ABSTRACT
Seduction, Jean Baudrillard maintains, is more exciting than sex. Seduction is more inventive, more subtle, a matter of nuances; it is witty and creative; it can be sublime. Seduction depends on a play of surfaces. It produces illusions, but refuses to participate in them, especially the illusion of depth. Enigmatic, enchanting, seduction defers satisfaction in order to sustain the pleasure of anticipation. It repudiates what Baud-rillard calls our culture’s naturalization of sex, its commitment to an unimaginative artlessness, and its claim at the same time to gratification as one of the human rights. Moreover, seduction refuses the sexual equivalent of the work ethic, the obligation twentieth-century Western culture so diligently promotes to put the body to good erotic use. Sex, Baudrillard argues, is quotidian, drab, referential, preoccupied by the real: seduction, which liberates us from the constraints of duty and truth-to-nature, depends on fantasy, romance, imagination. Seduction takes place at the level of the signifier (Baudrillard 1990).
