The person who will be entranced by this book will be the natural seducer, one who takes simple pleasure in pleasure and treats life like a game. It is a very unromantic book by conventional and Anglo-Saxon standards but it is not reductionist about sex.
One’s reaction to this book will come down to aesthetics and to anxiety. It is chess played by bodies in time and space. There is no game if the other is not a free and equal participant. We are talking here about a flow of power and desire between moral equals. Every chapter has well chosen illustrative examples from literature and history.Īlthough he does not preclude rational love between consenting adults by any means, there is enough evidence here of eternal truths about sexual relations which apply to male and female alike (albeit with different ‘modes’) and in homosexual liaisons as well. Greene is master of the historical anecdote. The book is also pleasurable for entirely different reasons. What he is showing us is something closer to a dance or a ritual (think of the tango perhaps) which obeys rules derived from a deeper level of shared or unconscious desires and fears and where, while the sexual element is central, it is the process that matters. Offering something far more sophisticated than Strauss’ manuals for adolescent losers and the sexually autistic, Greene is not interested in seduction as a mechanical application of rules for sex. It is about the flow of power between sexually alive people and no means to be compared with the ‘game’ genre of Neil Strauss and others even if Strauss (now a ‘reformed character’) once recommended the book to his ‘seduction community’. For better or worse (depending on your stance), Greene is persuasive that seduction is a game between equal partners where the ‘victim’ is willing enough because of what they will get out of the process. Unfortunately for those determined to be ‘nice’ in the world, there is scarcely a line in this book that does not ring true. Almost hypnotically repetitively at times, The Art of Seduction might be the book that Machiavelli could have written about love if he had been a jaded modern. These two books have to be taken together because they represent a world view that is fiercesomely realistic about human motivation at its most raw.
Book Review #3 - ‘The Art of Seduction’(2001) and ‘The Concise 48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene (2002)
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