Zlata Mechetina
1. Idleness Opening the Door for the Lover in Romance of the Rose, about 1405, unknown illuminator, made in Paris.
El classico, Giacomo Casanova, Steve McQueen, Hugh Hefner: the seducer, often depicted as male, employs deception to triumph over their invariably female victim, who ultimately succumbs only to regret. However, currently we are at the stage of the sexual revolution when seduction in its classical sense expands from being just about sex – it is more about discursive movements from sign to sign, from nothing to meanings, from performance to embodiment. Seduction now refuses grand stories in favour of very micro meta-narratives.
2. Arshile Gorky. “Diary of a Seducer”. 1945
Purely physical seduction, with the subtext of “having” simply for the fact of acquisition, makes capitalism’s power stronger – as it is a stimulative interaction within its exchange logic. In contrast, more theoretical and non-productive seduction performed purely ‘for the plot’ brings something else to the table.
3. “My dick has taken me places I wouldn't go with a gun”
It is half-a-gesture, somewhat idle, soaked in laziness to partake in truly ‘productive’ actions of making ‘healthy’ or sustainable relationships, instead going for a free play of forms-of-life. It requires a room to think and, most importantly, to dream and form independent desires, because otherwise they fall into computer-mediated tunnels with already formed and pre-directed desires.
4. Joan of Arc, Jules Bastien-Lepage French 1879.
Guilt ridden, and that's why it's so exciting! In the words of Baudrillard: “for religion, seduction is always a strategy for the devil, whether in the disguise of love or witchcraft.” This uneasiness that accompanies the act of making somebody lose their way makes sense within the Protestant Catholic background of capitalism. You are either a good Christian that participates in the productive ethos of capital or a bad Christian that dares to lose money.
5. Vera and Vadimir Nabokov playing chess
In this narrative, the seducer emerges not as a villain but as an ‘autonomous individual’ shedding the impositions of societal norms, religious constraints, and cultural taboos. This individual is autonomous in the way he or she is able to liquify the existing norms, pass through and rework them, without falling into obvious opposition. Autonomy, here, is understood as the ability to speculate and rethink the political imaginary through personal invasive methods of micro-narratives and everyday acts rather than the grand nature of what is evil and not. Speculative actions and animal movement.
Reading list
Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New York: St. Martin’s Pr., 2007.
Bennett, David. Psychoanalysis, money and the global financial crisis. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2011.
Chukhrov, Keti. Practising the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York, NY: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2017.
Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Los Angeles (CA.): Semiotexte, 2010. Preliminary materials for a theory of the Young-Girl. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012.
Vilisov, Viktor. Post-Love: future of human intimacies. Moscow: AST. 2022
Žižek, Slavoj. Disparities. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.