Starting with modernity, we have entered an era of production of the Other. It is no longer a question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him, of competing with him, of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter of producing the Other. The Other is no longer an object of passion but an object of production.
Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness alterite, or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable. And so, we have to conjure up his seduction. Or perhaps, more simply, otherness and dual relationships gradually disappear with the rise of individual values and with the destruction of the symbolic ones. In any case, otherness alterite is lacking and, since we cannot experience otherness as destiny, one must produce the other as difference.
And this is a concern just as much for the body as it is for sex, or for social relationships. In order to escape the world as destiny, the body as destiny, sex (and the other sex) as destiny, the production of the other as difference is invented. This is what happens with sexual difference. Each sex has its own anatomical and psychological characteristics, its own desire with all the insoluble events that emerge from that, including an ideology of sex and desire, and a utopia of sexual difference based on law and nature.
None of this has any meaning sens whatsoever in seduction where it is not a question of desire but of a play jeu with desire, and where it is not a question of equality between different sexes or of an alienation of one by the other since this play jeu implies a perfect reciprocity of each partner (not difference or alienation, but alterity/otherness alterite or complicity). Seduction is nothing less than hysterical, since no sex projects its sexuality onto the other. Distances are set. And otherness alterite is left untouched. This is the very condition of this greater illusion, of this play with desire.
What is produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness. During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men that is projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of likeness ressemblance. Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman’s heart, or about seducing her. It is rather a matter of creating her from inside de l’interieur, of inventing her, either as a realized utopia (an idealized woman), or as a “femme fatale”, a star, which is yet another hysterical and supernatural metaphor.
This is the entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has invented such an ideal harmony, such a love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin beings (woman as a projected resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural shape only as an ideal of the same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say destined to a pathos of ideal likeness ressemblance of beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion that replaces the dual otherness alterite of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes meaning/direction sens because the erotic attraction that once came from otherness alterite, from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side of the Same, to the side of similarity and likeness ressemblance. Auto-eroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that invests and alienates himself in the other. But the other is never more than the ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I me rapproche de moi.
It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-products, sexuality draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is getting closer to incest and to its own destiny, even if it is banalized (for it is no longer a .
