El amor es siempre contra natura

“El amor es siempre contra natura” is both an expression and a governing proposition in the novel’s erotic philosophy. Mario presents love as an absolute antinatural force: not a passive instinct obedient to biology, but a human act of invention, defiance, and self-making. The phrase gives a name to the book’s central reversal, in which what society calls deviation becomes evidence of human freedom, while conventional arrangements such as marriage and religious propriety appear as only one set of rules among several competing systems.

Definition and Philosophical Claim

The expression emerges when Emmanuelle asks Mario whether the only possible love, in his view, is love against nature. He answers that this is a truism and a pleonasm: love is always against nature, “the absolute antinature,” an insurrection against the universe’s order and a false note in the music of the spheres. His imagery makes the claim larger than sexual unconventionality. Love becomes the human escape from a supposedly settled cosmic arrangement, an act that breaks out of the earthly paradise with laughter and frustrates the plans attributed to God.

Mario’s argument depends on a contrast between nature as given and eroticism as made. He has already described beauty as humanity’s invention rather than nature’s order, and eroticism as the triumph of dreaming over natural necessity. In that framework, love belongs with poetry: it arises from human loneliness and bewilderment, then answers the universe by creating forms that did not exist within biological limits. The expression therefore names not merely an erotic preference but a theory of civilization, in which human value appears precisely in the capacity to exceed what nature seems to prescribe.

Erotic Invention and Biological Defiance

Mario makes the thesis concrete through examples of sexual acts that biology or convention would classify as impossible or unnatural. He describes sexual relations between women as a biological absurdity and says that eroticism immediately converts this dream-invention into reality. He treats sodomy as a challenge to nature and group sex as something humans imagine, arrange, and accomplish because it is not natural. Each such achievement is, in his account, beautiful because it is a victory over imposed limitation.

The argument does not require exceptional practices in every instance. Mario insists that eroticism can expand without resorting to extraordinary formulas; it requires youth and freedom of spirit, love of truth, and a purity unrelated to custom or convention. Courage is essential because erotic desire confronts the fear of difference, thought, and happiness. The expression consequently carries an ethical demand: to love against nature is also to resist the habits by which people make fear appear respectable.

The earlier discussion of sexual pleasure gives the proposition an intimate, rather than purely abstract, foundation. A woman explains that what conquered her in her partner was his “carnal genius,” his extraordinary appetite for making love and his ability to do it well. Christopher finds this confidence distasteful yet wants to know more, and immediately recognizes the danger that others might discover and attempt to appropriate such a gift. Erotic power is thus shown as both intensely personal and socially vulnerable: it produces attachment, jealousy, and the threat of possession at the same time that Mario’s philosophy celebrates its liberating force.

Collision with Law and Convention

The expression also becomes legible through its opposition to institutions. When Emmanuelle asks whether smoking opium is forbidden, Mario places it beside making love outside marriage: both are prohibited, though the comparison deliberately collapses a legal restriction and a sexual norm into the same field of authority. When she asks what would happen if the police arrived, he answers that they would go to prison. The erotic act is therefore not outside power; it is exposed to punishment precisely because law attempts to define which desires may be publicly enacted.

Marriage functions in this contrast as a social boundary rather than a natural guarantee. Mario’s comparison treats extramarital love as an offense regulated by the same coercive world that prohibits intoxicants, while his larger thesis denies that legality can settle the meaning of desire. The phrase does not claim that every transgression is harmless. Instead, it identifies the conflict between erotic invention and systems that convert convention into moral necessity. Love against nature is also love against the institutional fiction that social rules transparently express the universe’s order.

A religious setting intensifies the same tension. At a temple, Emmanuelle sees a tree bearing numerous phallic fruits. Mario explains that some are ex-votos and others offerings intended to secure sexual potency or fertility; their size reflects either the worshipper’s wealth or the urgency of the prayer. The scene complicates any simple opposition between erotic desire and religion. The temple has not eliminated sexuality but has incorporated it into ritual, redirecting bodily hopes through offerings and material symbols. Yet the sight also makes Emmanuelle conscious of the impropriety of her clothing, showing how sacred space can preserve sexual imagery while policing the body that enters it.

Rhetoric and Narrative Significance

The expression’s force comes from Mario’s deliberately excessive rhetoric. His speech moves through paradox, pleonasm, metaphor, and accumulation: love is simultaneously crime, insurrection, failed divine planning, and the recovery of human reality. The language refuses a moderate compromise between nature and desire. Its repeated reversals make the supposedly unnatural act appear creative, while the supposedly normal world becomes the realm of fear, conformity, taboo, hypocrisy, and cruelty.

This rhetoric also explains why the phrase works as a recurring interpretive key rather than a detached slogan. It joins the novel’s accounts of carnality, beauty, freedom, police authority, marriage, and religious fertility into one proposition: human beings become fully human when they create forms of intimacy that the given order does not authorize. The expression is therefore less a description of one sexual arrangement than a challenge to every claim that biology, custom, law, or theology has already determined the legitimate shape of love.

Its final significance lies in the tension it preserves. Mario’s formulation is liberating because it converts impossibility into possibility, but it is also confrontational because that conversion carries risks: exposure, punishment, jealousy, and attempts at possession. The phrase celebrates erotic courage without dissolving the institutions that oppose it. Against nature, against marriage’s restriction, against police enforcement, and even against the uneasy boundary between sacred ritual and bodily desire, love becomes the novel’s most concentrated image of human freedom as an act of deliberate defiance.