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  • Flirtations. Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction ed. by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone
  • Henrik S. Wilberg
Flirtations. Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction. Eds. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone. Fordham University Press, 2015.

In the 1915 essay “Timely Thoughts on War and Death,” Freud describes life before the Great War as characterized by a fundamental unbelief in mortality, leading to an impoverished experience where nothing is truly at risk, “as vapid, as inane as an American flirtation [ein amerikanischer Flirt], in which it is from the first determined that nothing is going to happen, in contrast to a continental love affair, in which both partners must constantly bear in mind the serious consequences” (qtd. in Hoffman-Schwartz 107). In this collection of essays–one of the first to appear in Fordham’s new Idiom series–a series of inquiries, by Americans as well as continentals, are opened into flirtation as a space where “nothing is going to happen.” This volume promises to establish a counter-discourse to what the editors call “the more spectacular discourse” of seduction and specifically, signaled in the book’s subtitle, to explore the concept of flirtation “this side of seduction.” Polemically positioned against the topic of the “beyond,” the commitment here is not to the theoretical mode of pursuit of transgression, but to cultivate the sideways glance and [End Page 1266] attend to the potentially more interesting acts of holding back, of remaining in bounds. Such an apologetics of the “this side” is reflected in the authors and texts privileged by the contributors: as such, it is less interested in employing a dialectical variation of the “Kant with Sade” paradigm of law and transgression; some of the more penetrating essays consequently shift their theoretical orientation from psychoanalysis to sociology, especially in the expanded early 20th century sense of that discipline, encompassing the work of Georg Simmel as well as Bataille and Caillois’ Collège de Sociologie.

To flirt–originally a gallicism, but which today has come full circle as an anglicism in French and other languages–has been derived from fleureter: to touch something in passing, to flitter–like a bee–from flower to flower. A fundamental question here seems to be to what extent these readings succeed in establishing flirtation as a kind of discourse: whether the flick and flitter of the flirt bears any resemblance to the schema of running back-and-forth of dis-cursus, exploited by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, a work to which the editors acknowledge their debt. The introduction attempts to prepare the ground for such a discursive understanding of flirtation, claiming both Niklas Luhmann’s Love as Passion and Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness as solidary undertakings in this respect. A key term of Luhmann’s analysis is the productive improbability of amorous communication as demanded by its own code, whereas for Cavell it is the willingness for conversation that returns love and marriage to the same temporal dimension (which, as Kant insists in the Metaphysics of Morals, is nothing less than perpetuity) and begin again. Through such conceptual groundwork, flirtation acquires conceptual independence from seduction as a distinct configuration of contingency and repetition.

The editors have allowed this discursive question to structure the entire volume. The book is divided into three sections, each consisting of a brief interlude (by each of the three editors) followed by contributions by two pairs of scholars. In an attempt to retain “the dialogue-like structure of flirtation,” one scholar introduces an essay topic, to which the second gives a more or less free response. Furthermore, attempting to distinguish flirtation’s give-and-take from the soliloquy of the lover, the editors underline that “[t]he dialogic principle in this anthology recalls the Symposium, which poses the question of whether Platonic dialogues partake in a form of flirtation and what it would mean to recast the love of wisdom (philosophia) as a playful and possibly pointless chase” (4). The dialogic principle at work in this volume is perhaps less akin to the atypical structure of the Symposium, where the speeches (amid hiccups and...

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