The Practice

Six lessons in the seduction tradition — Ovid, Casanova, Kierkegaard's seducer, Greene's nine types, and the objection that undoes them all.

A course on the thought of The Machinery of Desire.

Psychology

What you will learn

Describe what the Ars Amatoria actually instructs, and distinguish its testable advice from its indefensible advice.
State what is known and what is not known about why Ovid was banished.
State Girard's triangular structure and identify the mediator in a described case.
Describe the mate-choice-copying experiment, including the result for male participants, which does not go the way the theory predicts.
Contrast Casanova's own account of his conduct with his reputation as a technician of seduction.
Explain why a memoir is evidence of some things and not others, and name which.
Describe the pseudonymous structure of Either/Or and why the diary is presented at several removes.
Explain what the aesthetic life is, and why success is fatal to it.

The First Manual — A three-book instruction manual in verse from the year 2, its advice uncomfortably specific — and what it cost the man who wrote it.
Borrowed Desire — The claim that we do not want things, we want what other people want — and the face-rating experiment that turned it into a measurable effect.
Casanova Denies the Method — Twelve volumes by the man whose name became a common noun — read for what he says he was doing, which is not what the tradition says he did.
The Seducer's Diary — Kierkegaard invents a seducer with a complete method and lets him succeed — which turns out to be the most damaging thing that could happen to him.
The Nine Types — Greene's taxonomy of seducers — and what happens when you are asked to pick your own, which is the point of the lesson rather than a feature of it.
The Objection — Baudrillard's argument that seduction is not a technique at all, and that treating it as one is the surest way to fail at it.

Ars Amatoria (2 CE) — Ovid's three-book verse manual on finding, keeping, and — in book three — being the object of love.
Tristia (c. 9-12 CE) — The poems of Ovid's banishment, in which he defends the Ars Amatoria to Augustus.
History of My Life — Casanova's twelve-volume memoir, written in French in old age at the castle of Dux.
Either/Or (1843) — Kierkegaard's pseudonymous two-part work, whose first part ends in The Seducer's Diary.

mimetic desire, mediator, mate-choice copying, the aesthetic

Part of the Simposeum course library.