Capitalisme, production, séduction - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

François L’Yvonnet, philosopher Françoise Gaillard, philosopher Samuel Lacroix, journalist lectures followed by a conversation

François L'Yvonnet

Seduction versus production: the bias of appearances

Baudrillard contrasts “sé-duction” with “pro-duction.” They belong to two irreconcilable logics.

In production, the prevailing ideal is the mastery of things through work, according to a purposeful, irreversible and unlimited process (production, as the materialization of a force, is always a headlong rush). Man would thus be predestined to objectively transform the world, to bring value into being through his work. Moreover, there is the idea of self-production: the worker would be destined, in an old humanist refrain, to produce himself through and within work.

Seduction is a “diversion”: it means diverting things in order to open them up to the play of appearances. Seduction plunges us into the universe of symbolic exchange, characterized by reversibility: gift and counter-gift, potlatch, challenge, reversal, turning the tables.

With seduction, we enter the world of appearances, forms, illusion and play. Seduction is a fatal game in which everyone puts their identity at stake. To seduce the enigmatic young woman, Kierkegaard said, one must become an enigma to her. An enigmatic duel.

Françoise Gaillard

Playing, not taking pleasure

Seduction is a total social fact rooted in our mental, historical and religious frameworks. It belongs to the realms of play, challenge and escalation, and is its own end—something Johannes, the hero of The Seducer’s Diary, understood very well, and which Jean Baudrillard sums up in a pithy formula: “playing, not taking pleasure.”

In doing so, it opposes what lies at the heart of rationalism in modern society: truth, meaning and purpose. That is what makes it dangerous. Does it not threaten everything that serves as our reality principle, beginning with production?

What if it offered us another economy, another kind of exchange...

Samuel Lacroix

Seduce and give pleasure. How capitalism made itself likable

“Subway, work, libido,” “pleasure destination,” “to each their own impulses.” In recent years, we have seen messages of this kind proliferate on billboards in prominent public places. Whether promoting dating apps, platforms delivering condoms within minutes or sex-toy brands, these advertisements have in common that they do not merely use a sexual register or imagery (a scantily dressed woman selling a car, for example), but directly promote sex.

This may be seen as one of the latest indications of a change in the nature of capitalism, which has gradually moved from a repressive stage to a permissive one. In contrast to an “old-school capitalism” inherited from the Industrial Revolution, based on effort, austerity and prudishness, and championed by a conservative right, contemporary capitalism has increasingly taken on a “cool” and libidinal character, in which a progressive and feminist left can recognize itself. How did we get here? Alongside the great thinker of seduction, Jean Baudrillard, these are themes anticipated by certain socialist thinkers—Marx above all—but also, more recently, by philosophers such as Michel Clouscard, author of the aptly named Capitalisme de la séduction.