Baudrillard - Seduction (Culture Texts)

SEDUCTION

CultureTexts
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker General Editors

CultureTexts is a series of creative explorations in theory, politics and culture at the fin-de-millenium . Thematically focussed around key theoretical debates in the postmodern condition, the CultureTexts series challenges received discourses in art, social and political theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, value inquiry, science and technology, the body, and critical aesthetics.Taken individually, contributions to CultureTexts represent the forward breaking-edge of postmodern theory and practice.

Titles

Seduction Jean Baudrillard

Panic Encyclopedia
Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker and David Cook

Life AfterPostmodernism:Essayson Valueand Culture edited and introduced by John Fekete

Body Invaders
edited and introduced by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and HyperAesthetics Arthur Kroker/David Cook

SEDUCTION

JEAN BAUDRILLARD translated by Brian Singer

New World Perspectives CultureTexts Series

Montreal

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First published as De la seduction by Editions Galilee, 1979. 9, rue Linne, Paris 5e.
Editions Galilee
English language copyright New World Perspectives, 1990 .

ISBN 0-920393-25-X
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Baudrillard, Jean
Seduction
(CultureTexts series)
Translation of: De la seduction.
ISBN 0-920393-25-X
1. Seduction-Psychological aspects. (Psychology). 3 . Sex (Psychology) 4.
1 . Title. II . Series .
BF637.S36133813 1990
2 . Femininity
Postmodernism.z

V

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I.THE ECLIPTIC OF SEX
The Ecliptic of Sex 3 The Eternal Irony of the Community 12 Stereo-Porno 28 Seduction /Production 37

II.SUPERFICIAL ABYSSES
The Sacred Horizon of Appearances Trompe l'oeil or Enchanted Simulation 60 I'l Be Your Mirror 67 Death in Samarkand 72 The Secret and The Challenge 79 The Effigy of the Seductress 85 The Ironic Strategy of the Seducer 98 The Fear of Being Seduced 119

III.THE POLITICAL DESTINY OF SEDUCTION

The Passion for Rules 131 The Dual, the Polarand the Digital 154 The "Ludic" and Cold Seduction 157 Seduction as Destiny 179

INTRODUCTION

A fixed destiny weighs on seduction.For religion seduction was a strategy of the devil, whether in the guise of witchcraft or love.It is always the seduction of evil - or of the world.It is the very artifice of the world .Its malediction has been un- changed in ethics and philosophy, and today itis maintained in psychoanalysis and the `liberation of desire.' Given the present-day promotion of sex, evil and perversion, along with the celebration of the ofttimes programmatic resurrection of allthatwas once accursed, itmightseem paradoxicalthatseduc- tion has remained in the shadows - and even returned thereto permanently.

The eighteenth century stillspoke ofseduction.Itwas, with valourandhonour,acentral preoccupationofthearistocratic spheres.The bourgeois Revolution put an end to thispreoccu- pation (and the others, the later revolutions ended itirrevoca- bly - every revolution, in its beginnings, seeks to end the seductionofappearances).Thebourgeoiseradedicateditself to nature and production, things quite foreign and even express- lyfataltoseduction.Andsincesexualityarises,asFoucaultnotes, from a process of production (of discourse, speech or desire), itis not at all surprising that seduction has been all the more coveredover.Welivetodaythepromotion ofnature,beitthe good nature of the soul of yesteryear, or the good material na- ture of things, or even the psychic nature of desire.Nature pur- sues its realization through all the metamorphosis of the repressed, and through the liberation of all energies, be they

2 SEDUCTION

psychic, social or material.
Seduction, however, never belongs to the order of nature,

but that of artifice - never to the order of energy, but that of signsandrituals.Thisiswhyallthegreatsystemsofproduc- tion and interpretation have not ceased to exclude seduction - to itsgood fortune - from their conceptual field.For seduc- tion continues to haunt them from without, and from deep wi- thin itsforsaken state, threatening them with collapse.itawaits the destruction of every godly order, including those of produc- tion and desire.Seduction continues to appear toallorthodoxies as malefice and artifice, a black magic for the deviation of all truths, an exaltation of the malicious use of signs, a conspiracy of signs.Every discourse is threatened with this sudden rever- sibility,absorbedintoitsownsignswithoutatraceofmean- ing.This is why alldisciplines, which have as an axiom the coherence and finality of their discourse, must try to exorcize it.This is where seduction and femininity are confounded, in- deed, confused .Masculinity has always been haunted by this sudden reversibility within the feminine.Seduction and femi- ninity are ineluctable as the reverse side of sex, :meaning and power.

Todaytheexorcismismoreviolentandsystematic.Weare entering the era of final solutions; for example, that of the sex- ual revolution, of the production and management of all limi- nal and subliminal pleasures, the micro-processing of desire, withthewoman who producesherselfaswoman, andassex, being the last avatar.Ending seduction.

Or else the triumph of a soft seduction, a white, diffusefemini- zation and eroticization of all relations in an enervated social universe.

Or else none of the above.For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.

THE ECLIPTIC OF SEX

Nothing isless certain today than sex, behind the liberation of its discourse.And nothing today is less certain than desire, behind the proliferation of its images.

In matters of sex, the proliferation is approaching total loss. Here lies the secret of the ever increasing production of sex and its signs, and the hyperrealism of sexual pleasure, particu- larly feminine pleasure.The principle of uncertaintyhas extend- ed to sexual reason, as well as political and economic reason.

The state of sex's liberation is also that of its indetermina- tion.No more want, no more prohibitions, and no more limits: it is the loss of every referential principle . Economic reason is sustained only by penury;itisput into question with the reali- zation of its objective, the abolition of the spectre of penury. Desire too issustained only by want.When desire isentirely on the sideofdemand, when itisoperationalized withoutres- trictions, itloses its imaginary and, therefore, its reality;itap- pears everywhere, but in generalized simulation.Itis the ghost of desire that haunts the defunct reality of sex.Sex is every- where, except in sexuality (Barthes).

In sexual mythology, the transition towards the feminine is contemporaneous with the passage from determination to general indetermination.The feminine isnot substituted forthe

6 SEDUCTION

masculine as one sex for another, according to some structural inversion. It is substituted as the end of the determinate representation of sex, as the flotation of the law~that regulates the difference between the'sexes.The ascent of the feminine corresponds to both the apogee of sexual pleasure and a catas- trophe relative to sex's reality principle .