While past scholarship has explored at great length the inscription of the black body in Morrison's work, recent analysis has focused on her “use of the erotic” – to take up Audre Lorde's phrase (Turpin, 2010) – in an effort to locate her specific work with language in comparison and contrast with Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand. I wish to argue in this chapter that writing the erotic is what Morrison has been “risking” throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a “theme,” a moment in the novels’ diegesis. It is part and parcel of what writing ventures; it is its daring quest. Incest, pedophilia, rape, gang bangs, pornography – in Lorde's words, “abuse of feeling” (Lorde, 1984: 59) – and the constant probing of “love” – the title of Morrison's eighth novel – go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic that is constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival, and correlative to its freedom. Lorde offers, for her part, a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic incarnated in the autobiographical Zami (Raynaud, 1988; Jay, 1995). The erotic is power; it is knowledge from which black women have been alienated and which they must recover.