Sunday, October 16, 2005
(10:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Utilitarian Badiouianism
From Little Girl: A Magazine of Tactical Thinking, an article on seduction (link via Political Theory, though Jared Woodard also linked this magazine a while back):If Alain Badiou argues that the process of a truth always implies a “complex mixture of theory and practice,” the goal of this essay will be to find the nugget of such a possible truth in how-tos of seduction. My contention is that these accounts contain the seeds of what Little Girl refers to as a ‘tactical philosophy’: tactical because their goal is not the mere description of a state of affairs, but the delineation of a concrete set of principles by which a change can be produced in a material process; but philosophical in that they will bear upon, and therefore tell us something about, certain theoretical assumptions—in the case of sexual seduction, assumptions about the composition of the desiring subject. My goal will be making explicit the circuit between these two aspects.Now I resent the fact that my first exposure to philosophy was through the body-hating Plato and the syphilitic misogynist Nietzsche.
I will proceed in three steps:
First, I will develop an analysis of Kierkegaard’s narrative The Seducer’s Diary. My interest in this text will be the way that, on the one hand, it sets up a set of ‘tactical’ directives for the seducer, offering itself as a sort of 19th century Don Juan meets Dale Carnegie, while, on the other hand, rendering explicit the relationship of these directives to a philosophical structure, specifically Hegel’s account of Self-Consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
Second, my investigation will involve setting Kierkegaard’s theory of seduction alongside a contemporary article from the men’s magazine Maxim, “Take Her Home… Guaranteed.” 1 My thesis will ultimately be that Maxim presents something like an abstracted and distilled version of Kierkegaard’s theory of seduction, the adventure of the seducer’s labor boiled down to a pre-calculated form of knowledge. Understanding the philosophical presuppositions of “Take Her Home… Guaranteed” will therefore throw light on the nature of the contemporary “sexual fix.” 1
Third, passing through this analysis, in my conclusion I will be able to show how the relation established between these three reference points—Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Maxim—allows for an ethical appropriation of the concept of seduction. Here, a reflection upon Alain Badiou’s theory of the double temporality of truth will allow us to understand the way that the contemporary regime of seduction offers the key to understanding the deadlocks that love faces today. Traversing the manipulations of seduction, the goal will be to arrive at love.
UPDATE: Read Jodi Dean's interpretation of A History of Violence, the best movie of 2005.
