1. We should not seek meaning nor should we move towards a legitimate engagement with alterity. Rather, debate should be as a ritual dramaturgy wherein we submit absolutely and totally submit to the rules of the game as a transgression of the law. The only impact to game playing is the ability to lose oneself in total submission to the rules.

The Diary of the Seducer claims that in seduction the subject is never the master of his master plan, and even when the latter is deployed in full consciousness, it still submits to the rules of a game that goes beyond it . A ritual dramaturgy beyond the law, seduction is both game and fate, and as such pushes the protagonists towards their inevitable end without the rule being broken - for it is the rule that binds them. And the rule's basic dictum is that the game continue whatever the cost, be it death itself. There is, then, a sort of passion that binds the players to the rule that ties them together - without which the game would not be possible. Ordinarily we live within the realm of the Law, even when fantasizing its abolition. Beyond the law we see only its transgression or the lifting of a prohibition. For the discourse of law and interdiction determines the inverse discourse of transgression and liberation. However, it is not the absence of the law that is opposed to the law, but the Rule. The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. The one concerns cycles, the recurrence of conventional procedures, while the other is an instance based in an irreversible continuity. The one involves obligations, the other constraints and prohibitions. Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to "transgress" a game's rules; within a cycle's recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game). Because the Law - whether that of the signifier, castration, or a social interdiction - claims to be the discursive sign of a legal instance and hidden truth, it results in repression and prohibitions, and thus the division into a manifest and a latent discourse. Given that the rule is conventional and arbitrary, and has no hidden truth, it knows neither repression nor the distinction between the manifest and the latent. It does not carry any meaning, it does not lead anywhere; by contrast, the Law has a determinate finality. The endless, reversible cycle of the Rule is opposed to the linear, finalized. progression of the Law. Signs do not have the same status in the one as in the other. The Law is part of the world of representation, and is therefore subject to interpretation or decipherment. It involves decrees or statements, and is not indifferent to the subject. It is a text, and falls under the influence of meaning and referentiality. By contrast, the Rule has no subject, and the form of its utterance is of little consequence; one does not decipher the rules, nor derive pleasure from their comprehension - only their observance matters, and the resulting giddiness. This also distinguishes the passion for the game's rituals and intensity from the pleasure that attaches to obedience to the Law, or its transgression. In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire. Does the delight one experiences in a game come from a dream-like situation, where one moves free of reality, but which one can quit at any time? Not at all. Games, unlike dreams, are subject to rules, and one just doesn't leave a game. Games create obligations like those found in challenges. To leave a game is unsportsmanlike. And the fact that one cannot refuse to play a game from within - a fact that explains its enchantment and differentiates it from "reality" - creates a symbolic pact which compels one to observe the rules without reserve, and to pursue the game to the end, as one pursues a challenge to the end. The order instituted by the game, being conventional, is incommensurable with the necessary order of the real world: it is neither ethical nor psychological, and its acceptance (the acceptance of the rules) implies neither resignation nor constraint. As such, there is no freedom in our moral and individual sense of that term, in games. They are not to be equated with liberty. Games do not obey the dialectic of free will, that hypothetical dialectic of the sphere of the real and the law. To enter into a game is to enter a system of ritual obligations. Its intensity derives from its initiatory form - not from our liberty, as we would like to believe, following an ideology that sees only a single, "natural" source of happiness and pleasure. The game's sole principle, though it is never posed as universal, is that by choosing the rule one is delivered from the law. Without a psychological or metaphysical foundation, the rule has no grounding in belief. One neither believes nor disbelieves a rule - one observes it. The diffuse sphere of belief, the need for credibility that encompasses the real, is dissolved in the game. Hence their immorality : to proceed without believing in it, to sanction a direct fascination with conventional signs and groundless rules.