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Quote by Amit Kalantri

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Wealth of Words

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Amit Kalantri

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“Seduction is the direct and murderous irradiation of the object, the end of metaphor, the strategy of an enchanted world, the triumphant resurrection of an illusion which puts an end to the dialectical swoonings of sense and the all too naïve ruses of history. If you wish to speak of fiction, the text must obliterate all reference. If you are speaking of simulation, the text must scoff at meaning, while at the same time being completely true. If you are speaking of seduction, language has to pervert something or other in elliptical ways. Otherwise, what would language be there for? Language is a woman: it seduces you by metamorphosing into what it says. It is a woman also in that it will never stop taking its revenge if it does not succeed in seducing you. It will avenge itself by saying only what you make it say, like a woman who only satisfies what you ask of her.”

“She can jettison her existence, her plans and her passions at a single stroke. She is only committed to reality through a secret electoral pact, by which she will stand down if she is losing. She never assumes responsibility for her existence, which allows her to wipe out at a stroke and to slide, like a good hysteric, towards another life. A strange life, spun out entirely towards a goal of transaction. Let a man ask her to give it up, to sacrifice the whole of it, and it all ceases to exist. The Epeda Multispire mattress. Everyone can have their own night, their own sleep thanks to the 3,600 spiral springs which guarantee everyone complete autonomy. The ideal mattress. You can make love to someone on it without them even noticing. As the automaton of his own pleasure, each person’s experience of their sexuality is like their experience of a night on a Multispire mattress. It isn’t even loneliness, since there is someone else there. It’s more something of the order of the independent lunar module. Tristan and Isode each dreaming to themselves, on either side of their sexual console. That seduction is the seduction of the uterine Mother and that all attraction merely masks the attraction of the primal abyss are platonic ideas. The cavity of the womb has taken over from the Cave in the Realm of Ideas. Once again, the real woman, her anatomy, serves as a sacred referent for a platonic ideology. The vertigo of seduction is here vulgarly phantasized into the hollow of a woman’s womb. This is to move from the most subtle game to the most profound—and hence the most stupid—phantasm.”

“It may not be right,” Aalea said. “It may not be just. But this is a world of senators and consuls and Luminatii—of republics and cults and institutions built and maintained almost entirely by men. And in it, love is a weapon. Sex is a weapon. Your eyes? Your body? Your smile?” She shrugged. “Weapons. And they give you more power than a thousand swords. Open more gates than a thousand war walkers. Love has toppled kings, Mia. Ended empires. Even broken our poor, sunsburned sky.”

“Each of us lives by setting traps for the other. The one and the other live in an endless affinity, an affinity which endures until prostration decides the issue. Everyone wants their other. Everyone has an imperious need to put the other at their mercy, along with a heady urge to make the other last as long as possible so as to savour him. The opposing logics of the lie and the truth unite in a dance of death which is nothing but pure delight at the other's demise. For desire for the other is always also the desire to put an end to the other (albeit, perhaps, at the latest possible moment?). The only question is which one will hold out the longest, occupying the space, the speech, the silence, the very inner world of the other - who is dispossessed of himself at the very moment when he becomes one in his difference. Not that one kills the other: the adversary is simply harassed into desiring, into willingly acceding to his own symbolic death ... The world is a perfectly functioning trap. An otherness, a foreignness, that is ultimately unintelligible - such is the secret of the form, and the singularity, of the emergence of the other.”