Seduction, the feminine, and reversibility: is *Seduction* a misogynist celebration of women-as-non-truth, or the precise statement of reversibility as the symbolic principle that exceeds the production-paradigm?

Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Seduction is the symbolic strategy of reversibility — the principle by which appearance overtakes depth, the duel overtakes the contract, the play of signs overtakes the production of meaning.1 It is not a strategy among others; it is the form of the symbolic that the production-paradigm of Western metaphysics has constitutively excluded. The feminine, in the precise sense the book develops, is not the biological category woman but the principle of reversibility — the position that operates by appearance, that does not constitute itself as a depth to be discovered, that wins by losing in the regime of truth.

Women are not seduction's object and not its incidental practitioners; they have been, historically, its principal strategists, and the regime of truth that productivism imposes on sexuality (the production of pleasure as labor, the truth-of-sex as the secret to be extracted from the body, the contractual model of consent as the political form of sexuality) is what feminism has too often accepted as the ground from which to demand justice.2

The book is not a celebration of women's non-truth and not a denigration of women's politics; it is a statement of the symbolic principle that has been historically more available to women than to men, and the polemic with feminism is the polemic against the strands of feminism that have ceded the symbolic to the production-paradigm in exchange for political recognition within it.345

Sources

  1. It was a matter of liberating energy - the archetypal model of which was material energy - a model in absolute contradiction to the great game of seduction which, for its part, is not accumulative in nature. Seduction is not so much a play on desire as a playing with desire. It does not deny it, nor is it its opposite, but it sets it in play.
    Passwords, pp. 23–24
  2. Whereas in fascination there is no longer any need for signs to pass. Signs are recorded, but no more. Hence it is not seductive. There's no adventure or challenge. It's really the inverse. There's no doubt. SM With reference to seduction.... In a footnote in Oublier Foucault you depicted the history of the feminine as the seduction of man.
    Baudrillard Live - Selected Interviews, p. 86
  3. A universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of structures and diacritical oppositions, but implies a seductive reversibility - a universe where the feminine is not what opposes the masculine, but what seduces the masculine. In seduction the feminine is neither a marked nor an unmarked term.
    Seduction, pp. 13–14
  4. One can hypothesize that the feminine is the only sex, and that the masculine only exists by a superhuman effort to leave it. Amoment's distraction, and one falls back into'the feminine. The feminine would have a decisive advantage, the masculine a definite handicap.
    Seduction, pp. 22–23
  5. In other words, interaction is impossible and there is no 'game', for if there was, if the categories of the subject could still be exchanged with those of the object, or if the object was made into a supersubject, a hypersubject, we would still be dealing with traditional metaphysics... AB But then again, aren't we simply dealing with an inversion of metaphysics? I hope not.
    The Disappearance of Culture - Uncollected Interviews, pp. 281–282

Where the argument is made

  • Seduction (1979) — the entire book, especially the chapters on the strategy of reversibility, the feminine as principle, the duel against the contract, and the response to feminist objections
  • Forget Foucault (1977) — the polemic against the productivist categories Foucault imported
  • Cool Memories I (1980-1985) and II (1987-1990) for the diaristic-aphoristic register on these themes
  • Fatal Strategies (1983) — reversibility as the formal principle by which the object overtakes the subject
  • the late Cool Memories III-V (1990-2006) for late reflections

How the argument was received

Seduction (1979) was the most-attacked book in the authorship through the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the Anglophone feminist reception. The misogyny charge — that the book celebrates women as non-truth, denigrates feminist politics, identifies the feminine with appearance in a manoeuvre that confirms patriarchal stereotypes — is the standard reception, and the rhetorical register of the book gave the charge surface plausibility. Gane's defense in Baudrillard's Bestiary (1991) is the canonical sympathetic counter-reading: seduction names reversibility as principle, the feminine names the principle's historical bearer rather than the biological category, and the polemic with feminism is internal to feminism in the sense that it argues for the symbolic dimension feminism has too often abandoned to the productivist regime of recognition. The contested ground is whether the rhetoric of the book serves the principle or betrays it. The position is the principle.