| Summary: | Considering all literary texts about libertinage, from Ovid to nowadays, Claude Crébillon and Laclos are surely amongst those who treated with more wit the issue of Eros’ ambiguous language. Within the closed and policed universe where theirs characters circulate, a vanity fair as refined as cruel, words’ double meaning, when not detected in time or when misinterpreted, can lead the incautious victim to a mise à mort, even when it is merely a moral and social death. As a strategic ceremonial, seduction appears as a dual and agonistic relation with the purpose to defeat/ to conquer the object of desire, sometimes in a violent way, and the seducer uses all means at hand. As an essentially strategic discourse, seduction makes use of a linguistic and rhetorical code that conceals libertine’s real intentions under the mask of the language of love.
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