„Fatalitatea obiectului” și circuitul simbolic al seducției
“The Fatality of the Object” and the Symbolic Circuit of Seduction

Summary/Abstract: Criticizing the ideology of the consumer society, Jean Baudrillard analysed in 'De la séduction' (1979) the omnipresence of seduction in the contemporary world; a phenomenon hat always creates new (unjustified) needs for consumers and, in this sense, he observed how the object (which seduces, provokes, and regulates the desire of the individual) is, paradoxically, substituted for the subject. Regarding this problem, in the critique of production and utility in the name of seduction as outlined in the book 'Les stratégies fatales' (1983), Baudrillard considered that the distinction between a “banal theory” and a “fatal theory” consisted in the fact that “in one the subject always believes himself to be more cunning than the object, while in the other, the object is always supposed to be more cunning, more cynical, more brilliant than the subject”. Baudrillard also denounces “a principle of Evil, not as a mystical and transcendent instance, but as concealment of the symbolic order”. The wilful concealment of the symbolic and of the order that this dimension establishes on a historical scale is symptomatic and serious, and this happens all the more because of malevolent camouflage, by which the objects impose their seduction as an illusory effect “that recreates in us the disturbance original”, thus promoting a fascinating fatal strategy among the many of contemporary world, namely, the one in which deep emotion is reduced to a superficial “communication” with objects. Thus, for the postmodern ethos, centred on the object which is engaged in a symbolic circuit of seduction, the symbol can become, from the moment when the reference to a higher instance is ignored, just a game with life and knowledge, either “gratuitous”, as in the case of art, or “pragmatic”, as in the case of certain social “symbolic exchanges”. These aspects are approached in 'Les strategies fatales', 'L’échange symbolique et la mort' (1976) or 'Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe' (1972).

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