ABSTRACT
In romanticized versions of love the elevation of the beloved is accompanied by an intensification of the positive personal attributes of the beloved, what Stendhal has labeled crystallization. The intoxicating power of love involves building up; in De Sade, the intensification of pleasure requires belittling, tearing down, torturing, and annihilation. Love as well as good and evil are defined in terms of these more primary emotions, thus Love is pleasure, accompanied by the idea of an external cause. The phantasmic sacrificial structure understands the contagious nature of evil, but fails to understand the deliverance from evil that the gift of love provides. In Spinoza's system, love, pleasure, good, desire all neatly line up so that our essence and our end are determined by a drive for pleasure. For Spinoza desire is part of a triumvirate—pain and pleasure being the other two "primary emotions".
