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.

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.

Course outline

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

Works read in this course

• 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.

Terms introduced

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

Part of the Simposeum course library.