Jousetsujin

The erotic person is the central speculative figure in Mario's philosophy of eroticism, presented not as a libertine caricature but as a human being transformed in consciousness. This figure would remain human while becoming “more than man”: freer from inherited shame, fear, prohibition, and possessive custom, and able to judge conduct through pleasure, pain, lucidity, and love of life. The idea gives Mario's conversation with Emmanuelle its widest horizon, turning private sexual experience into a theory of education, evolution, and the possible future of the species.

Definition and Evolutionary Status

The erotic person is described as a new animal, but not as a creature that simply abandons humanity. Mario's answer is deliberately paradoxical: the future being will be more than ordinary man while continuing to be man, “more adult” and further advanced on the scale of evolution. The comparison is with the emergence of art in the cave-dwelling past. Just as artistic values supposedly marked the separation of the first human from the last ape, erotic values could separate a glorious human from the ashamed human who hides nakedness and sexuality under social prohibitions.

Mario places this transformation in a biological rather than merely political register. He does not imagine a reform of existing institutions or the construction of a republic devoted to lust. Instead, he foresees a sudden change in the human brain: a flash after which a person thinks differently and becomes a different kind of being. The erotic person would no longer understand inherited categories such as indecency, inversion, adultery, or incest in their current moral sense. These terms would become museum remnants of an earlier civilization, comparable to fossils and extinct animals.

Moral and Intellectual Formation

For Mario, the erotic person is defined less by a particular sexual act than by the spirit in which life is lived. The act itself is secondary; the decisive novelty is that it is performed by a free mind. Pleasure becomes the criterion of good, while pain, boredom, limitation, and frustration constitute evil. This morality rejects fear and credulity in favor of reason and confidence, and it treats eroticism as a code, a ceremonial discipline, an art, a school, and a science rather than as a collection of social amusements.

The erotic person therefore represents an educational achievement. Mario insists that no one is born already possessing poetry, genius, or a privileged erotic nature. These capacities must be learned. His formulation, “Learning is learning to enjoy,” makes pleasure the result of training rather than an accidental instinct. The model offered by the Murias, whom Quentin encountered in India with the sociologist Verrier Elwin, supports this claim: their community is organized around a communal dormitory in which children learn the art of love from an early age, within a sexual morality characterized as formative rather than prohibitive. Mario treats this institution as evidence that an erotic mode of humanity can be cultivated.

The contrast with conventional morality is also a contrast between health and damage. Mario calls eroticism a progressive force that desacralizes sex and promotes mental and social health. It educates character by replacing imaginary passions with lucid ones and by affirming the body rather than treating sexuality as a source of guilt. In this framework, the erotic person is not simply permitted to desire; the person has learned to inhabit desire without the old machinery of terror.

Eroticism as Creative Art

Mario's theory gives the erotic person an artistic function. Earlier art shaped colors, curves, sounds, stone, bronze, and paste; modern humanity, he argues, increasingly wants to shape its own flesh and mind. The new art can therefore exist only through living bodies and living energy. Eroticism becomes the art adequate to a human being who seeks to move beyond the stars, just as ochre and smoke once opened a future on the walls of caves.

This artistic claim is more radical than an aesthetic celebration of the body. Mario imagines the human body as material that can be seized, altered, and reconstructed so that its inherited form no longer dictates its destiny. The goal is to free people from the blind determinism of the cell, from the energy that degrades and the bodies that fall, and to make them capable of giving themselves their own laws. The erotic person is thus both artwork and artist: a being whose bodily and mental life becomes the medium through which spirit seeks liberation from matter.

The argument also explains why Mario speaks with such violence and urgency. The project is not decorative. To remake the human being is, in his account, more than art; it is the reason for the spirit itself. Erotic practice becomes a test of whether humanity can become the author of its own form rather than merely the product of biological inheritance and social fear.

Individual Mutation and Collective Consequences

Although the erotic person begins as an individual, Mario refuses to confine the transformation to private experience. Evolution, he argues, does not proceed through entire societies at once. It begins with a small minority, a branch separating from the human tree while the larger herd resists it. Once that branch has emerged, however, its consequences can extend to the whole universe of human possibility.

This minority logic makes the erotic person both exceptional and responsible. The first transformed individuals must live as though the future had already arrived, adopting erotic values openly and without reservation. Mario calls this deliberate practice a way of bringing oneself into the world before the promised age has actually appeared. Their gestures and words matter because anything that confirms old assumptions may delay humanity's maturation, while every lucid act can help produce the necessary “step.”

The future is therefore approached through conduct in the present. Mario urges people to affirm that their bodies are just, their powers infinite, and the sweetness of living itself the reason for life. The desired historical movement is from the Age of Fear toward the Age of Reason, but reason here is not detached calculation. It is a liberated intelligence joined to bodily pleasure, self-love, and love of one's fellows. The erotic person is the agent through whom that transition might become biologically real.

Limits, Doubts, and Narrative Significance

Emmanuelle challenges Mario's optimism by asking whether such a morality could be produced through conscious effort. She suspects that the Murias' erotic order may be an innate grace rather than an acquired discipline, just as poetry is often treated as a gift bestowed by nature. Mario rejects that distinction, arguing that humans make poetry, harmony, and beauty and can likewise learn to make themselves. His confidence transforms the erotic person from a miraculous exception into a project of deliberate self-formation.

Yet the figure remains explicitly future-oriented and uncertain. Mario admits that the full Erotic Age may lie beyond the lives of those discussing it and even wishes they had been born a million years later. At the same time, he refuses to surrender to historical delay. Evolution remains mysterious, so attempting to “bring ourselves into the world” may itself be part of the evolutionary process. The erotic person consequently occupies an unstable position between prophecy and experiment: not yet fully present, but potentially already visible in scattered individuals and in the Murias' radically different sexual education.

Within the novel, this concept enlarges scenes of looking, exposure, and desire into a philosophical experiment. Emmanuelle's body is repeatedly made visible to strangers: a man's fixed attention on her bare knees, the exposure of a breast after her blouse wrinkles, the condesa's calm inspection, Ariane's public admiration, and Mario's joking address to an audience gathered around a shrine. These episodes show the bodily intensity that Mario's theory seeks to reinterpret, but they also preserve tensions his doctrine does not resolve: the difference between being looked at and choosing to be seen, between erotic freedom and another person's control, and between a body treated as living art and a body turned into a spectacle. The erotic person is therefore not merely the book's ideal future. It is the name for its sustained attempt to imagine whether pleasure can become knowledge, whether knowledge can become ethics, and whether a transformed relation to the body can alter what it means to be human.