The Pear

"To seduce is to die as reality and to reshape oneself as illusion. It is to be taken in by one's own illusion, and to move in an enchanted world. It is the power of the seductive woman who delights in the deception in which others will come to get caught. Narcissus, too, loses himself in his own illusory image. That is why he turns from his truth, and by his example turns others from their truth - and so becomes a model of love.

The irony of artificial practices: the peculiar ability of the painted woman or prostitute to exaggerate her features, to turn them into more than a sign, and by this usage, not of the false as opposed to the true, but of the more false than the false, to incarnate the peaks of sexuality while simultaneously being absorbed in their simulation. The irony proper to the constitution of woman as idol and sex object: in her closed perfection, she puts an end to sex play and refers man, the lord and master of sexual reality, to his transparency as an imaginary subject. The ironic power of the object, then, which she loses when promoted to the status of a subject.

What does the women's movement oppose to the phallocratic structures? Autonomy, difference, a specificity of desire and pleasure, an altered relation to the body, a speech, a writing - but never seduction. They are ashamed of seduction, as if it implies a life of vassalage and prostitution. They do not understand that seduction means mastery over the symbolic universe, while power only means mastery over the real universe. And there is a fierce complicity between the feminist movement and the order of truth. For seduction is resisted and rejected as a misappropriation of women's "true" being - a truth that, in the last instance, is to be found inscribed in their bodies and their desires. In one stroke, the immense privilege of the feminine is effaced: the privilege of never having acceded to truth or meaning, and of having remained absolute master over the realm of appearances.

Woman is but appearances; and it is the feminine as appearance which thwarts masculine depth. Instead of rising up against such "insulting" counsel, women would do well to let themselves be seduced by its truth, for here lies the secret to their strength.

The capacity of seduction to deny things their reality and to turn everything into a game, into the pure play of appearances - and thereby to foil all systems of power and meaning with a simple sleight of hand. The ability to turn appearances in on themselves - to play on the body's appearances rather than with some hidden depth of desire. Now all appearances are reversible; only at the level of appearances are systems fragile and vulnerable. Meaning is vulnerable only to enchantment. One must be incredibly blind to deny the sole force that is equal to and superior to all others, since with a simple twist of appearances, seduction turns everything upside down.

If production can produce only real objects or signs and can thereby obtain some power, then seduction, by producing only illusions, obtains all powers - including the power to return production and reality to their fundamental illusion.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex, and it commands the higher price."

- Jean Baudrillard, Seduction