ABSTRACT
The question of Dante's notion of desire can only really be approached at a bias: firstly, because he tells us so much and yet so little about his own erotic history; and because what he does tell us comes almost always filtered through the figure of Beatrice and his imaginary relations with her. Beatrice, the purported object of desire in life, becomes in Dante's retrospective and touched-up vision: an inspiration, a bait, a mask, a pair of spectacles, a view-scope, an illusion, a holograph, a film image, a mother, a child, a nurse, a visionary, a fortune teller, a knight, a protector, and possibly even a father. The fantasy that structures the Commedia is the fantasy of the post-evental convert whose body, leads him to vacate the interior space of consciousness to become instead a body of pure surface, a receptor of the waves of love that emanate from the material of creation.
