In 1979 Editions Galilée published De La Seduction, a book which was to outrage its select band of readers, especially feminists. In the reception of much of his work Baudrillard has been interpreted as explicitly anti-feminist and this work certainly added fuel to the fire. Macmillan published an English translation by Brian Singer in 1990 and the first chapter of this edition of Seduction provides the extract here. The English edition had a stunning Man Ray cover and was published in the CultureTexts series edited by Canadian ‘performance theorists’ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The series was self-consciously dedicated to representing the ‘forward breaking-edge of postmodern theory and practice’ and the Krokers, along with a small group of like-minded others around the cyber journal C-THEORY, promoted Baudrillard for many years as extreme postmodernist theorist extraordinaire, especially in the realm of bodies and sexualities. Seduction, on any reading, does not support such an interpretation and still remains a relatively little known, and little read, text in Baudrillard's oeuvre. It was undoubtedly a long while before English-speaking readers caught up with its concepts and approach and, as with the reception of Symbolic Exchange and Death, once Seduction was properly absorbed and analysed the trajectory of Baudrillard's work since the mid-1970s became much clearer. Advertised as ‘Baudrillard's most provocative book’ in the 1990s, Seduction challenged ‘all modern theory, even, indeed, the rules of theoretical production itself’ as Liberation noted at the time of its first publication in the late 1970s.