  At the same time that his work was becoming extremely popular, Baudrillard’s own writing became increasingly difficult and obscure. In 1979, he published Seduction (1990), a difficult text that represented a major shift in his thought. The book marks a turning away from the more sociological discourse of his earlier works to a more philosophical and literary discourse. Whereas in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993a [1976]), Baudrillard sketched out ultra-revolutionary perspectives as a radical alternative, taking symbolic exchange as his ideal, he now takes seduction as his alternative to production and communicative interaction. Seduction, however, does not undermine, subvert, or transform existing social relations or institutions, but is a soft alternative, a play with appearances, and a game with feminism, a provocation that provoked a sharp critical  response.[7] Baudrillard’s concept of seduction is idiosyncratic and involves games with signs which set up seduction as an aristocratic “order of sign and ritual” in contrast to the bourgeois ideal of production, while advocating artifice, appearance, play, and challenge against the deadly serious labor of production. He interprets seduction primarily as a ritual and game with its own rules, charms, snares, and lures. His writing mutates at this point into a neo-aristocratic aestheticism dedicated to stylized modes of thought and writing, which present a set of categories — reversibility, the challenge, the duel, — that move Baudrillard’s thought toward a form of aristocratic aestheticism and metaphysics.