13 On Seduction

Dear Andrew Walsh,

I’ve also written a Foreword for the English-language edition of my blog texts for you to translate, attached here. Please also write an Afterword on your own translations, including the problems you had (or didn’t have) with my language. We’ll have to wait a bit more for the dual-language edition and the reprinting of your questions, and my answers to them, concerning terms and problems of understanding the text. I don’t presently have the time in any case to read through this (rather intensive) correspondence.

I like the title “On Seduction” quite a lot. Likewise, I’d like to keep the doubly-broken, ironic motto of Baudrillard (“don’t be seduced!”), as well as Wittgenstein’s pronouncements on crisscross thinking.
Hopefully your own proofreading work will be finished soon and we can start with the publication—or rather, marketing—in short order.

R.U.

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Foreword

Time and again I have come back to the task of investigating my self, my entire life. With the eyes of a man, with the eyes of a woman, and through the lens of feminism. I’ve sought advice and wisdom from the philosophers of the past, and of the present. From this it’s become clear to me: I’m a Roman. Yes, in fact, even a Roman of the past. But still more: a Roman of the present, perhaps even of the future.

I write these lines, which should be about “seduction” (whatever that might mean), at the end of the age of love. For an age in which love in the romantic sense will die out, and even in marriage, to the extent that this institution can even still exist, will be dominated by terms such as “reason,” “planning,” “calculation,” and “breeding.” I don’t say “conditioning”, but rather “breeding”, and breeding in the sense of a technological, of a prenatal cloning.
Only lust hasn’t yet died out, for desire—desire for the sake of pleasure—seeks “eternity, deep, deep eternity,” as Nietzsche says.

I write these questioning words and sentences with wistfulness and nostalgia, as I am myself still a member of this dying breed, of a perhaps already long-dead age. Even if I imagine to be, or have been, a thinking person—for those do, in fact, still exist—a realist.
Yet the time of those past exemplars, as alluring and beautiful they may have been, tend eventually and inexorably towards their end.

Ostende/Belgium, November 16th, 2016