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“The erotic kiss is not a matter of lips only: still more are the eyes and the hands involved. And surely Sartre is right to think that, in the caress of desire I am, as he puts it, seeking to ‘incarnate the other’ – in other words, I am seeking to bring into the flesh that I touch with my hands or lips, the thing that Sartre calls freedom, and which I am calling the first person perspective. Sartre goes on to argue that sexual desire is inherently paradoxical, since it can succeed in its aim only by ‘possessing another in his freedom’ – in other words possessing another’s freedom while also removing it. I don’t agree with that. But I do think that the kiss of desire brings into prominence the very same ambiguity in the face that is present in eating. The lips offered by one lover to another are replete with subjectivity: they are the avatars of I, summoning the consciousness of another in a mutual gift. This is how the erotic kiss is portrayed by Canova, for example, in his sculpture of Eros and Psyche, and also by Rodin in ‘The Kiss’, a work that was originally called ‘Paolo and Francesca’. The lips are offered as spirit, but they respond as flesh. Pressed by the lips of the other they become sensory organs, bringing with them all the fatal entrapment of sexual pleasure, and ready to surrender to a force that breaks into the I from outside. Hence the kiss is the most important moment of desire – the moment in which soul and body are united, and in which lovers are fully face to face and also totally exposed to one another, in the manner that Francesca describes. The pleasure of the kiss is not a sensory pleasure: it is not a matter of sensations, but of the I–You intentionality and what it means. Hence there can be mistaken kisses, and mistaken pleasure in kissing, as was experienced by Lucretia, in Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan’s version of the story, kissing the man she thought to be her husband, and whom she discovered to be the rapist Tarquin, though too late to defend herself.” — Roger Scruton

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The erotic kiss is not a matter of lips only: still more are the eyes and the hands involved. And surely Sartre is right to think that, in the caress of desire I am, as he puts it, seeking to ‘incarnate the other’ – in other words, I am seeking to bring into the flesh that I touch with my hands or lips, the thing that Sartre calls freedom, and which I am calling the first person perspective. Sartre goes on to argue that sexual desire is inherently paradoxical, since it can succeed in its aim only by ‘possessing another in his freedom’ – in other words possessing another’s freedom while also removing it. I don’t agree with that. But I do think that the kiss of desire brings into prominence the very same ambiguity in the face that is present in eating. The lips offered by one lover to another are replete with subjectivity: they are the avatars of I, summoning the consciousness of another in a mutual gift. This is how the erotic kiss is portrayed by Canova, for example, in his sculpture of Eros and Psyche, and also by Rodin in ‘The Kiss’, a work that was originally called ‘Paolo and Francesca’. The lips are offered as spirit, but they respond as flesh. Pressed by the lips of the other they become sensory organs, bringing with them all the fatal entrapment of sexual pleasure, and ready to surrender to a force that breaks into the I from outside. Hence the kiss is the most important moment of desire – the moment in which soul and body are united, and in which lovers are fully face to face and also totally exposed to one another, in the manner that Francesca describes. The pleasure of the kiss is not a sensory pleasure: it is not a matter of sensations, but of the I–You intentionality and what it means. Hence there can be mistaken kisses, and mistaken pleasure in kissing, as was experienced by Lucretia, in Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan’s version of the story, kissing the man she thought to be her husband, and whom she discovered to be the rapist Tarquin, though too late to defend herself.
— Roger Scruton