Communication politique et séduction à travers la Déclaration de politique générale du Premier ministre Idrissa Seck à l'Assemblée nationale le 03 février 2003

3. SEDUCTION

The Dictionary of the French Academy defines the seduction in the following way :

Action to suborn, corrupt witnesses. Seduction absolutely says action to allure a girl or a woman, to corrupt her innocence, its virtue. It says also attraction, approval which makes certain things clean to allure.

It is to say all the ambiguity of the word which refers at the same time to illegal practices, illicit, at the same time as it connotes an attraction which one exerts or who is exerted on us, in spite of us and without we knowing why. What leads the Sirois psychoanalyst to write :

In the seduction the diverted person of its goal and its race is carried out elsewhere than where it is or which where it wants to go. This diversion implies a force, and is exerted under the motion of a charm or the power of an attraction. (Sirois 2005)

The negative side finds its explanation in the origin of the word which comes from meaning itself Latin -duceré « to lead to share ». However, like the Dictionary of the Academy specifies it, It gets busy absolutely, especially in the last meaning returning to the attraction and the charm. By there, the seduction borrows from the ludic dimension which brings Baudrillard (1979 : 18), to interpret it « in terms of play, of challenge, duelles relations and strategies of appearances (...) «. A ludic dimension which requires of it a work of adaptation and innovation. All things which confer to him, to take again Baudrillard, the statute of « flexible ceremonial » (1979, op.cit. : 174) by which any preestablished standard can be circumvented, violated. Because it is a universe in which « the choice of the rule delivers you law there » (1979, COp cit.  : 182)

Applied to the policy, we have evil to share the conviction of Baudrillard (op.cit. : 75), like what « the seduction is what removes with the speech its direction and its truth diverts it ». For Baudrillard, « the strategy of the seduction is that of the lure ». Admittedly, but we think that the seduction is initially, and above all, an interactive process between two agents, the seducer and his target which the first would like to transform to be allured of it. Consequently, in the political play as in the seduction, the truth does not exist in oneself. The truth, in these two fields, is more to seek in the impact, proven or not, on the target that in the founded good of its step.

According to Nightingale (2002 : 238), « the seduction, if not very moral is it, is a dimension founder of the reports/ratios of being able ". Also, the question of the seduction is it dominating in policy. Indeed, as « fight for the appropriation of sign-capacity » (Bonnafous, op.cit. : 68), the policy aims at the rallying of a greater number in order to profit from their confidence to exert the power. It is a marked field, essentially, by its performative dimension.

Also, refuse we to proceed, like Baudrillard, with this distance, quasi-epistemological, between seduction and policy^21(*). We think, on the contrary, that the relationship between policy and seduction is a report/ratio in complicity and complementarity, rather than of hegemony. Indeed, as much the seduction exerted on the voters can make it possible the politician to reach the capacity, as much the detention of the capacity and the exercise of this one by the relevant and useful decision-making, can cause seduction. We thus have there a specular dimension of the relationship between seduction and policy. Seduction causing being able, capacity also functioning like vector of seduction.

If, like Sirois (2005) writes it, « any seduction is established on the deployment of a network of sensitive signs », to allure in policy, quite simply does not consist in convincing by arguments concerned with the logos (logical and rational). Because we are at the era of the homo videns. And this last, according to Pereyra (2005) :

live the world of spectacular, dominated by the celebrities (...) as different as can be the local situations or cultures, popularity dominates the market, the TV rating reigns. We approach the end of the century and each country of the «total village» transformed its company into audience and its population as passive televiewers hypnotized by the magic of the spectacular one.

And like it Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2002 recalled : 23), « so that an argumentation develops, it is necessary, indeed, that those for which it is intended pay some attention to it ». Thus, the politician, undoubtedly held by the law of the adaptation, tries to satisfy his public more carried towards the image and the sensational one.

From now on, to allure, it is also and especially to like. To also like by an image of oneself (ethos), attractive, which is repugnant neither to varnishing, nor with smoothing by either discursive means only, but, by one to appear, gestural, even a setting in scene on a large scale allowing to integrate the news « company of the spectacle » (Overflow 1999).

* ²¹ For Baudrillard, «  the seduction represents the control of the universe symbolic system whereas the capacity represents only the control of the real universe. The sovereignty of the seduction is without common measurement with the detention of the political power  ».