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Seduction, in French thinker Baudrillard’s apocalyptic discourse, is a power of attraction and fascination capable of subverting mechanical, orgasm-centered sexuality and reality in general. Two chief obstacles to unleashing the potentially liberating forces of seduction are the women’s movement and psychoanalysis, charges the author of America and Forget Foucault. While recognizing that seduction has a negative side–turning the seduced person away from his/her true thoughts and impulses–Baudrillard is intrigued by the seductive processes at work in the vertigo induced by games, in magic and the lottery, in the transvestite’s “total gestural, sensual and ritual” behavior. He decodes pornography as “an orgy of realism,” a hyperreality of signs. In his analysis, seduction has itself been corrupted in a world of manufactured desires and ready-made satisfactions. With seductive irony, Baudrillard storms the fragile phallic fortress of patriarchy in this heady, sometimes obscure meditation.If a state of exasperation, a thwarting of expectation, and a teasing of the imagination are sufficient response to a book that bafflingly evades all of the flexible nomenclature of literary classification, then Seduction has been successful. It is not science, if science is clear thinking from carefully ascertained facts. It is not art, for Baudrillard writes a prose–in translation at least (the book was first published in France in 1979)–that has neither intelligibility nor music. The author of America ( LJ 1/89) had an opportunity to inform and enlighten us on the various roles the art and act of seduction play in our lives, but his arguments are vitiated by the lack of a coherent point of view and by diffuseness. To read the book takes much more effort than the average reader is likely to give.- A. J. Anderson, Graduate Sch. of Library & Information Science, Simmons Coll., BostonCONTENTSIII . THE POLITICAL DESTINY OF SEDUCTIONINTRODUCTIONI . THE ECLIPTIC OF SEXThe Ecliptic of Sex 3The Eternal Irony of the Community 12Stereo-Porno 28Seduction / Production 37II . SUPERFICIAL ABYSSESThe Sacred Horizon of Appearances 53Trompe l’oeil or Enchanted Simulation 60I’ll Be Your Mirror 67Death in Samarkand 72The Secret and The Challenge 79The Effigy of the Seductress 85The Ironic Strategy of the Seducer 98The Fear of Being Seduced 119The Passion for Rules 131The Dual, the Polar and the Digital 154The “Ludic” and Cold Seduction 157Seduction as Destiny 179