Enrico Schirò

This article proposes a reassessment of the philosophical tension between Alphonso Lingis’s lust and Jean Baudrillard’s seduction, starting from three correlated issues: nihilism, gender identity, and ontology. The thesis is that Lingis’s reading of Baudrillard is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between seduction and nihilism, and consequently of Baudrillard’s position. The interpretation of Baudrillard I propose is unorthodox, because it is based on a Schellingian interpretation of his operators of doubling and raising to a power, for which I highlight the textual and conceptual foundations in the article. First, I reconstruct Lingis’s reading of Baudrillard and challenge the thesis regarding Baudrillard’s nihilistic outcomes. Subsequently, I compare the two authors around the theme of gender identity with reference to transvestism, showing that both share the same problem related to ontological identity, which Baudrillard reworks through Schelling. Finally, I compare the respective ontologies of seduction and lust, arguing that they can be considered respectively as a form of new realism (Baudrillard) and new materialism (Lingis).

This paper argues that Jean Baudrillard’s thought is structured by an unrecognized Schellingian matrix which is decisive for understanding his place within the French post-Hegelian horizon. Against the dominant view that situates Baudrillard along a trajectory from Marxism to postmodernism, I show that his persistent rejection of dialectical reconciliation and his emphasis on radical antagonism correspond to a specifically Schellingian model rather than to a merely anti-Hegelian gesture. Through a close analysis of Baudrillard’s treatment of speed, movement and immobility, potentiation (Steigerung), doubling (Doublierung) and the “double spiral,” as well as a series of textual correlations with Schelling’s Weltalter and later lectures, I argue that Baudrillard’s key concepts—simulation, illusion, hyperreality, seduction, and doubling—are best understood as instances of a non-dialectical logic of intensification and reduplicative identity. Reconstructing this hidden lineage not only reframes Baudrillard’s philosophical status but also clarifies the broader conflict between Schellingian and Hegelian models of negativity in late twentieth-century French philosophy.

This article reconstructs the overlooked Schellingian dimension of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy by tracing its conceptual and textual foundations from Le Système des objets (1968) to Les Stratégies fatales (1983). Starting from Graham Harman’s insightful observations on qualities, the passage to a higher level, and absence, it reinterprets Baudrillard’s work as developing a coherent theory of qualities generated through two key operations: Steigerung (intensification, elevation to a higher power) and Doublirung (doubling, reduplicatio). Drawing on Schelling’s Weltalter and Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, the article shows that Baudrillard’s core concepts—such as simulation, illusion, and the hyperreal—follow a Schellingian logic in which each quality radicalizes itself by absorbing the energy of its opposite, becoming “more x than x.” Through a philological examination of Baudrillard’s explicit citation of Die Weltalter in Le Système des objets and his later reflections on doubling and essence, the study establishes a consistent Schellingian subtext that informs the metaphysical structure of his thought. It concludes that Baudrillard’s “metaphysical turn” of the 1980s represents not a departure from his earlier semiological project, but its speculative culmination: a philosophy of radical duality and non-dialectical absolutization that aligns him, unexpectedly yet decisively, with Schellingian speculative philosophy.