For religion seduction was a strategy of the devil, whether in the guise of witchcraft or love. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. The most recent of the rights of man, it has acceded to the dignity of a categorical imperative.
It is the story of the feminine in the present tense, in a cul- ture that produces everything, snakes everything speak, every- thing babble, everything climax. The glamour of seduction is quite superior to;the Christian consolation of the pleasures of the flesh. To- day, behind the mechanical objectification of the signs of sex, it is the masculine as fragile, and the feminine as degree zero which have the upper hand.
It is not a real, generic violence, but a vio- lence of dissuasion, the violence of the neuter, the violence of. Let everything be rendered in the light of the sign, in the light of a visible energy. But not in the vulgar sense of the masses' desire for complicity (a tautology that ultimately seeks to ground seduction in thedesire ofothers).
But it is also what lies behind the fragility of sex, and of the entire edifice of production.
SUPERFICIAL ABYSSES
But if one does, it is imperative that one not suc- ceed lest the absence of the truth become manifest. It is what surrealism was to the functionalist revo- lution of the early twentieth century - surrealism being but an ironic reverie on the principle of functionality. In the murals and ceiling paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque, painting and sculpture converge.
It is aprivatissime space, the prerogative of the Prince, like incest and transgression were once kingly prerogatives. Butis a mimetic relation with the image of the deceased really necessary to investigate narcissistic vertigo. It is the power of the seductive woman who takes herself for her own desire, and delights in the self- deception in which others, in their turn, will be caught.
The fairy agrees on one condition, that he never think of the colour red in the fox's tail. Everybody knows that their spell is car- ried by the unmediated resonance of the signs. Seduction lies with the annulment of the signs, of their meaning, with their pure ap- pearance.
The red and the black represent life - a life surpassing and ex- ceeding that of the nature. If it is characteristic of the seductress that she turns herself into an appearance in order to disturb appearances, what is characteristic of that other figure, the seducer. The seducer's calling is the extermination of the girl's natur- al power by an artificial power of his own.
Which would break with the specular nature of the sign and the encoumbrance of the referent. This, the pleasure of the approach, should not be slighted; for it is in this interval that he begins. In this case, one of the two terms must die, and it is always the same since the other is already dead.
For the realm of the rule is not part of psychoanalysis's jurisdiction, which concerns law alone. If the purpose of the game is to win, then the cheater is the only true player.
SEDUCTION
THE PASSION FOR RULES
The Law is part of the world of representation, and is there- fore subject to interpretation or decipherment. Games do not obey the dialectic of free will, that hypothetical dialectic of the sphere of the real and the law. And it is the rule's immanence, its arbitrary, circumscriptive charac- ter, that leads, in its own sphere, to the reversibility of meaning and the reversion of the Law.
With the rule we are free of the Law - and of all the constraints of choice, freedom, responsibility and meaning. The latter has proved very problematic foi our revolu- tionaries: is the festival a transgression or regeneration of the Law. To send a dollar in response to the absurd challenge of the ad- vertisement, is the sacrificial responsepar excellence.
The world is held together by unbreakable chains, but they are not those of the Law. Still it is symptomatic of the game's importance in many social activities and in the rapid circulation of goods and social posi- tions. The "Werbung," the solicitation of advertisements and polls, all the models of the media and.
With the magic of the console and instrument panel, the manipulation of the medium predominates. Where is the intensity of the game of chess, or the pleasure proper to computers. If all the information can be found in each of the parts, the whole loses its meaning.
There is a close relation between the concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer. With this diffuse, tensile form of seduction, orie is no longer speaking of the aristocratic seduction of duel relations. A psychologized seduction that results from its vulgarization with the rise in the West of the imaginary figure of desire.
Nor even of the corruption of innocence or virtue (there is no longer sufficient morality -or perversion - for that). It is the seduction of student and teacher (I am seducing you and you are seducing me, there being nothing else to do), of the politician and his public, of power (ah, the seduction of power and the power of seduc- tion!), of the analyst and the analysand, etc.
SEDUCTION AS DESTINY
If in the ritual form there are no originals (the aesthetic originality of cult objects is of little concern in the sacred), the original is again lost in the political form. There is only the multiplica- tion of objects; the political form corresponding to the object's maximum circulation and minimum intensity. Seduction too would have had its ritual phase (duel, magi- cal, agonistic); its aesthetic phase (as reflected in the "aesthetic strategy" of the seducer, whose domain approaches that of the feminine and sexuality, the ironic and the diabolic - it is then that seduction takes on the meaning it has for us: the possibly accursed distraction of appearances, their strategies, their play) ; and finally its "political" phase (taking up Benjamin's term, here somewhat ambiguous).
In this last phase the original of seduc- tion, its ritual and aesthetic form, disappears in favour of an all-out ventilation whereby seduction becomes'the informal form ofpolitics, the scaled-down framework for an elusive po- litics devoted to the endless reproduction of a form without content. This informal form is inseparable from its technical nature, which is that of networks - just as the political form of the object is inseparable from the techniques of serial reproduction). As with the object, this "political" form cor- responds to seduction's maximum diffusion and minimum in- tensity.
Or can we oppose this involu- tional fate, and lay a wager on seduction as destiny?Produc- tion as destiny, or seduction as destiny. Be that as it may, we are living today in non-sense, and if simula- tion is its disenchanted form, seduction is its enchanted form. It is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous and predestined world; it is what is quietly effective in a visi- bly efficient and stolid world.
And seduction_still holds, in the face of truth, a most sibylline response, which is that "perhaps we wish to uncover the truth because it is so difficult to imagine it naked.".
