Baudrillard and Seduction

This is what occurs in the most banal games of seduction: I shy away; it is not you who will give me pleasure, it is I who will make you play, and thereby rob you of your pleasure. A game in continuous movement- one cannot assume that sexual strategies alone are involved. There is, above all, a strategy of displacement (se-ducere: to take aside, to divert from one’s path) that implies a distortion of sex’s truth. To play is not to take pleasure. Seduction, as a passion and as a game at the level of the sign, acquires a certain sovereignty; it is seduction that prevails in the long term because it implies a reversible, indeterminate order.

The glamour of seduction is quite superior to the Christian consolation of the pleasures of the flesh. One wants us to consider the latter a natural finality- and many are driven mad for failing to attain it. But love has nothing to do with sex drives, if not in the libidinal look of our contemporary culture. Love is a challenge and a prize: a challenge to the other to be seduced in turn (there is no finer argument than to accuse a woman of being incapable of being seduced). Perversion, from this perspective takes on a somewhat different meaning: it is to pretend to be seduced without being seduced, without being capable of being seduced.

p.22 in the English translation of Brian Singer of De la seduction by Jean Baudrillard. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.