changed from the body to art. Literature's creative force of the Erotic allows it to make this transformation so that the ephemeral aspects of sensuous life can become ideals which are immortal.
     The Erotic, through which we realize and recreate our position of being forever separated from natural sexuality, characterizes our human ability to play. Not only do we function with the purposeful reflection of consciousness in this world, but we also use our arts to create for the sake of the pleasure of reflecting further. We have come a long way from the simple knowledge of causality and identity as the "animal who works." The sex of conscious beings goes far beyond that of the animals, as it bursts with desire, fantasies, texts, imagination, memories, intensity, the knowledge of death, of life, and of being a unique individual. Play in the Erotic is so multi-faceted, that new descriptions of it continue to abound throughout all the centuries. As each individual's experience of the Erotic is created through their new consciousness, so do the creations and interpretations that gush from this plentiful life source abound.
     The various manifestations of the Erotic attest to our diversity as humans and to our potential within freedom. As the texts of the Erotic reverberate from each other, an immense realm of their associations dance within the music they create. Within the flammability of their subject, each text has infinite dialogues with other histories, cultures and philosophies, and thus brings a unique creation of the Erotic to shine within its specific time and to permeate its rays into future discourses.
     We must unclothe the resonations of the texts; we must digest and swim voluptuously in the sensuous waves of words that authors offer to us. And then we must stop and reflect. For if we are so caught up in the sensuality of images and feelings that we do not understand how the author reflects and creates, then our reading will be limited to experience and not thought. The fact that a human created an experience should not be relegated to merely seeing a few trees on a stroll at night and forgetting their impression a moment later.
     If we are to read, we already acknowledge that we are separated from nature, and within thought and reflection. To be a sentimental reader we acknowledge this division and revel with ecstasy in our mutual creation of reading-writing with the author. As conscious beings, we have the unique ability to reflect, and as erotic humans, the power to create. In the knitting factory of the Erotic, the texts are complex fabrics and we are the complex weavers, warping nature and putting the essentials to woof in the vibrant tapestry of our art.

Works Consulted

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Bataille, Georges. Les Larmes d'Eros. Pauvert: France. 1981

Bataille, Georges. The Bataille Reader. Edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Massachusetts: Black well Publishers, 1997.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, n.d.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Butler, Judith. "Desire." Critical Terms for Literary study. Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chigago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Zone Books: New York, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.

Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language.    Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith.  New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la Sexualité. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de. Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). Version 2. October 19, 1996. Copiste: Vincent Maret (maretv@worldnet.fr). http://www.worldnet.fr/~maretv/Biblio/Liaisons/Liaisons.html

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de. Dangerous Liaisons. New York: Signet, 1962.

Mills, Jane. Erotic Literature: Twenty-Four Centuries of Sensual Writing. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995.

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Masochism: Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Schiller, Friedrich. "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." from Essays. Edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum, 1993.