ABSTRACT
French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) developed an original method of cultural criticism in significant part from his reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s fictional presentation of the act of seduction in “The Seducer’s Diary.” For Baudrillard, seduction came to serve as an analogue to critical thought in general and a precursor to an entire range of what he later called “fatal strategies” of individual freedom. Though crucial to his own development, Baudrillard’s reading of Kierkegaard in general and of “The Seducer’s Diary” in particular was not itself a critical or thorough reading. Rather, he subjected the text to a species of speculative interpretation and used it as the basis for protracted extrapolation into a wide range of other cultural spheres and critical concerns. This in mind, it is unsurprising that tracing Baudrillard’s engagement with Kierkegaard should tell us more about Baudrillard and his readers than it does about Kierkegaard.
