with desire. What is produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness. During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men that is projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of likeness [ressemblance]. Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman's heart, or about seducing her. It is rather a matter of creating her from inside [de l'interieur], of inventing her, either as a realized utopia (an idealized woman), or as a "femme fatale", a star, which is yet another hysterical and supernatural metaphor. This is the entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has invented such an ideal harmony, such a love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin beings (woman as a projected resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural shape only as an ideal of the same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say destined to a pathos of ideal likeness [ressemblance] of beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion that replaces the dual otherness [alterite] of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes meaning/direction [sens] because the erotic attraction that once came from otherness [alterite], from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side of the Same, to the side of similarity and likeness [ressemblance]. Auto-eroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that invests and alienates himself in the other. But the other is never more than the ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I [me rapproche de moi]. It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-products, sexuality draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is g...
