Masculinity as a Gendered Form of Desire: Laplanche and Enigmatic Seduction

ABSTRACT

Laplanche’s formulation of primal seduction and afterwardsness is employed to theorize masculinity as a gendered form of desire. This formulation is grounded in the notion that gender, sexed difference, and Freudian sexuality are complexly interrelated and mutually determined, forming gendered desire and desirous gender. With Laplanche, identification with a gendered other is understood to be preceded by identification by the other. Masculinity is in this instance constituted by how one translates and retranslates the enigmatic signifiers inscribed by the address of adult caregivers, and by how the untranslated remains of that address inspire and animate the performance of gender. Primal seduction is here further employed, in extended form, to explore and augment understandings of the intergenerational transmission of masculinities through paternal seduction. Masculinities are in this articulation considered to emerge in relation to the vulnerabilities associated with the experience of the enigmatic within relations of power, in the tensions between subjectivity and subjectification. The article privileges the enigmatic, unrepresented experiences of being, and the otherness of self, and while I attempt to apprehend these understandings through the presentation of case material, I do so to demonstrate that the enigmatic is, by definition, elusive and indeterminate, and I invite the perspective that this problematic not be resolved.

Notes

¹ Unless otherwise stated, desire is used here interchangeably with the term “drive,” in line with Quindeau’s (2013) reading of Laplanchean drive.

² Birksted-Breen and Flanders (2010) provide a particularly useful introduction that locates Laplanche and orientates the reader to French psychoanalysis, as does Fletcher (2007).

³ Harris (2009) offers an intimate account of the complexities and alignments of similar seductive transmissions between a father and daughter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Burkhalter

Thomas Burkhalter, PhD, is a psychologist working primarily as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Johannesburg. He is a member of the South African Psychoanalysis Initiative.