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By Root 953 0

game of being signs. The meaning of the signs is reserved, withheld for the sake of the immediate and endless play of the feedback loop of the game. As with cosmetics, seduction keeps play alive by abdicating its meaning to concealment and secrecy, creating a series of appearances and disappearances that efface the traditional subject-object relationship. Baudrillard calls this moment aleatory suspension, for seduction exists in the frozen, thrilling, pregnant moment between the throw of the dice and their landing, where everything is anticipation, hope, and faith, even though the game is bound only to arbitrary chance.

I Follow to the Edge of the Earth and Fall Off

The relation of seduction has required that we forsake our interpretation of the signs for the sake of the game. Enchanted sex is no longer about the orgasm, or even intercourse, but the play of the seductive relationship. The abyss before us now is not one of depth or meaning but of appearance and aleatory suspension, for seduction enchants us in the world of immediacy, not the world of meaning. Baudrillard calls this critical shift toward the aesthetic the superficial abyss. This transformation of meaning into appearance is our hope for a re-enchanted sex.

But what is a superficial abyss, beyond a contradiction? Consider it analogous to a mirror pointed at the sky. The mirror’s reflection of the sky reflects the appearance of infinity, doubling the endless span and countless stars in the heavens, and yet it has no depth its own. It transforms the truth of the sky into pure appearance. Seduction has the power to work the same magic on sex as the mirror with the sky. This is seduction’s transformative power over truth. We choose the sign over the object and the arbitrary over the meaningful for the sake of enchantment and endless play.

Your Eyes, They Turn Me

Baudrillard’s example of this transformation is Narcissus. Narcissus is typically painted as a character too deeply in love with himself and his own image, but Baudrillard thinks that this explanation is too psychological. He contends that Narcissus was seduced by a version of himself that was appearance-only, not his attractive reflection. Narcissus was called into the water by the prospect of becoming a mere sign.

But this echoes the warning suggested by the parable of “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi,” as the narrator is seduced in the depths by the dangling bright light of an anglerfish, mistaken for eyes. On the bottom of the ocean, seduction is leading the narrator off the edge of the earth. They sink deeper and deeper, until the narrator can no longer take the risk implicit in the seduction and escapes, leaving the game. As we find with Narcissus, the risk of seduction is simultaneously the risk of death.

Of course, this might not be particularly shocking news considering that seduction has already required us to rebel against the Enlightenment and transform meaning and truth into arbitrary signs. But the possibility of death always raises the stakes of a game, and it’s no different here. If seduction is going to re-enchant sex, it must transform every sign, even death itself, into superficialities in an even greater deception.

I Am in the Middle of Your Picture

So what we need is a greater deception. Borrowing a term from the world of visual art, Baudrillard employs the trompe l’oeil (“trick the eye”) as deception’s sublime face. Whereas pornography was the truer-than-true, the trompe l’oeil is falser-than-false; whereas pornography was hyperreal, the trompe l’oeil is hypersimulation. Stemming from a long tradition throughout the history of visual art, and reified in the Baroque period, trompe l’oeil uses tricks of perspective in two dimensions to create optical illusions of a third.

Yet, crucially, trompe l’oeil does not intend to confuse itself with the real, but rather presents itself as a challenge to the real by an enchanted deception, just as seduction challenges Enlightenment sexuality. Unlike other visual techniques in art such as chiaroscuro, which uses the interplay of