Seduction Is Dead, Long Live the Incel

Incel: A Novel
by arx-han
296 pages, $23.95

My only diagnosis—my incurable, wholly intractable condition—is that I cannot help but see the world as it is, not how I want it to be,” laments Anon, protagonist of ARX-Han’s Incel: A Novel. The book has been quietly making waves since it was self-published in 2023, and for good reason: It is the most incisive exploration of the “radical incel” (involuntarily celibate) worldview yet to appear in fiction. Not only does Han (a pseudonym) succeed in personalizing this culturally reviled perspective; he shows that it isn’t isolated to the involuntarily celibate individual, but is rather a condensed expression of the scientism that suffuses modern society.

Anon, the titular “incel,” is a precocious graduate student in evolutionary psychology. His sole friend, bartender and autodidact Jason, however, is sexually prolific; their shared adherence to the “truth” of biological materialism binds them together in miserable codependency. Each believes that life has no meaning apart from its instrumental purpose: the mechanistic perpetuation and refinement of genetic material. Accordingly, Anon has resolved prior to the novel’s beginning that if he does not lose his virginity by his twenty-third birthday, he will kill himself. If it doesn’t happen by then, he believes, it is statistically unlikely ever to happen, which means he has been judged biologically unfit for existence, much less reproduction. Promiscuous Jason, on the other hand, had a vasectomy on his eighteenth birthday to enable a hedonistic existence unburdened by the horrifying prospect of perpetuating human life. The novel follows Anon’s journey as enfant terrible of his grad program, his turbulent friendship with Jason, and his methodical attempts to lose his virginity.

The worldview explored in Incel is a crystallization of what Jean Baudrillard terms “obscenity” in his 1979 work Seduction. The obscene, for Baudrillard, is less about explicitness than an excess of rational clarity, a stripping away of mystery and ambiguity until all that remains is the brute, predictable fact of material reality. In an obscene culture, “Everything is to be produced, everything is to be legible, everything is to become real, visible, accountable; everything is to be transcribed in relations of force, systems of concepts or measurable energy.” Obscenity is a fixation on quantifiable certainty and total disclosure. 

Obscenity stands in opposition to Baudrillard’s twin concept of seduction. Seduction derives its charm from uncertainty and secrecy. It is the levity and frivolity of fun, as opposed to the stern purpose of work. Seduction is largely defined by what is omitted, unknown, unknowable. It resists, above all else, explicit definition. 

The obscene person is “radically suspicious of seduction,” fearing the vertigo and vulnerability it entails. He attempts to “fix its rules, formalize them in a text, express them in a pact. In so doing, he breaks a basic rule, that of the secret. . . . All the perverse forms of seduction . . . betray its secret and the fundamental rule, which is that the rule remain unspoken.” In Han’s novel, both Jason’s and Anon’s suspicion of seduction is driven by fear and shame, but even more so by their obscene materialist worldview. For Jason—tall, muscular, and handsome—this plays out in callous promiscuity, formalized in a rule that he never sleeps with the same girl twice. For physically unremarkable Anon, this results in desperate adherence to the formulaic strategies of “pickup artistry,” which relies on evolutionary psychology and thus precludes actual seduction. 

Pickup artistry and its obsession with “body count” (one’s number of sexual partners) becomes a mask Anon hides behind. Attraction, to him, is an equation to be solved. Sex and relationships are not a site of mystery, intrigue, or fun, but merely a function of genetic propagation, social affirmation, and banal orgasm. Unsurprisingly, he remains romantically unsuccessful for much of the novel. “To be deprived of seduction,” Baudrillard says, “is the only true form of castration.”

The male fixation on body count is, of course, familiar. The book’s subtle horror lies in our slow realization that this obscene perspective is actually contiguous with our own scientistic overvaluing of the quantifiable, the material. And Han’s prose reflects this mindset. It is clinical to a fault, applying scientific jargon to mundane phenomena with a kind of smirking satisfaction. Eating is “ingesting.” Discovering you have slept through an important lecture “produces only the mildest stirring in the limbic memory of your internal organs.” But the prose is also interspersed with ruminations on loneliness and human connection— “Personhood is a thing that you cannot find in yourself; it is only ever reflected in the eyes of others.”

Although the novel is satirical, Anon is not a caricature. Even as he rattles off statistics and metaphysical musings, Anon can never quite keep it cool, his seething bitterness often erupting in rants worthy of Larry David. Moreover, Han’s stylistic talent and sense of humor rescues the novel from the tedium often typical of works driven by philosophical purpose. But the message remains clear: Anon and Jason are not outliers but representatives of our culture’s epistemic priorities. 

The obscenity of scientism is exacerbated by the anxiety of a secular culture that seeks stability amidst a radically contingent world. Anon is comforted by the simplifications of biological determinism. He hopes to mitigate risk, which results in viewing relationships and marriage with skepticism—costly deals that we negotiate in the “sexual marketplace.” This suspicion fosters anxiety and precludes intimacy, so we recede into the safety of digital communication, where we always retain control.

But we feel that something—often wistfully called “spontaneity”—has been lost. Even Anon often recognizes this. Nevertheless, he feels powerless to deviate from a culture that normalizes anxiety and excess caution by justifying individualism, personalization, safety, freedom, control, and power. Baudrillardian seduction, on the other hand, requires that we relinquish all of it.

Anon’s cynicism precipitates fallings-out with his peers and professors, and estrangement from his sister; Jason’s cynicism, together with his penchant for violence, nearly lands him in prison. The harrowing descent concludes when Anon acknowledges that the way he lives has failed. After losing his virginity solves nothing, the hopelessness and vulnerability that follow forces Anon out of his arrogance. 

In suggesting a way out, Han is tentatively optimistic. And so is Baudrillard. Obscenity, in his view, will always prove itself miserably deficient against the empyrean forces of seduction: “Seduction is destiny. It is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous and predestined world; it is what is quietly effective in a visibly efficient and stolid world.”

What makes Incel both unsettling and profound isn’t its implicit moralism, but that the abject incel’s disaffection is also our own. Anon’s perspective is a distillation of obscenity’s victory over seduction—a battle playing out in every mind formed by the digital age.