Abstract

This article investigates the concepts of love and eroticism of the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz, in his book The Double Flame. The purpose is to show how the author, in his treatment of the intersections between love, eroticism and sexuality in Western cultural life during several centuries, by way of an interdisciplinary and analogical method, makes as well a poetic manifesto in defence of sensitivity against the process of the commercialization of desire in the contemporary world and proposes an erotic re-education of society at this century's end through the rehabilitation of the idea of love.