
"Probably the most influential contemporary media analyst and social theorist."
-New Statesman
"...for Baudrillard, is not seduction a new figure of our freedom?"
-L'Express
"It is as though some dreadful sliver of ice had lodged in the eye of the American avant-garde... Both the despair and the airy certainty reflect, in part, the enormous recent influence of a single thinker... the French theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard."
-The New Yorker
"Seduction is a theory-fiction which resembles nothing which has preceded it. It turns contemporary discourses inside out, even the most radical, and could very well challenge all modem theory, even indeed, the rules of theoretical production itself."
-Libération
Seduction is Jean Baudrillard's most provocative book. Here, under the sign of seduction all modern theory is put into question. Seduction speaks of the sudden reversibility in the order of things where discourse is absorbed into its own signs without a trace of meaning. In the sudden triumph of seduction in apocalyptic culture there is also signaled the end of history. As Baudrillard says, "Nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it."
| I. THE ECLIPTIC OF SEX |
| The Ecliptic of Sex |
| The Eternal Irony of the Community |
| Stereo-Porno |
| Seduction/Production |
| II. SUPERFICIAL ABYSS |
| The Sacred Horizon of Appearances |
| Trompe l'oeil or Enchanted Simulation |
| I'll Be Your Mirror |
| Death in Samarkand |
| The Secret and the Challenge |
| The Effigy of the Seductress |
| The Irony Strategy of the Seducer |
| The Fear of Being Seduced |
| III. THE POLITICAL DESTINY OF SEDUCTION |
| The Passion for Rules |
| The Dual, the Polar and the Digital |
| The "Ludic" and Cold Seduction |
| Seduction as Destiny |