A mirror hangs on the opposite wall
she does not reflect on it
but the mirror reflects her
[size=80]Diary of the Seducer[/size]
The seducer’s strategm will be to merge with the mirror on the opposite wall in which the girl is reflected. She does not give it a thought, but the mirror is reflecting on her.
One should distrust the humility of mirrors. The humble servants of appearances, they can reflect only the objects that face them, without being able to conceal themselves. The whole world is grateful to them (except in death when, for this reason, one veils them); they are the watchdogs of appearance.
But their faithfulness is specious, for they are waiting for someone to catch himself in their reflection. One does not easily forget their sidelong gaze. They recognize you, andwhen they
surprise you when you least expect it, your time has come.
Such is the seducer’s strategy: he gives himself the humility of the mirror, but a skilful mirror, like Perseus’ shield, in which Medusa found herself petrified. The girl too is going to fall captive to the mirror that reflects and analyzes her’, without her knowledge.
[size=80]3. Soren Kierkegaard, Diary of the Seducer, appended to EitherlOr (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971) p. 311 .[/size]
He who does not know how to compass. a girl
about so that she loses sight of everything which
he does not wish her to see, he who does not
know how to poetize himself in a girl’s feeling so
that it is from her that everything issues as he wishes
it, he is and remains a bungler; I do not
begrudge him his enjoyment . A bungler he’is and
remains, a seducer, something one can by no means
call me. I am an aesthete, an eroticist, one who
has understood the nature and meaning of love,
who believes in love and knows it from the ground
up. . . I know, too, that the highest conceivable enjoyment
lies in being loved . . . To poetize oneself
into a young girl is an art, to poetize oneself out
of her is a masterpiece. [size=80](pp. 363-64)[/size]
Seduction is never linear, and does not wear a mask ([size=80]that is vulgar seduction[/size]) - it is oblique.
. .what weapon is so sharp, so penetrating, so, flashing
in action, and hence so deceptive, as the eye?
You feint a high quart, as fencers say, and attack
in second. . . The moment of the feint is indescribable.
The opponent, as it were, feels the slash, he
is touched! Aye, that is true, but in quite a different
place from where he thought. [size=80](p. 314)[/size]’
I do not meet her, I touch only the periphery of
her existence I prefer to arrive a little early and
then to meet her, if possible, at the door or’upon
the steps as she is coming and I am leaving, when
I pass her by indifferently. This is the first net in
which she must be entangled. I never stop her on
the street ; I may bow to her, but I never come; close
to her, but always keep my distance. Our continu
al encounters are certainly noticeable to her; she
does indeed perceive that a new body has appeared
on her horizon whose orbit in a strangely
imperturbable manner affects her own disturbingly,
but she has no conception of the law governing
this movement; she is rather inclined to look
about to see if she can discover the point controlling
it, but she is as ignorant of being herself this
focus as if she were a Chinaman. [size=80](pp. 336-37)[/size]
There is another type of indirect reverberation : hypnosis, a
sort of psychic mirror in which, once again, the girl is reflected
without her awareness, under someone else’s gaze:
Today my eyes have for the first time rested upon
her. Someone has said that sleep can make the eyelids
so heavy that they close of themselves; perhaps
my glance has a similar effect upon Cordelia . Here
eyes close, and yet an obscure force stirs within
her. She does not see that I am looking at her, she
feels it, feels it through her whole body. Her eyes
close, and it is night; but within her it is luminous
day. [size=80](pp. 360-61)[/size]
This obliquity of seduction is not duplicity. Where a linear movement knocks against the wall of consciousness and acquires only meager gains, seduction has the obliquity of a dream element or stroke of wit, and as such traverses the psychic universe and its different levels in a single diagonal, in order to touch, at the far end, the unknown blind spot, the secret that lies sealed, the enigma that constitutes the girl, even to herself.
Seduction has two simultaneous moments, or two instants of a single moment. Her entire character, all her feminine resources must be mobilized, and simultaneously suspended.
It is not a question of surprising her in the passivity of her innocence; her freedom of action must be in play. Because it is by this freedom, by its movement - and by the curves and sudden twists imparted to it by seduction - that she must, seemingly spontaneously, reach that point where, unbeknownst to herself, she will be lost. Seduction engages a fate; and in order for it to be realized, she must be completely free, but in her freedom . she must reach out, as if somnabulistically, towards her own fall . The girl must be :plunged into this second state which reduplicates the first, the state of grace and sovereignty.
And this second, somnambulistic state must be sustained, so that a passion, once awakened and intoxicated with itself, slips into the trap fate has set for it. "Her eyes close, and it is night, but within her it is luminous day."Omissions, denials, deflections, deceptions, diversions and humility - all aimed at provoking this second state, the secret of true seduction. Vulgar seduction might proceed by persistence, but true seduction proceeds by absence; or better it invents akind of curved space, where the signs are deflected from their trajectory and returned to their source . This state of suspense is essential: it is the moment of the girl’s disarray before what awaits her, even as she knows -and this is something new and already fatal - that something awaits her. A moment of high intensity, a “spiritual” moment ([size=80]in Kierkegaard’s sense[/size]), similar to that in games of chance between the throw and the moment when the dice stop rolling.
Thus the first time he hears her give out her address, he refuses to remember it :
I will not listen to it, for I do not wish to deprive
myself of surprise; I shall certainly meet her again
in life, I shall recognize her, and perhaps she will
recognize me. . . If she does not recognize me, if
her glance does not immediately convince me of
that, then I shall surely find an opportunity to look
at her from the side. I promise that she will remember
the situation. No impatience, no greediness,
everything should be enjoyed in leisurely draughts ;
she is marked out, she shall be run down. [size=80](p. 312)[/size]
The seducer is playing with himself. At this point it is not even a ruse, with the seducer being the one delighted at the seduction’s deferment. This, the pleasure of the approach, should not be slighted ; for it is in this interval that he begins to dig the pit into which she will fall. It is like fencing: one needs a field for the feint. Throughout this period, the seducer, far from seeking to close in on her, seeks to maintain his distance by various ploys : he does not speak directly to her but only to her aunt, and then about trivial or stupid subjects; he neutralizes everything by irony and feigned pedanticism; he fails to respond to any feminine or erotic movement, and even finds her a sitcom suitor to disenchant her of her love. To keep one’s distance, to put her off, to disenchant and deceive her, to the point where she herself takes the initiative and breaks off her engagement, thus completing the seduction and creating the ideal situation for her total abandon.
The seducer knows how to let the signs hang. He knows that they are favourable only when left suspended, and will move of themselves towards their appointed destiny. He does not use the signs up all at once, but waits for the moment when they will all respond, one after the other, creating an entirely unique
conjuncture of giddiness and collapse.
[i]When she is in the company of the three Jansens
she talks very little, their chatter evidently bores
her, and certainly the smile on her lips seems to
indicate it. I am relying on that smile.
Today I went to Mrs. Jansen’s. I half opened the
door without knocking. . . She sat alone at the piano.
. . I might have rushed in, seized the moment
- that would have been foolish. . …She is evidently
concealing the fact that she plays. . . When sometime
I can talk more confidentially with her, I shall
slyly lead her to this point and let her fall into the
trap.[/i] [size=80](pp. 338-9).[/size]
He has not reached the vulgar diversions, the bits of libertine bravura, the erotic whims (which will occupy an increasingly large part of the story, with Cordelia hardly ever appearing except beneath a lively, libertine imagination: “To love one alone is too little; to love them all suggests the lightness of a superficial character; but to love as many as possible. . . What pleasure!
What a life!”) He has not acceded to the frivolous seduction which is not part of the “grand game” of seduction, with its philosophy of obliquity and diversion. The “grand” seduction may make its way secretly along the same paths as vile seduction, but will play them as suspense or parody. Confusion is not possible: the one is a game of love, the other a spiritual duel. All the interludes only accentuate the slow, calculated, and inevitable rhythm of “high” seduction. The mirror still hangs on the opposite wall, even if we are no longer aware of it - and time in Cordelia’s heart is on the march.
The process seems to reach its lowest point with the~seducer’s betrothal. Here one has the impression of having attained a point of extreme numbness, where the seducer pushes the subterfuge of disenchantment or dissuasion to an almost perverse degree of mortification . And one has the impression that, as a result, Cordelia’s spirit is broken, her femininity run down, neutralized by the illusions that surround her. The moment of the engagement -which “has so much importance for a young girl that her entire soul can be fixed on it, like that of a dying man on his last will” - this moment, Cordelia will live without understanding, deprived of every reaction, muzzled, circumvented.
One word, and she would have laughed at me, one
word, and she would have been moved, one word,
and she would have fled from me; but no word
crossed my lips, I remained stolidly serious, and
kept exactly to the ritual . As regards my engagement,
I do not boast that it is poetic, it is in every
way philistine and bourgeois. So now I 'am engaged;
so is Cordelia (so is Cordelia!) and that is
all she knows about the whole matter. (pp. 370-71)
It is all a kind of ordeal, as found in initiation rites. The initiated must pass through a phase that marks his.or her death, not as pathetic suffering, but as nothingness, as emptiness - the final moment before the passion’s illumination and the erotic abandon. In a sense, the seducer adds an ascetic moment to the aesthetic movement he imparts to the whole.
Generally I can assure any girl who entrusts herself
to me a perfect aesthetic conduct: only it ends
with her being deceived . . . [size=80](p. 375)[/size]
There is a sort of humour in the fact that the engagement coincides with the apparent disappearance of all that was atstake in the seduction. What in the bourgeois vision of the
nineteenth century constitutes a joyous prelude to marriage, is here an austere initiation into the sublime ends of passion (which are, simultaneously, the calculated ends of seduction) by the somnabulist passage across the deserts of betrothal.
(Don’t forget that the engagement was a crucial moment in the life of many a romantic, including Kierkegaard, but also and more dramatically ofKleist, Holderlin, Novalis and Kafka. A painful moment of seemingly endless frustration, the almost mystical passion sustained by the engagement was perhaps (let us drop all talk of sexual impotence!) a matter of suspension, of a suspended enchantment, haunted by the fear of sexual or matrimonial disenchantment.)
However, Johannes continues to live the invisible dance of seduction, even as his objective and its presence appear to have faded. Indeed, he will never live it more intensely, for it is here, in the nullity, in the absence, in the mirror’s face that its triumph is assured: she cannot but break off her former engagement and throw herself into his arms. All the fire of her passion lies revealed, just beneath the surface, in its transparence. He will never again find it as beautiful as in this premonition, for at this moment the girl still remains predestined - which will no longer be the case once this moment is over.
Nowthe giddiness ofseduction, as of every passion, lies above all with its predestination. The latter alone provides that fatal quality at the basis of all pleasure - that stroke of wit, as it were, which ties, as if in advance, a movement of the soul to its destiny and its death. Here lies the seducer’s triumph. And here, in the invisible dance of the betrothal, one is able to see his knowledge of seduction, of true seduction, as a spiritual economy.
My relation to her is that of an unseen partner in
a dance which is danced by. only one, when it
should really be danced by two. She moves as in
a dream, and yet she dances with another, and this
other is myself, who, in so far as I am visibly
present, am invisible, in so far I am invisible, am
visible. Themovements ofthe dance require a partner,
she bows to him, she takes his hand, she flees,
she draws near him again. I take her hand, I complete
her thought as if it were completed’in herself.
She moves to the inner melody of her own
soul; I am only the occasion for her movement.
Iam not amorous, that would only awaken her;
I am easy, yielding, impersonal, almost like a
mood. [size=80](p. 376) .[/size]
Thus seduction is presented in a single movement as:
- a conspiracy of power : a sacrificial form.
- a murder and, ultimately, a perfect crime.
- a work of art: “Seduction considered as one of the Beaux-Arts” (like murder, to be sure).
- a stroke of wit or flash of inspiration: a “spiritual” economy.
With the same duel complity as a stroke of wit, here everything is exchanged allusively, without being spelled out, the equivalent of the allusive, ceremonial exchange, of a secret .
- an ascetic form of a spiritual, but also pedagogical ordeal:
a sort of school of passion, a simultaneously erotic and ironic maieutics.
I shall always acknowledge that a young girl is a
born teacher, from whore one can always learn,
if nothing else, how to deceive her - for one only
learns this best from the girls themselves. . . size=80[/size]
Every young girl is, in relation to the labryinth of
her heart, an Ariadne; she holds the thread by
which one finds his way through it, but she has
it, without herself knowing how to use it . [size=80](p. 396)[/size]
- a form of duel or war, an agonal form. It never takes the form of violence or a relation of force, but of a war game. In it one discovers the two simultaneous movements of seduction, as
found in every strategy:
So now the first war with Cordelia begins, in which
I flee, and thereby teach her to triumph in pursuing
me. I constantly retreat before her, and in this
retreat, I teach her through myself to know all the
power of love, its unquiet thoughts, its passion,
what longing is, and hope, and impatient expectation.
. . She will gain courage to believe in love. . .
She must never suspect that she owes this freedom
to me. . . When she at last feels free, so free that she
is almost tempted to break with me, then the second
war begins. Now she has power andpassion,
and the struggle becomes worthwhile to me.
Let her forsake me, the second war is just beginning.
. . Thefirst war was a war of liberation, it was
only a game ; the second is a war of conquest, it
is for life and death. [size=80](pp. 379-80)[/size]
The stakes are all organized around the girl as mythical figure.
Both adversary and objective in this many-sided duel, she is, therefore, neither a sex object nor afigure of the Eternal Feminine
- the two great, Western references to woman are equally foreign to seduction. And there is no more an ideal victim or ideal subject (the girl and her seducer respectively), than there is an executioner and victim in a sacrifice. The fascination she exercises is that of a mythical figure, an enigmatic partner, a protagonist equal to the seducer in this almost liturgical realm of challenge and duel.
[size=80]Seduction[/size]
