From Chapter Four, Eros.
Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.
The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one's own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we way, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. [...]
Without Eros sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved. It becomes almost a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world. That is why Eros, though the king of pleasure, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product.
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