Existential Seduction

How Wanting and Being Wanted Reveal the Self

Forthcoming

This book is an existential theory of desire. It examines what wanting and being wanted do to the self, and why desire so often feels like relief from doubt, isolation, and invisibility.

Moving between philosophy, phenomenology, cultural observation, and brief historical vectors, the book traces desire as a movement toward recognition. Seduction is understood not as manipulation or morality, but as a temporary suspension of existential uncertainty for both the one who wants and the one who is wanted. Within that suspension, the self can feel real, chosen, and less alone.

Structured around the arc of doubt, suspension, mutuality or asymmetry, collapse, and aftermath, the book explores why desire stabilizes identity, why its loss destabilizes meaning, and why recognition can become existential currency. Written in a reflective, investigative voice, Existential Seduction is not a clinical manual, but a conceptual work that reveals how erotic life exposes the deepest structures of human subjectivity.