Bogdana Koljević

Laplanche's Enigmatic Signifiers and General Theory of Seduction

Wo Es war, wird (soll? muss?) immer noch Anderes sein.

Introduction

If on the philosophical scene the bringing into question of the traditional concept of subjectivity - and though that the breakdown of philosophy as a closed system, in the name of possibilities in time – was realized in the ‘revolution' of deconstruction, first of all in the works of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Levinas and Derrida, then a certain similar movement, a psychoanalytic deconstruction, took place in Laplanche's, especially later work, in his relation to Freud. Doubtlessly, Freud's figure here in no means stands as an ‘equivalent' of Hegel's, but rather, if one is to follow this analogy, can be compared to that of Heidegger who, despite his disclosure that the beginning concerns “two” and not “one” (as exposed in the concepts of Mitsein , Mitdasein and in the entire discourse of “being-in-the-world”), does not draw all the consequences and even sometimes tends to repeat the “father's sin”. In a rough summary one could say that it is Heidegger's permanent oscillation between the significance of inauthenticity and the insistence on the authentic form of existence. Or, as Laplanche remarks about Freud: “if he is his own Copernicus, he is also his own Ptolemy.” (1)

But if Freud is Heidegger, as in this provisional and temporary construction, who is then Laplanche? One is tempted to say (and therefore provoke Laplanshe's own rejection of this essay) that he is Levinas (2). And not merely because his entire late theory is based on arguing for the primacy of otherness in the constitution of the human subjectivity, and because this is his way for finishing the unfinished ‘Copernican revolution' on which his entire critique of Freud is founded, but for a more important reason of his coinciding (in his understanding of the role of the other in psychic life) with Levinas in the choice of major motives for analysis, namely, “seduction”, “persecution” and “revelation” through which the relation with the other primarily unfolds. (3) Above all, this refers to the term “enigma” . In order to expose that the other is not a phenomenon, Levinas develops the concept of enigma (4).

Also, and no less significant, Laplanche's critique of Freud in some important aspects strangely coincides with Levinas's critique of Husserl and/or Heidegger. Such is the criticism that Freud reduces the other to the subject's perception of the other, a conception in which the other is allowed no other place then in the depths of my subjectivity. (5) Furthermore, Laplanche continues that this kind of reduction of the other to the subjectivity of its recipient entirely annuals his otherness and alien-ness.

Perhaps then it is not a matter of mere chance that Laplanche wrote an essay with the identical title – Time and the Other – and wrote it after Levinas. Certainly, Laplahnche's de-centering of the human subject – and in some aspects even more radical then in the entire post-structuralism – demonstrates a specific understanding of the role of the other, that is primarily to be conceived through a general theory of seduction.

If the theme of passivity as the first condition of the “subject”, as well as the insistence on if not original masochism then certainly original traumatism (revised, second version of Laplanche's theory), despite all differences, demonstrate a significant similarity between the two authors, then Laplanche's next step, no less relevant, brings him close again to Levinas's but also to Derrida's work. This refers to the initial (and always present) enigma as the crucial determination of the primary processes, and to the constitution of the “third domain” – reality of the message as the par excellance example of reality, in which the primary events – and to an important extent all events - occur. The “message”, for Laplanche, simultaneously contains the signifiers that represent the other and “signifies to” the subject. This partly resembles some of Levinas's descriptions about the encounter with the Other, and even more, as a reality that is neither “material” nor “ideal”, as a place “in between” that has no strict place but is realized and belongs above all to time, as a trace which can never be fully comprehended for no one has a “code” for it, something always (already) present but always experienced as a delay that never permits one to fully coincide with himself – irresistibly reminds of the structure of differance.

It is within this framework, in our opinion, that the question about the meaning of enigmatic signifiers (6) and the issue of Laplanche's structural theory of seduction – and primarily the question why is the other the other of seduction - should be analyzed. The first aim is to comprehend the way in which the ‘subject' appears as originally de-centered and unfamiliar with himself, practically “alienated”, and what is the relation between his initial receptive and passive position to the creation of the enigma. The second task is to recognize in what manner this theory refers not only to a “limited” scope of investigation of the primal processes and phenomena but has validity on a more general level as well: as a permanent live presence of the unconscious within the processes of relating to all others, therefore as the creation of the entire intersubjective space/time and finally the (deferred) consequences of “Laplanche's law” that ‘ theoreticogenesis ' reproduces ‘ontogenesis'.

A different “return to Freud”

Freud's abandonment of his seduction theory (1897), as well as his own stoppage in the great discovery that the unconscious is precisely not a center, that it is an ‘excentric center', directly caused, argues Laplanche, not only his own later “strayings”, but the basic orientation of the entire psychoanalysis after that: its focus on the individual, the subject, one person as the topos of events, implicitly excluded the active role of the other as if he was only an additional element, external and not highly relevant for the process. In that way, through displacement of the place, through substitution of the intersubjective space with position of the subject, and by means of a rough reduction which resembles the traditional philosophical attempt to derive everything from the “one” (and the reason for this, according to Levinas, was that “other” can never be fully grasped and comprehended, for it is the only instance that escapes reflection) it has failed to understand not only the unique meaning of first events and primal processes and the role of seduction, but also repression, the drives, hysteria, paranoia, masochism, narcissism, the ego – finally, unconscious itself and therefore the meaning of the analytic situation and practice and of the entire conception about human time as well. Focusing on phenomena of “projection”, “introjection”, “splitting”, “foreclose” it had clearly demonstrated its auto-centric orientation that with itself always carries a certain conception of reality as well.

In Essays on Otherness Laplanche also in this manner refers to contemporary trends in psychoanalysis, which he signifies as a “phenomenological current” and “metaphysical current”. While the specificity of the first one is exactly to restore the subject as the ‘author of his acts' and intentionality as the center of all psychical acts, the latter I various ways conceives the unconscious as a kind of metaphysical entity.

Laplanche argues that all of this is a result of a misconception of the “first step”, a failure to understand that on the beginning there is always “two” and never “one”, a closing up into a certain henological and/or monadological logic, a solipsistic paradigm (evident in a closing-in-on-itself of the human being in the very process of its constitution), for Laplanche signified that the de(con)struction of the “narcissistic” theories was not completed. And the unfinished task was, first of all, conditioned by the fact that Freud did not develop the possibilities implicit in his seduction theory, namely that the problem is a reversed one. The question is not how to access the other but that of his priority.

Returning to Freud's own “forgotten” concepts – the primal fantasies, leaning-on (Anlehnung), afterwardsness or deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit), Laplanche tends to demonstrate the validity of what he calls general theory of primal seduction that is directed toward a reformulation of the relation between the “external other” and “internal other” . He reflects on Freud's position as split within itself, as a continuous oscillation (7) between a recentering, manifested in the insistence on a biologizing of sexuality and a decentering of the human psyche, especially evident in his early theory of seduction and developed through the theme of child sexual abuse and memory of it.(8)

Beginning from the “Emma case” (A Project for a Scientific Psychology) Freud attempted to explain the hysterical and obsessional symptoms by tracing them back to the memories of sexual events from the early childhood. The specificity and significance of the “Emma case” was exactly in the patients remembrance (although, only after the analysis had begun) and recollection – but one of the “wrong” i.e. of the second event. Laplanche argues – and repeating Freud's words (9) - that this can be explained by nothing else then the logic of deferred action, underlining now that it must be recognized that the trauma of seduction takes place between the two events, in the interval which is ‘external' to Emma's conscious process and which, furthermore, does not “belong” to Emma at all, but is directly a product from the “outside”, from an “external other”, and internalized to the extent that hysteria is manifested. According to Laplanche, Freud here neglects the implications of his own discovery, namely, that hysterics suffer not from memories but from “reminiscences” – “a pseudo-memory perhaps, coming from…the other.” (10) (Similary, this goes in a direction of developing a conception according to which the unconscious element is not a stored memory or representation, but as a certain “waste-product” of memorization).

For Laplanche this is also one of the indisputable proofs that sexuality, as fundamentally constitutive for human subjectivity, literally breaks within the subject through the action of the other , and furthermore that its “structure” is intrinsically traumatic, for it arises as an intrusion, incursion and something imposed by the other. Furthermore, the primacy of sexuality for Laplanche (and the fact that the unconscious consist of, above all, sexual scenes) takes place exactly because it directly opens onto the question of the other, the adult other in his strang-ness and alien-ness.

The concrete external event, therefore, immediately initiated from the external other – from, as in Levinas, the adult other that belongs to personal prehistory - becomes internalized, but is such a way that it is experienced as an inner foreign body , an internal other, a stranger (11) at with whose “work” the ego is either only partly familiar on unfamiliar at all. This traumatic seduction as the origin of sexuality, has its own specific temporality that occurs somewhere “in between” what Levinas calls “subjective” and “objective” time, between the concrete material events and concrete external others from which it originates, and subjects coexistence with it – and simultaneously includes both, but in such a way that its meaning can never be entirely grasped. In such a way it signifies a movement beyond the “truth”, when truth is understood as a meaning of facts that can be demonstrated.

In this sense Laplanche writes that there is “a kind of objective lie inscribed in the facts…as though there existed in the facts themselves a kind of fundamental duplicity .” (12) This “lie” concerns the relation between the inscription and translation, between the “real” external initiator of the trauma or, rather, its “ first factical reality” and its deferred effect, i.e. its actual ‘coming-into-being' in subject's existence as its “second facticall reality”. (Also, the process through which the “untranslated” tends to block the translation.) And it is precisely in this gap between the primary seductive intrusion of the external other, the moment and the act of “writing” and the later attack of the internal foreign body that Laplanche posits the general theory of primal seduction, presented, above all through its basic “structural” elements – the enigmatic signifiers and afterwardness (13) as the very temporality of seduction.

The Signifying and Significance of the Enigma

Seduction for Laplanche is therefore not merely one of many processes that becomes manifest at an early stage of child development, let alone of many phenomena through which sexuality is realized. Seduction is a phenomenon par excellence, or, rather, a non-phenomenological pre-phenomenon, an “unconditional condition”, an an-archic, contingent beginning through which everything becomes. Seduction is a structural phenomenon. Theory of seduction is the theory of sexuality, and as such represents the ground, the fundament, and the structure (although itself it is not “structural” in a Lacanian manner) that simultaneously figures as the primal (14) and universal process, for it is constitutive for all and every human existence. In that sense it also carries an aspect of inescapable ananke with it, as a situation, interrelation that we have been “thrown” into without asking. The other comes to me, reaches me, seduces me through his activity of sending me verbal and non-verbal messages; sending me various signifiers which are enigmatic not only because “I” as a child can not understand them but because they originate from the unconscious of my adult other. I am permanently being seduced by my other, but inasmuch as he remains unaware of the meaning of his activity toward me, upon me, and “does not have a code” for sexual significations that he is sending me - he is also not immune to the event of seduction. Seduction, therefore, is also self-seduction , auto-seduction through which he projects his own childhood and acts according to his own untranslated messages. (15)

The first aspect of my relation with the other, of the “first relation” is, therefore, that it remains (again as in Levinas) asymmetrical – that I as an infant, who cannot answer, ho has no shared interpretative system, appear in the role of passivity and also original openness for everything that comes to me from outside, from my external other. In contrast, the other (what Freud had neglected in his theory of seduction) is a fully constituted subject , the actor who implants enigmatic signifiers into my body-ego (16), who shapes and forms my sexuality, and though that determines the major direction of my relating to the world. And in some cases, as Laplanche notes, this happens on a way of a violent intromission, which is a variant of the normal process of implementation. However – and this is the second aspect - precisely as a fully constituted subject the other is “ not himself ”, he is the actor but not the author of such a project i.e. of his “creation” of me. Remembering (and, more significantly, not remembering) himself as a child he approaches me as a mirror-image of himself, as if he was the child, living out in a way of the past that has never been present. His unconsciousness of it is his self-seduction up to the point that he/she conceives of himself as the independent, aware agent, one in control of this production, and exposes the process as one of “merely” and “purely” giving love, and teaching the child how to love.

Seduction and self-seduction are, therefore, reducible neither to memories and fantasies of the subject nor to the “materiality” of its actions: what is at stake is a third, structurally different mode of reality, reality of relation, communication, transmission and message. And these are for Laplanche most ordinary events. They belong to our everydayness, to our usual parent-infant relating and appear as the crucial way through which human subjectivity as such is constituted. Reality of messages is neither “purely” subjective nor objective, it is derived from the other in question (and as such is certainly a highly personal issue) but it also carries the message for reality itself, about itself – namely, that the “first” reality is one of an inter-relational enigma, enigma of human encounter (with itself and the other), enigma of internal and external otherness on which everything else if further build on, but which remains permanently present and active, and furthermore, determines the consciousness that can never fully comprehend and grasp it. In final instance, that there is always an enigma that escapes knowledge.

In other words, the enigmatic signifier, the message of the other, the “first reality”, always leaves something untranslated – there is always a traduire, a “still not”, “yet-to-come”, yet to be translated. And translation of enigmas for Laplance is a continual self-theorisaiton, as knowledge of the self that is constituted in afterwardsness. Movement of translation is, therefore, a movement of temporalisation, of returning to the past from the present in order to aim towards a future.

Based on this process of translation, and beginning from the interplay between translation and the untranslated, Laplanche reexamines and reformulates the concept of repression, as a failure of translation that results from a dislocation of enigmatic signifiers. Primal repressions are failures of translation. And they occur in two phases: in the first inscription of the enigmatic signifiers, the “passive” phase, then though their reactualization and reactivation (17).

Since the “game” between two children, however, also involves one's ‘self-play', as an encounter with his internal other (which is repressed fantasy), that is now given an active, productive role in a relation toward an external other; and since this in its own way brings into question a determinate limit between the internal and external otherness - and if the solipsism that Laplanche so much attempted to avoid comes anywhere on the back door, then it is exactly here (18) – in the child's uncertainly as to “What is that the breast wants from me?” , in its task of translation of the enigma of the other's desire is certainly not easy. (The famous Lacanian formula that ‘desire is always the desire of the other' would have an interesting twist here). For the very process of repression and of becoming of the unconscious has been relocated, situated exactly within the field of general primal seduction, in the field of functioning of the enigmatic signifiers, the act of their “writing”, inscription, and re-inscription that is translation. But there is, however, always a “void in signification” which constitutes the enigmatic character of the adult's message.

It is therefore the case that precisely through the enigmatic signifiers, i.e. through the message created by them a different conception of the unconscious becomes possible. But Laplansche insists that although this evidently de(con)structs a position of naive realism, and of understanding the unconscious as representation, it also has not much to do with a relativist and a ‘constructivist' position either. In fact, it is not a question of the truth (of a meaning) at all. Rather, the issue concerns reality of the message, and in that way, a possible missing inscription in a manner of an excluded fragment of discourse. That is also the reason why the term “translation” hits the target much better then interpretation, since we are dealing here more with understanding and misunderstanding in the sense of communication and interrelation and/or, if one prefers, a certain mimesis of the possible ways of human existence. But one should keep in mind here that although there is a doubtless tendency of the child to resemble, to be alike, the child is not, Laplanche argues “a symptom of his parents” in a way that Lacan had conceived this. On contrary, it is an entirely different entity, a new enigma.

The term “translation” also already presupposes that it is not the original, nor can it ever be – while simoultaionsly reveals the tendency to resemble it. In this case it is the question of relating to the world, of establishing the framework, coordinates, even behavioral patterns through which the enigmatic signifier operates. It is a question of messages, discourses and/or pictures, scenes, which are, such as infantile scenes, signifiers that ought to be translated. Furthermore, this would be a pre-existing structure, pre-existing sense of the meaning as such, the very procedure of its becoming. And there is no direct transmission, no direct determination, but an enigmatic encounter between me and the other. The relevance of the concept of enigma is precisely that with it a break in determinism appears – it reveals that the present is not determined by subject's actual past. However, for Laplanche, hermeneutics also misses the point, for it is founded on the same antithesis between “factual reality” and “fantasy”. Neither course recognizes the category of the message, i.e. of the enigmatic signifiers; neither of them grasps the third domain of reality, which escapes both the materiality of the gesture and the psychology of the protagonists. Neither of them recognizes that the process of the development of human individuals arises as an attempt of translation of these enigmatic and, above all, traumatizing messages.

Because of this structure it has to be recognized that registration precedes repudiation foreclosure and projection, and furthermore that in the cases of extreme violence of signification we are dealing with something as a failure of communication with strong consequences. The enigmatic signifiers, in these events, block and paralyze the translation, for I cannot adequately receive them. From the perspective of the infant, in lacanian terms, it would precisely be the situation where the letter does not reach its destination – but here the failure of receiving would be directly conditioned by failure of sending (and it seems that, exactly in these cases, it was not sent to me at all).

Even more important, however, is the question of the excess of message in general. Is the process of signification and of sending enigmatic signifiers violent as such? Does it occur in every, and not just “problematic” cases, and in that way, is it the dominant factor of the beginning, of the first human encounter, of interrelation on which “everything else” further depends on? Or, in other words, is the first reality, and exactly as a reality of message, of discourse, signification – one of violence? And is the confirmation for this to be found precisely in its enigmatic structure and the fact that something always remains untranslated, that, in the strict sense, translation actually never succeeds? It seems that as if, if there is something left of in Laplanche's replacement of the early theory of masochism by theory of seduction, it concerns exactly this “original violence”, which, however, is not reserved for the sphere of language only, but, as a “message” includes both verbal and non-verbal communication. (19)

Maintaining the Opening

What are then, if one is to follow Laplanche's own “law” that theoreticogenesis produces ontogenesis, the implications of such a ‘violent' framework? One question is weather the psychoanalytic Copernican revolution can ever be completely finished. The other, however, is can it be sublated only through a seduction theory of the original traumatism, through a theoretical conception that suggests that the arrival of the other, first and foremost, disturbs me, that the event of the encounter is not primarily a togetherness, which results from sending/receiving of love, that it is not even a fundamentally pleasant experience, but rather one of intrusion, persecution, and even violent intromission. Or, rather, where is the seductive in Laplanche's seduction theory? And what would human relations really look like if they were a product of such a conception?

Certainly this are not questions only for Laplanche. And it also opens (equally concerning both “Copernican” and “Ptolemaic” theories) the practically endless debate that in various ways revolves around the theme of cultural production of sexuality, its closures and re-openings in different Zeitgeist , its simulations and perversions which can either affirm or negate its masochistic original constitution. This further opens the whole issue of the relation between psychoanalysis and politics, which, by necessity, remains for investigations which are “yet to come”. (20)

Footnotes:

1. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, p.60.

2. Laplanche insists that his examination is not a philosophical one. Interestingly, however, in his reference to the philosophical investigation of the question of the other he fails to mention Levinas at all. In a brief inquiry into the history of philosophy, Laplanche rightly reminds that it is not until Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that the problem of the other was analyzed as such. And then draws a typically Levinasian conclusion that “the existence of others remained subordinate, in the history of reason, to that of the ‘world'”. Also, his reference to Hegel and German idealistic tradition contains the same – levinasian – arguments, even his conceptual framework that the “other there comes out of the hat of the same”. See L, Essays, p.72. and pp 173-174 and Leinas, Basic we, pp 14-20. We are inclined to think that Laplanches ignorance, however, derives from his need to underline that psychoanalysis, unlike philosophy, and in spite its own “strayings”, within itself carries the break (present in Freud's seduction theory) with Ptolemaism.

3. Indisputably, this presupposes a certain reading of Levinas, first of all, a return to his 1968 version of “Substitution” (as well as to Otherwise then Being ). There we find that: “It is from the subjectivity understood as a self..whereby the Ego does not appear but immolates itself, that the relationship with the other is possible as communication and transcendence.” Also: “It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion, and proximity in the world.” See Levinas, E., Basic ph..wr, pp 69-95.

Levians to a great extent thinks of the subject (in spite his ignorance and refusal of psychoanalysis) as a trauma and his ethical relation to the other is “a traumatology” – and the question precisely becomes what does it mean to think the meaning of the unconscious in terms of the traumatism of persecution? See Critchley, 183-197.

4. See Levinas, E, Basic, Enigma and Phenomenon, 65-77. Also, Otherwise then Being.

5. See Laplanche, Essays, pp 72-73.

6. The concept of the „enigmatic signifier“was previously used by Lacan, in order to designate the repressed term which is substituted by a conscious representation in the structure of the symptom. Laplanche's use of this concept, however, refers to his general theory of primal seduction and the way through which the adult other sends ‘messages' to the infant.

7. Laplanches notes that Freud's alteration between relapses into Ptolomaism and a Copernican shift almost at every period of his work, that the Ptolemaic moment, therefore, is already present at the moment when the seduction theory finds its strongest affirmation. Essays, pp. 60-61.

8. Laplanche exposes three major Freudian “strayings”: tendency toward biologising (as later developed in Klein), “structural” tendency (as developed by Lacan) and a monadological tendency (as developed in the ego-psychology).

9. “We invariably find that a memory is repressed which had only become a trauma by deferred action .”

10. See Laplance, Essays, p. 71.

11. Perhaps it is, however, most adequate to, instead of “stranger” speak, with Laplanche, rather of “stranger-ness”, “foreigner-ness” and “alien-ness”.

12. Life and Death, p. 34.

13. Laplanche argues that Freud's great discovery was the “level III” of human time. That is exactly time of memory and project, time of afterwardness. See Essays, pp. 100-102.

14. “The primal situation is one in which a new born child, an infant in the etymological sense of the word (in-fans: speechless) is confronted with the adult world. This may even mean that what we call the Oedipus complex is in a sense subject to contingency.”, p. 90.

15. “In the primal situation we have, then, a child whose ability to adapt is real but limited, weak and waiting to perverted, and a deviant adult…inclined to perform bungled or even symbolic actions because he is involved in a relationship with his other self, with the other he once was. The child in front of him bring out the child within him.”, p.103.

16. Laplanche's topographical situation of the enigmatic signifiers refers to the peripheral surface of the body, particularly erogenous zones as sites of passage and exchange.

17. Laplanche reminds that Freud's famous example of the fort-da game (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) exactly demonstrates this process: the signifier there is the absence of the father or the mother, actively taken up by the child though the fort-da game.

18. Certainly, Laplanche contextualizes Freud's distinction between der Andere and das Andere within his theory of primal seduction and concept of afterwardsness. Der Andere, is here the initiator of (the moment of) inscription, the “writer”, while Das Andere is its “by-product”, its untranslated remainder in the unconscious. However, it seems that the situation of the adult other displays a duplicity within itself, the duplicity of its simultaneous relation (and reaction) of mutually “excluding” ‘child/adult' roles, that occurs through transformation of its own primary passive condition into an active engagement upon . This resembles a process of rewriting personal history . And precisely as such it is the “sensitive” point of Laplanche's argument, at least for a part of it. For it remains as a question to what extent is the action of the adult other actually directed toward the external other and his otherness and is his primary “function” to serve a mere substitute, a substitute for “me”, a possibility to influence and “change” the direction of my past that has never been present. This would inevitably, as a process of self-seduction (because I am not aware of my own “making”) point to a form of self-occupation, and exactly one of solus ipse . Or, a different solution would be then to say that the external other is still the “cause and guarantee” of the internal other (because “the unconscious is in no sense an other myself in me, possible more authentic than me, a Mr. Hyde alternating with a Dr Jekyll”, Essays, p. 108), that the unconscious is maintained only through seduction; that the infant still “results” and becomes through the enigmatic signifiers, but these do not belong to his present external adult other, but rather to someone else, a missing third , who actually determines and governs the whole relation “between us”. In final instance, we would than be faced with the reality of messages as the utmost reality which would be “objective” precisely to the extent that its author(s) are unknown (or, rather, untranslatable) but mostly present, ghosts of our existence – and “subjective” to the extent that we constantly engage in a rewriting of the original masterpiece.

19. Aside from establishing his distinction to Lacan and to the priority of “language” (which then leads him to the priority of trans-individual structures and not the alterity of the other) this gesture is even more significant in the relation to the difference between Laplanches conception of “primary violence” and Derrida's reflection of it, as exposed in Violence and Metaphysics. But this does not mean to say that Laplanche would deny Derrida's demonstration that there is something violent in the speech itself, on contrary. Still, he is more focused on its “other” side, namely, and in an Levinasian manner, the situation of the original traumatism that becomes through my encounter with the other, the “forcible” character of his approaching and the fact that I can never completely grasp/translate his messages and actions toward me, which necessarily to some extent always initiates a certain frustration, as a result of my failure.

20. One of the frequent questions about Heidegger is still: “Where is love in Heidegger?” In the case of Laplanche, the question would be is it situated in the translation or, rather, belongs exactly to silence, to that which can never be translated and remains enigmatic? But if this is, more or less evidently the case is this silence, in ordinary everydayness, necessarily a disturbing one? If it is not, then, ideally, the primal seduction might well appear as an experience of love. Or an absence of this message. Certainly, we are not forgetting here the important distinction between the vital and the human, the cultural and the sexual order, but are addressing a different question: does the sexual field, the field of message and seduction, and precisely if its movement is “centripetal” and not “centrifugal”, necessarily need to be “closely tided” to the masochistic field? See Laplanche, pp. 197, 211-213.