Seduction is a highly elusive concept in Baudrillard which won’t be elucidated here but attempted to be dealt with in it’s implied relationship to chance/contingency and necessity. I am not reducing the logic of this concept to those of chance and necessity, however, I wish to contextualise the concept of seduction and work with it’s logic through certain allegiances to a conception of chance and necessity. To do this I will be specifically dealing with Baudrillard’s short analysis of the fable, ‘Death in Samarkand’, not in his literary terms but logistic.
In the story a soldier sees Death at the marketplace and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. The soldier goes to the King and asks for his best horse to flee from Death, as far as Samarkand. The King then summons Death and reproaches him for scaring his best soldier but Death astonished replies, “I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just a surprise to see the soldier here when we had a rendezvous tomorrow in Samarkand”. Baudrillard suggests to read this seductively is to concede the soldiers rendezvous with Death is not a textual necessity for the story to begin and end. There is no guarantee the soldier would be in Samarkand the next day if it wasn’t for the ‘chance encounter’ he had with Death in the market. Death was already certain the soldier was coming to Samarkand tomorrow before seeing him in the market as Death has no other choice but to be there tomorrow, hence choosing to innocently wave at the soldier. The soldier however, freely decided to interpret this sign as signalling a fate that wasn’t written yet because Death was always already going to be in Samarkand, despite Death gesturing the opposite. Thus, who’s to say the soldier was to arrive tomorrow at Samarkand and Death was right to be astonished?
The soldier’s death is not the necessary end or truth of the text because the chance encounter in the market necessitated Deaths rendezvous as an effect. The textual condition for the rendezvous was an arbitrary sign, Death didn’t know seeing the soldier in the market meant seeing him tomorrow (despite thinking otherwise) and the soldier didn’t know Death was going to see him tomorrow because he planned to not see Death. By arbitrary we mean that there was no reason for the two to meet in the market to begin with, there is insufficient textual reasoning as to how that happened. Deaths rendezvous is contingent on the event of the two meeting at the market as it necessitated the rendezvous, even though the rendezvous comes after and the market comes before. We should really say the rendezvous came first and they met in the market after, we not knowing what comes next because we cant be sure how they met before reading; it is undeniable the chance encounter caused the rendezvous to happen. Has Death met the soldier before? Was the soldier reminded that he needed to be in Samarkand tomorrow to give something to Death which Death could not be without, having to flee today and arrive tomorrow before Death leaves?
Baudrillard conceives chance itself (becomes) a necessity by chance, necessitated by chance is always chance itself. Chance has no necessity except for another chance that is a necessity for the first chance to have occurred, thus the first chance was merely a necessity for the second which creates a necessity to have made the first possible. To think of it in terms of cause and effect, the chance encounter (event?) has no necessary cause except for it’s effect. However, the second rendezvous in Samarkand is impossibly denied and reverses its effect (the first encounter) to become indeterminate and missing a cause; at least internally to the text. What are the undetermined effects, what cause could be missing? This text despite having no internal reason to begin except for the first chance encounter in the market was nonetheless read under circumstances unknown to the reader a priori and can only be derived from reading the text a posteriori. Thus, the chance for the text to be read returns as the reader didn’t know the internal reasons which made reading a necessity unto themself. The texts appearance as incomplete revokes reading as a necessity for writing because it’s contingent on the whoever we were before reading. Henceforth, it becomes a necessity for the text to cause itself to be written because the chance encounter to read wasn’t determined by the reader without the text but the text itself. The chance to read leaves open the necessity to write what has never been read, the text inscribes itself unto the reader and the writer unto the text itself.
Death in our world as it is in the fictional is not an objective destiny, the meaning of Death fictional or not isn’t decided by the body which Death meets. Deaths already decided our meaning in a world we no longer make meaning out of. Death causes nothing in a Life of the reader, the reason we all met at the market was because of Life itself.
