Introduction: The Hidden Force of Allure

Arousal shares something in common with the Kantian conception of the beautiful. That is to say, the mechanics are similar. As we have already established (in the previous section on the beautiful), objects in themselves are not innately beautiful, or ugly for that matter. And in fact, we are often not even talking about objects necessarily, but rather the subject's own disclosure of pleasure drawn from some external referent. In his discourse on the Kantian beautiful, an individual “does not cognize the beauty of an object,” Steven Shaviro notes in his book Without Criteria. “Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it.” In a similar fashion, then, the external referent is not innately arousing. But when an individual pronounces, “Oh, that's sexually arousing,” or more likely in a more colloquial tone, “Oh my god, so fuckin’ hot!” this discloses more about the subject making the utterance than it does about the referent. And thus, arousal poses a particular challenge—assuredly based in part on embarrassment— because to address arousal something is potentially revealed about the individual making the utterance.

In a similar rhetorical gesture, Shaviro (elsewhere) locates affinities between allure and Kantian aesthetics. Drawn from Graham Harman's discourse on allure, Shaviro recounts that allure trades in the currency of excess—an ephemeral non-assimilable surplus standing outside the objectal economy. “What seems to happen in every form of allure is that a special sort of interference occurs in the usual relation between a concealed sensual object and its visible symptoms.” The arousing object appears to contain within it some other nearly mystical quality quite apart from the object in itself. Harman adds further, “If objects are what recede from us, qualities are simply defined as whatever does not recede, allowing us to bathe in them at every moment.” Harman describes this surplus—the force, or energy of allure—in almost mystical terms as a “dark agent,” trading outside, alongside, or in the shadow of the economy of objects. Harman frequently uses terms like “beneath,” or “subterranean.”