Seduction

Definition

Seduction, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is Baudrillard's name for the dual, ceremonial, artificial game of appearances — the power of the object over the subject, of appearance over meaning and desire. It is defined against love: "I prefer the dual form of seduction to the universal form of love… It is possible to speak of seduction because it is a dual and intelligible form, while love is a universal and unintelligible one." Where love is affect, sincerity, and psychology, seduction is "linked not to affects but to the fragility of appearance; it has no model and seeks no form of salvation—it is therefore immoral." It obeys "the pact, the challenge and the alliance, which are not universal and natural forms, but artificial and initiatory ones. It is therefore frankly perverse." Its logic is the duel, not the fusion: "I cannot seduce if I am not already seduced, no one can seduce me if he is not already seduced." This is why "the power of the object lies in its irony. Difference is always serious, but indifference is ironic" — and why the woman, as the "object of desire," occupies the higher position ("triumphal indifference," "triumphal lack of subjectivity"). Baudrillard makes seduction the master-category of Fatal Strategies ("Only the subject desires; only the object seduces"), the only counter to obscenity and terror: "Seduction against terror: these are the stakes. There are no others." It is also the book's theory of sexual difference: "Sexuality signals… the weakest and poorest difference, the one that's left over after all other differences have been lost." See appearance-and-disappearance, supremacy-of-the-object, obscenity, sexual-difference, the-secret.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "the dual form of seduction"; "seduction is pagan, love is Christian"; "Only the subject desires; only the object seduces" (1983; the book that follows Seduction, 1979).
• Friedrich Nietzsche — "Christ come to seduce people to his own person" (Baudrillard's footnote on the Christian invention of psychology and love).
• Søren Kierkegaard — the mirror "suspended on the opposite wall": the famous seduction example, "she doesn't think about it, but the mirror does."
• Jacques Lacan (not yet paged) — "there is no sexual rapport"; Baudrillard agrees but redirects it to the game of the missed encounter.
• Sigmund Freud — the "murder of seduction" in the founding of psychoanalysis (via Monique Schneider).

Related Concepts

• Appearance and Disappearance — seduction is the game of pure appearance.
• Supremacy of the Object — seduction is the object's strategy.
• Obscenity — the opposing pole: "the full through which only the empty appears."
• Sexual Difference — seduction as "an aesthetic and ceremonial difference between the sexes."
• The Secret — seduction preserves the enigma; love confesses.
• The Ceremony of the World — seduction as the initiatory, rule-bound game (the pact of alliance).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Evil Genie of Passion," "The Supremacy of the Object," "In Praise of the Sexual Object," "The Gray Imminence," "The Crystal Revenge": seduction vs. love, the dual form, the woman as object, the gray imminence, the initiatory birth.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the adjacent simulation machinery (the falser than false).
• Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the earlier object-system's "signified warmth" as a pre-version of seductive appearance.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the concept's fullest secondary reading (ch. 2): seduction as "the distance between things that allows their resemblance or the distance that arises when their resemblance is pushed too far" (p. 97); "neither the same as simulation nor opposed to it, but doubles it" (p. 73); unrepresentable because "in seduction the distance between the real and its double, the same and the other, is abolished" (S, 67); the anti-seduction of pornography and the fox's-tail and Death-in-Samarkand tales; Kierkegaard's Johannes as Cordelia's "mirror" and Sophie Calle's Suite vénitienne — "it is the shadowing itself which is the other's double life" ('FM', 104) — as the figure of the analyst; "One cannot be free of seduction, and the discourse of anti-seduction is but its last metamorphosis" (S, 42–3). See doubling, the-double, internal-and-external-readings.

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's seduction is explicitly anti-feminist in its allocation of woman to "object of desire." Can the concept be severed from this gender politics, or is the gender politics internal to it? (See gender-and-the-interior, sexual-difference.)
• Is seduction still a live category once obscenity has abolished the scene? Baudrillard insists it is the last counter-strategy, but also that "seduction against terror" may be impossible.
• The book treats seduction as a theory of power (the object over the subject) as much as an erotic category. Can it be transferred to architecture or the interior? (The wiki's atmosphere, scenography, and commodity registers are the candidates.)