ABSTRACT
The word ‘seduction’ has appeared a number of times in this volume, usually in conjunction with other terms such as ‘symbolic exchange’, ‘reversion’, ‘otherness’; always in association with that which, in Baudrillard’s terms, is structurally eradicated or barred by the ideological institutions of semiology and axiology. In Chapter 1, I referred, in note 18, to ‘seduction’ as that which is counter to production. Where production is literally making something appear, bringing into the realm of the visible or perceivable (or even performing, as in a theatre on a stage), seduction is that movement that removes from the realm of the visible, that vaporises ‘identity’, and is marked by ambivalence. Seduction is about reversion and disappearance, neither of which is recognisable within a productivist logic. In Chapter 2, I discussed the concern of feminists to articulate an ‘otherness which is not the otherness of sameness’, an ‘otherness’ which is not always and inevitably caught up in the oppositional logic of the binary form where the feminine is always opposed to, or different from, the masculine. Given this concern, Baudrillard’s writing on ‘seduction’ is pertinent for consideration by feminists, and engagement by feminist theory.
