The End of Seduction:

A Few Words About Baudrillard's "Sex"

Caroline Bayard, Michael Kliffer & Daniel Simeoni
I fake so real I am beyond fake,
Some day you will ache like I ache.
Courtney Love, Doll Parts
In "The Destiny of the Sexes and the Decline of Sexual Illusion" Jean Baudrillard at
once mourns the loss of the shimmering artifices and alluring indeterminacies of the
seductive gaze, and condemns the emancipatory discourses of sexual identity which for
him amount finally to so much "leering" (Baudrillard's word loucher, bears the conno-
tations of ogling, squinting, and gawking). The depressing social scene that Baudrillard
observes in the wake of these changes in perspective are as lurid as any hyper-reality
that one could imagine. Gaping at each other across a gendered divide, Baudrillard sug-
ests, men and women consolidate their respective fantasies of power, knowledge and
identity, but only as a prelude to a further and more wide-reaching cultural and psycho-
logical disaster, here rather schematically described as "the commutation of sexual
polarities." The ensuing situation is profoundly counter-intuitive, not to say icono-
clastic, like so many of the social landscapes that now bear Baudrillard's name; it is
as if once the sexes get a hard look at each other, abandoning the suspense and the ten-
sion of the playfully seductive glances, they in effect hold each other hostage. Sexual
difference - which for Baudrillard is, properly speaking, the site of seductive gaming
and of illusions that are freed from any nostalgic comparison to a 'reality' - thereby
collapses into a field of indetermination where the subject positions designated "man"
and "woman" threaten to switch uncontrollably like an alternating current. In a strate-
gic move that remains extremely troublesome for many of his readers, Baudrillard
chooses to identify the chief assassin of seduction and the subsequent triumph of sexual
in-difference with something called "feminism." An old hand at decoding the stakes,
displacments, decoys, and deceits of seduction (let us not forget that his initial medita-
tion on the beguiling art, De la seduction, was written in the late 1970s), Baudrillard
has for years warned readers that the positive capacity of each sex to be the bearer of a
radical illusoriness had been irretrievably undermined by the politics and the episte-
mologies of sexual emancipation. For Baudrillard, "feminism" in particular subtly
reproduces certain humanistic and melioristic assumptions about sexual identity and
the subject, committed, as it is, to giving a voice to that subject's imagined "depths," or,
114 Jean Caroline Bayard, Michael Kliffer & Daniel Simeoni
in his words, to be bringing "out 'the real woman' (or the biological or psychological
being, conscious or unconscious, that she is supposed to be)." This "outing" of and
grounding in "sex," he contends, spells the end of its seductive illusions, or, to be more
precise, the end of its existence as seductive illusion; in the supposed name of truth and
freedom, subject positions instead harden to the point that they become interchange-
able, and consequently in-different to the difference that might otherwise keep their
radical illusoriness alive.
That Baudrillard continues to speak this way about sex, notwithstanding wholesale
shifts in his thinking about many other questions, puts to us just how important
"seduction" remains for him as a point of critical leverage on the postmodern condi-
tion. A world devoid of seduction and of the illusion of sexual differentiation is a world
in which "passion" has been evacuated from "the firmanent of concepts," as Baudril-
lard melancholically puts it. Baudrillard writes in an age that has seen the collapse
of utopian desires and the breaking of the greatest ideological icons; the commutation
of sexual difference is not unconnected to these declines, yet it is one about which
Baudrillard is tellingly regretful. It is perhaps worth noting that the single figure who is
perhaps most closely identified with postmodern iconoclam here flirts shamelessly with
making a fetishistic idol out of both "the sexes" and the "sovereign" power of "seduc-
tion" in whose thrall the chimera of the sexes is said to thrive. Hence the passion of his
lament for the end of seductive passion, a lament that it is difficult to read - not to
say unacceptable to a majority of feminist thinkers, several of whom have denounced
Baudrillard as naive at best, and violently sexist at worst.
Baudrillard suggests that sexual difference was reconceived by the bourgeois order of
nineteenth-century Europe as a juridical, political, and ideological construct designed to
ward off the strangeness of one sex vis-a-vis the other. Yet the same century nurtures
the greatest theorist of seduction in the unlikely form of Soren Kierkegaard, some of
whose quasi-autobiographical writings constitute, for Baudrillard, a reflection upon a
world of pure sexual gaming, a world that has given itself over to the "genius" of
appearances and to the interplay of seducer and seduced. But we know from the ironic
narrative of Kierkegaard's Either/Or (which is Baudrillard's pretext) that the scandalous
sexual enticements of this world are always already threatened with more banal possi-
bilities. If the first volume (including the infamous "Diary of a Seducer") affirms the
preternaturally postmodern social life that is composed of "guises and disguises," the
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second volume settles out that playfulness with its more sombre insistence on the sanc-
tity of marriage; seduction gives way to the orderliness and productivity of the bour-
geoisie. Baudrillard's point is that in the late twentieth century, seductive gaming has
met an analogously ignominious fate: "sexuality" has un-sexed, if you will, fragmented
into "all its scattered limbs ... its partial objects ... its fractal elements." Baudrillard's
point is that in the late twentieth century, seductive gaming has met an analogously
ignominious fate; "sexuality" has become un-sexed, if you will, scattered into "all its
scattered limbs ... its partial objects ... in its fractal elements." The substanceless and
attractive fantasies of "femininity" and "virility" - as fantasies - are evaporated, and
the play of the pure surfaces of a radically illusory "sexuality" is replaced by a leering
identity politics anchored in apparitions of essential depths that have forgotten them-
selves to be apparitions. In a typically hyperbolic way that can only have the most dis-
turbing resonances for Europeans, Baudrillard describes this catastrophe as la solution
finale [the final solution].
Baudrillard at no point believes in a "natural sexual difference" any more than he
upholds a "natural democratic sexuality;" the concept of an entitled difference (one
could say a politically founded difference) is summarily denounced as a "democratic
platitude," a reference that will not endear Baudrillard to thinkers and activists of
human rights. Yet his sensitivity both to the decline of the extreme figures of an entire
century's sexual mythology (condensed into the social and psychological form of
the hysteric, the femme fatale), and to the "virtual end of liberation" (the "orgy is
over," as he puts it), has other, more ominous consequences. As he pointedly argues in
his recently published Figures de l'alterite, when one erodes difference (whether cultural
or sexual), when one does not give oneself over to alterity and strangeness and seduis-
sance ["seducingness"], one risks inculcating the exclusionary violence whose most
tragic social expression in contemporary Europe is racism. Baudrillard's short essay on
"The Destiny of the Sexes" is perhaps most valuable for its suggestion that difference of
any kind can be eroded precisely when it seems most vociferously to be proclaimed, cel-
ebrated, and idolized. The demise of what might be called - with sufficient care - "the
racial illusion" is thus in some sense parallel to the decline of the sexual illusion that we
see described here, at least insofar as "race" and "sex" are equally vulnerable to the cul-
tural autism and faked altruism that Baudrillard irreverently associates with the politics
of identity, whether that identity is "Europe" or "woman."