5.

Seduction, Gender and

the Drive

Judith Butler

Editors’ note: Judith Butler’s essay ‘Seduction, Gender and the Drive’ offers
an outline of key theoretical innovations that Laplanche’s analytical
re-traversal of certain Freudian categories has given rise to, with a focus on
the implications of Laplanche’s thought for the politically contested sites of
gender, sexuality and kinship. In particular, she reflects on the implications
of two of Laplanche’s major re-orientations of psychoanalytic theory for the
thinking of gender. The first is his systematic development of Freud’s largely
implicit differentiation between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt),
between the acquired sexual drives (plural) and the inherited self-preserva-
tive functions; and the second, intimately connected with the first, is the
priority of the adult other and the other’s seductive transmissions/implanta-
tions within the infans (without language) through the ordinary
ministrations of nurture and childcare. Laplanche only came to address the
question of gender in a late essay1 where he poses it in its distinctions from
and relations to both sexuation or sexual difference (le sexué) on the one
hand and the polymorphous perverse sexual drives (le sexual) on the other.2
While Freud doesn’t have a specific term for gender, he does, as Laplanche’s
interpretative reading demonstrates, have a descriptive recognition of it as
distinct from specifically sexual difference. Here again Laplanche gives a
theoretical clarity to the term by locating it within the general theory of
primal seduction and translation. Where gender is conventionally thought
of as gender identity (e.g. by identification with the gendered adult),
Laplanche argues that identification with the other is necessarily preceded
by a prior identification by the other. Butler takes up this thesis of gender
as an enigmatic message and as an assignation to a pre-existing codified
gender (that requires further translation) in an illuminating exploration of
its productive consequences for thinking the priority of gender in relation to
sexuation and embodiment.

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My aim in this paper is to call attention to Laplanche’s re-elabora-

tion of seduction and the drive, and its radical rethinking of the
relationship between the cultural world, understood as the adult
world, and the formation of infantile sexuality. Th is theory has
broad-reaching consequences for gender, embodiment, and kinship,
including a rethinking of oedipalisation. I will sketch out some of
these consequences, and suggest what I understand to be radical and
original in Laplanche’s contribution to thinking about both seduc-
tion and the drive.
Laplanche has been concerned that psychoanalysis, in its theory
and practice, always runs the risk of reproducing a certain narcissism
of the ego, and that its own theoretical vocabularies encode and
perpetuate what can only be understood as a resistance to the uncon-
scious itself. In a general way, we find this, for instance, in those
theories that treat the ego as the basis of therapeutic treatment and
psychoanalytic theory, but we also find it within a certain customary
grammar by which the unconscious is described. If a subject is said to
‘have an unconscious’ or if a subject is enjoined to know his or her
‘unconscious’, then it appears that the unconscious is a predicate of
that subject, or that the unconscious is something that can, in prin-
ciple, be fully translated into conscious knowing. Laplanche argues
persuasively that if we are to conceptualise the unconscious appropri-
ately, it would demand not only a disruption of our grammar, but a
certain dislocation of the human subject within a broader metaphys-
ical scheme. In other words, the unconscious is what decentres the
subject, making it impossible to take either the subject or the ego as a
point of departure for the understanding of psychic life. The uncon-
scious is not a ‘part’ of the mind, strictly speaking, since that would
once again posit the mind as a container, that is, as a structure that is
not disrupted and disoriented by the unconscious. Even our efforts to
‘know’ the unconscious will be up-ended by what we cannot recover
and cannot know. The irrecoverable and unknowable constitute us
essentially, and they mark a certain limit to our capacity for cognitive
mastery.3 This would imply a strong criticism of those conceptual
schemes that either presuppose cognitive mastery in their theoretical
descriptions of the mind or the ego, or which prescribe cognitive
mastery as a norm of psychoanalytic treatment.
Such theories tend to override or refuse the traumatic origins of the
drive. Laplanche argues that drives have their ‘sources’ in the untrans-

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lated remainders of enigmatic signifiers that are traumatically implanted

by the other and partially but always imperfectly metabolised by the
infantile recipient. As a result, the general theory of seduction presup-
poses a primary trauma, an unwanted interruption by what is foreign,
and the installation of what is foreign within the psyche which
co-produces the inscrutable and persistent sources of the drive.4
Freud calls ‘popular opinion’ about the nature and characteristics
of sexuality ‘a very false picture of the true situation’: ‘it is generally
understood to be absent in childhood’, develops with heterosexual
aims in place, and simply unfolds according to a biological necessity
and rhythm that has self-preservation and self-perpetuation (if not the
perpetuation of the species) as its goal.5 In Freud’s vocabulary, Instinkt
appears to be reserved for what is hereditary, innate, invariant, and so
endogenous to the organism. When Freud turns to the term Trieb,
however, he is marking an emergence of infantile component drives
that are not fully understandable as part of the self-preservative
instincts. Laplanche insists that something interrupts this biological
unfolding, but also works upon it in unpredictable ways. It is exoge-
nous, it seems to find its sources in the introduction of what is foreign
into the psyche. The drive is, thus, precisely not hereditary; and neither
is it adaptive, conceived as part of an evolutionary scheme, linked with
an internal urge to survive.
His view is that the source of the infantile sexual drives is deposited
precisely through parental or adult impingements that incite and
excite the infant through the forms of being cared for, handled,
impressed upon, held – in other words, sexuality emerges in its first
moment as the ‘leaning’ (Anlehnung) of the drive on the instinctual,
self-preservative functions (of feeding, digestion, excretion etc), speci-
fied by Freud in the second of the Three Essays, that on ‘Infantile
Sexuality’. The language and gestures of the adult are enigmatic, and
remain so for the rest of life. But these enigmatic signifiers, to use
Laplanche’s terms, are metabolised and worked-over psychically by
the infant’s processes of repression, whose failures of translation
deposit a foreign body, as it were, lodged within, without which there
would be no drive, that is, no sexual desire.
What is perhaps most important to underscore here is that adults
communicate desire through any number of means, a situation that
constitutes a rapport at the level of bodies, and even establishes a
certain somatic relationship that is at once traumatic (in the sense of

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enigmatic, too much to handle, and overwhelming) and inciting (in

the sense that the unbindable excess of these enigmatic messages, as it
were, forms the sources of the drives). The infant is not yet speaking
but is still saturated in communication; most importantly, the infant
is in a state of helplessness in relation to the messages by which he or
she is surrounded and addressed.
There are two points that follow from the scheme I have just offered.
The first is that the idea of ‘attachment’ that focuses on the non-trau-
matic or even anti-traumatic character of parental interventions also
bears on the emergence of infantile sexuality and the unconscious. If
we are to think through the problem of attachment more carefully, we
will have to accept that the very actions that help to sustain the infant
are those which will be, of necessity, overwhelming and enigmatic,
will communicate an adult sexuality that cannot be fathomed; the
unprocessed by-products of these actions will continue to act upon the
infant and form sexuality in ways that establish its distance from an
instinctual or hereditary basis. This intervention or impingement that
is necessary for survival (since it supplements the deficient self-preserv-
ative instincts) and also incites drives or sexual desire is what is posited
by a generalised theory of seduction. Now, of course, many well-meaning
and progressive people will worry that Laplanche has made a mess of
things, returning us from attachment to an outmoded or discredited
model of seduction. After all, attachment favours modes of emotional
care, holding, and sustenance that are exactly the opposite of unwanted
sexual impingement, seduction and exploitation. So we have every
reason to pause here.
But I would strongly argue that to contrast attachment with seduc-
tion in this way is to misunderstand the generalised theory of
seduction. It is to disavow the enormous influence of adult sexuality
on the formation of the child and to devalue those communications
that have no exploitative or moral status, but are part of necessary
adult care and intervention, even part of the very tactile and verbal
dimensions of childcare without which the child cannot survive and
cannot emerge as a subject of desire. The moralisation of childcare as
a radically de-eroticised and de-eroticising activity is no less than an
assault on the theory of infantile sexuality, the theory of the drives,
and any account of the unconscious. At which point, we would have
to ask, how much of psychoanalysis has been sacrificed in the name of
a self-serving and delusional morality?

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Secondly, the separation between instinct and drive is not absolute.

But neither can we say that drive is somehow causally derived from
instinct. Only through an external set of interventions is drive sepa-
rated from instinct. By virtue of this generalised scene of seduction the
drive takes on aims that are no longer governed by self-preservation
and the life-instincts that assume it, or the biological reproduction of
the species (the ‘popular’ account of sexuality). According to the
popular view, instinct unfolds a heterosexual aim for human desire, or
so Freud argues in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Drive, on the
other hand, is not derived from instinct (if it were, that would allow
instinct and its unfoldings to govern the trajectory of the drive).
Laplanche refers to the drive, not as continuous with the instinct, nor
as a transmutation of instinct, but as a certain rupture that establishes
what is qualitatively new.6 This drive is sexuality in general, and it may
well be pre- or para-genital, as well as genital. What is most impor-
tant, though, is that it is a sexuality that has its source in fantasy,
where fantasy is not self-generated, but, rather, follows the experience
of being impinged upon and incited. The infant begins his or her
sexual explorations, accedes to a life of fantasy, precisely on the occa-
sion in which it finds itself impressed upon, infiltrated, by signifiers
that are enigmatic and overwhelming. This is the generalised scene of
seduction, one that is coextensive with the generalised scene of
communication that takes place between adult and child. It is not the
same as an exploitative sexual relationship or an act of abuse. It is
rather to be accepted as the erotic consequence of necessary and vital
care, the consequence of an intervention without which the infant
cannot survive and cannot thrive.
So far I have hoped to show that Laplanche has offered a way to
rethink two sets of oppositions. The first is the opposition between
drive and instinct; the second is an opposition between attachment
and drive. He has as persuasively formulated a generalised theory of
seduction, and it is one that I think counters and overcomes some of
the moral objections that have been levelled against that view. The
issue before us is not whether seduction is a fantasy or an event. It may
well be an event without which there is no fantasy. But to understand
its meaning as Laplanche has outlined it, we would have to distinguish
between those forms of impingement that inaugurate the sexual life of
the child, and those forms of impingement that exploit the child’s
unknowingness and dependency for the purposes of abuse. It is not

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necessary to deny the thesis of infantile sexuality in order to take a

moral stand against the sexual exploitation of children. In fact, part of
what is exploited in the child is his or her unknowingness, vulnera-
bility to imprint, radical need for contact, and capacity for fantasy.
This does not mean that we reduce all fantasies of seduction to acts of
impingement, but that we understand better the difference between
those forms of impingement without which the child cannot survive,
and those that imperil that survival and flourishing. But to make this
distinction, we do not have to turn against the early sources of fantasy,
the generalised scene of seduction, or indeed, infantile sexuality.
There is no development of the infant without the intervention of the
other, and the other may well be a parent or a caretaker, so that when we
consider that it may be any adult, it would appear that the gender of that
other is incidental to the fact of intervention. To be called a gender is to
be given an enigmatic and overwhelming signifier; it is also to be incited
in ways that remain in part unconscious. To be assigned a gender is to
be subject to a certain demand, a certain impingement and seduction,
and not to know fully what the terms of that demand might be.
Moreover, the insistence that adult desires may be generated from any
number of quarters in the adult world seems to give us a means of
rethinking the communication of gender in a way that does not presup-
pose the Oedipal structure: the girl who identifies with the mother, or
refuses that identification; the boy who identifies with the father, or
refuses that identification, etc. That intervention by the adult, broadly
understood, is what is named by seduction; and because that seduction
establishes a veering off of drive from instinct, it is the mechanism, we
might say, for understanding their complex interrelationship. They are
not opposites, but neither are they continuous with one another. The
instinct makes the drive possible, but the drive institutes a life of fantasy
that is qualitatively new, and which is not constrained by the teleologies
of biological life. Hence, in Laplanche’s view, seduction is what names
the phenomenon that exceeds ‘traditional oppositions between the
endogenous and the exogenous, the constitutional and the acquired’
(Laplanche, Life and Death, p131).
Further, what we have been calling intervention, impingement or,
indeed, the generalised scene of seduction, does not simply act once;
it is not a single event, and in this way Laplanche’s account of seduc-
tion moves beyond and outside the commonly accepted framework
for adjudicating the dispute over the question of whether seduction is

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fantasy or event. We could not say that seduction in this sense is an

event (which is not to say that there are no events of seduction). And
we could not say that seduction is the content of a fantasy, since seduc-
tion in this generalised sense is what inaugurates fantasy. Needless to
say, this does not mean that there are no fantasies of seduction. It
only means that when we refer to fantasies of seduction we are not yet
understanding, or not yet referring to the generalised scene of seduc-
tion that makes fantasy possible. Similarly, when we speak of an event
of seduction, we are not yet understanding, or not yet referring to the
generalised scene of seduction that is not a single event, but an
ongoing agency.7
So what does the rupture constituted by the drive imply for
thinking about gender and sexuality? I have three points to offer: the
first is that Laplanche’s view asks us to think beyond those versions of
oedipalisation that presuppose the mother and the father as exclusive
and primary designations for parenting or adult care. Second, I’d like
to suggest, with Laplanche, that when we speak about those enig-
matic adult messages that traverse the infant, and that relay adult
desire, we are also speaking, invariably, about gender. Laplanche’s
view is that we rethink gender assignment as an unconsciously trans-
mitted desire, a view with implications for current sociological and
legal approaches to questions of gender assignment and reassignment.
Third, I want to know whether an emphatically non-reproductive
sexuality is what finally marks the drive off from instinct, suggesting
that the dimension of sexuality that is not constrained by instinct is
precisely what constitutes the qualitatively new, and that this emer-
gence from biological constraint is made possible by biology, but is in
no sense determined by it.

KINSHIP AND OEDIPALITY

First, then, how do we understand the implications of Laplanche’s

view for rethinking the taken for granted models of kinship that tend
to underwrite the oedipalisation narrative within psychoanalysis?
John Fletcher makes clear that Laplanche’s recourse to the ‘adult
world’ as the source of sexual messages is a significant departure from
those psychoanalytic accounts that assume that an Oedipal scene
with Mother and Father structures desire at a primary level.8 Fletcher
has rightly noted that Laplanche’s theory of the ‘enigmatic signifier’

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emerges as a clear alternative to the Lacanian symbolic. In the first

instance, we can see that the displacements that are constitutive of
the drive do not follow upon a strict Oedipal prohibition. It is not
that a desire, if unchecked, will deliver one over to a murderous
paternal law; rather, it is that from the outset, sexual desire is beset by
meanings and trajectories that cannot be fully understood and that,
in fact, can never become fully available to conscious reflection. What
propels the displacements of desire is less an effort to evade the
murderous consequences of a prohibitive law than an effort to fathom
a set of adult desires that have become in part translated and assimi-
lated and have been in part refused translation and repressed. The
infant is unknowing and, indeed, helpless, in relation to these over-
whelming and confusing messages relayed more or less unconsciously
by the adult world. As a result, the sexuality that emerges, understood
as a series of displacements from instinct, is a result of this helpless-
ness in the face of the desirous adult word. The infant becomes an
investigative theorist on such an occasion, trying to fathom the
strange force and direction of his or her own impulses. Over and
against a Lacanian perspective that would privilege the paternal law
and its prohibitions, Laplanche resituates the dilemma of the infant
as one in which an enigmatic sexual life emerges as a consequence of
a generalised seduction. The problem for infantile sexuality is not
how to evade death by punishment, but how to fathom a desire that
is, from the start, already the desire of the other.
For those who appreciate how the Lacanian position has been
bound up with structuralist models of kinship, this departure from
Lacanian doxa is enormously consequential. Let’s remember that
several analysts and social psychologists of Lacanian persuasion have
been active in arguing against gay and lesbian parenting in France
(what is called ‘homoparentalité’), and that they often refer to the
symbolic positions of Mother and Father as necessary points of refer-
ence for any child who hopes to emerge into the world in a non-psychotic
way.9 This intense effort to install a contingent form of heterosexual
parenting as a precondition of culture itself and as an invariant norm
of psychic health, is a move that has led to serious legal disenfranchise-
ments and unnecessary attributions of psychopathology. It has led as
well to a widespread misunderstanding, if not phobia, about the vari-
ability of kinship structures, the concrete implications of a
post-structuralism, and the viability for the infant and child of any

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number of parenting and care-taking arrangements that provide

conditions of love.
Theoretically, Laplanche’s departure from Lacan in this regard
implies a full critique of the paternal law, linked to the structuralist
account of the exchange of women and the universalist premises of
‘culture’. This view of the paternal law is countered by a conception
of an adult world that generates and imposes enigmatic signifiers on
an infant who responds with cognitive helplessness, failures in trans-
lation and the drives that have been thereby incited. As a result,
primary messages with an unconscious, sexual affect and dimension
are implanted in the surfaces and orifices of the primitive skin-ego
of the infant. Moreover, those primary others whose desires are
communicated through various practices are themselves in the grip
of such messages (have themselves been incited unconsciously by
such messages). The ones whose desires become the foreign and
inciting elements in my own desire are themselves propelled by what
is foreign and inciting, and invariably so. Hence, all the characters
in the scene are to a large extent, and irreversibly, unknowing about
the meaning and content of the messages by which they are incited
and impelled. There is something foreign in desire, and desire makes
us always in some ways foreign to ourselves. This is because what is
foreign has not only made its way into us, but has become the source
of drives, that which incites the very possibility of an ‘I’ who consti-
tutes a subject of desire.
This account of the inducement of desire offers a distinct alternative
to oedipalisation, a theory that either presumes an instinctual efficacy
in constraining and directing human desire according to biological
requirements, or which accounts for the production of desire as a
consequence of prohibition itself (the Pauline heritage of the Lacanian
view). Indeed, as Fletcher puts it, ‘The Oedipus is no longer primal in
the sense of first, but topographically located as secondary, even
though it may involve the re-elaboration of earlier inscriptions and
translations, and it is no longer primal in the sense of universal but
culturally contingent’ (Fletcher, ‘Letter in the Unconscious’, p118).
According to Fletcher, Laplanche has clearly inaugurated a psycho-
analytic possibility for explaining ‘those psychic trajectories that
swerve from or attempt to rework the normalising function of the
paternal Law and its Oedipal polarities (e.g. various female and male
homosexualities)’ (p118). And here we might add that the strictures of

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the paternal law, which are explicitly theorised over and against a
biological determinism, turn out to parallel the biological require-
ments of instinct that would establish heterosexuality as the exclusive
matrix for sustainable desire. The critique of normalisation that
Laplanche’s view offers us works mainly by the replacement of the
paternal law by the enigmatic signifier.

GENDER AS AN ENIGMATIC MESSAGE

This point leads us to the question of gender, how it is assigned, and

whether we can think of ‘assignment’ outside of the generalised theory
of seduction. I join Fletcher in asking, how do we account for gender
if Oedipus is no longer the exclusive framework in which we consider
the formation of gender? If one cannot presume the heterosexuality of
a parenting structure, and if one cannot presume that children always
or exclusively desire the parent of the opposite sex, then the field is
opened up to any number of permutations. In the Laplanchean view,
the desire communicated to the child may well be complex, or self-
defeating, and it would be necessary to separate the communication of
a desire, heterosexual or homosexual or both, from the ‘identity’ of the
adult and the ‘identity’ that is proffered or assigned to the child: ‘You
be the girl I never was’; ‘You be the man my husband refuses to be’;
‘You be the girl when I need you to be, and then the boy when I need
you to be’ – all of these are possible propositional forms for desires
that, in fact, never arrive with such propositional clarity. In fact, the
communication of ‘gender’ provides an interpellation, a mode of inter-
preting the body that precedes and conditions the experience of
somatic sex. Fletcher thus poses a crucial question on the basis of
Laplanche’s theory: how are we to rethink ‘the psychic constitution
and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image
(the repression and symbolisation of what enigmatic signifiers?) as the
ground or, at least, terrain for the formation of gendered identities’
(Fletcher, ‘Letter in the Unconscious’, p119)? Laplanche can be seen to
take up this question of the ‘ground’ or ‘terrain’ for rethinking the
formation of gendered identities in his final collection: Freud and the
Sexual: Essays 2000-2006.
Why, we might ask, does Laplanche turn to a consideration of
‘gender’ in the midst of a study on sexuality? And what does he mean
by gender? The term ‘gender’ in English-language contexts usually

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refers to a cultural meaning assumed by a body in the context of its

socialisation or acculturation, and so it often makes use of a distinc-
tion between a natural and cultural body in order to secure a definition
for gender as an emphatically cultural production. But what is the
mechanism of that production? If we start with the naming of the
infant, we start to understand gender as a social assignment, but how
precisely does that assignment work?
To answer this question, we have to take our distance from the
notion that gender is simply an attribute of a person. Or, rather, if it
is an attribute, it is attributed, and we have yet to understand the
means and mechanism of that attribution. For Laplanche, gender is
resituated as part of the terrain of the enigmatic signifier itself. In
other words, gender is not so much a singular message, but a
surrounding and impinging discourse, already circulating, and mobi-
lised for the purposes of address prior to the formation of any speaking
and desiring subject. In other words, one is not born into the world
and then happens upon a set of gender options, but gender operates
as part of the generalised discursive conditions that are ‘addressed’
enigmatically and overwhelmingly to an infant and child and which,
I would argue, continue to be addressed throughout the embodied
life of the person. If gender is an enigmatic signifier in this sense,
then, gender operates as part of the primary seduction that we have
described. Indeed, Laplanche takes up the position that gender
precedes sex, and thus he suggests that gender – understood as that
which is addressed to the infant, and so imposed as part of a discur-
sive intervention in the life of the infant – precedes the emergence of
the ‘sexually and genitally differentiated body image’. Needless to say,
I agree with this point.
As a result, for Laplanche, gender is ‘ordinarily double, as in
masculine-feminine’ (Sexual, p159) to be understood as a transmitted
‘code’, whose specific enunciations also entail an indecipherable
dimension, largely communicated as ineffable ‘noise’ (bruit) through
an ‘assignation’ that ought to be understood in terms of a ‘generalised
theory of seduction’. Of course, this view is counter-intuitive to the
extent that we might want to argue that sexual differentiation is, for
the most part, there from the start (although recent research on
intersex has called this presumption into question throughout the
biological and social sciences). But are there conditions under which
‘sex’ understood as sexually differentiated morphology, comes to

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appear as a ‘given’ of experience, something we might take for

granted, a material point of departure for any further investigation
and for any further understanding of gender acquisition? The
sequence that is often used to describe how gender emerges only after
sex, or how gender is something superadded to sex, fails to see that
gender is, as it were, already operating, seizing upon, and infiltrating
somatic life prior to any conscious or reflexive determination of
gender. If gender is relayed, traumatically, through the generalised
scene of seduction, then gender is an assignation that forms and
incites the life of the drive, of sexuality itself. We might ask, which
gender? Or, gender in what sense? But that is already to move ahead
too quickly. Gender is relayed through the generalised scene of seduc-
tion, then it arrives, as Laplanche argues, as an assignation accompanied
by a kind of indecipherable noise. This assignation that is relayed
from various quarters in an adult world carries enigmatic desires and
demands. Laplanche understands the assignation as imposing a ‘code’
for which the infant does not have the key. I am less sure about this
language of the ‘code’ since I am not certain we can distinguish the
mode of address from the content of what is addressed. But that is a
matter we can consider at another time. For now, it is most important
to note that the assignation of gender arrives through the enigmatic
desire of the other, a desire by which somatic life is infiltrated and
which, in turn, or simultaneously, incites a set of displacements and
translations that constitute the specific life of the drive or sexual
desire. Is somatic life determinable outside this scene of assignation?
To the extent that bodily ‘sex’ appears as primary, this very primari-
ness is achieved by a translation of gender assignment by the binary
code of sexual difference and the consequent repression (refoulement)
of what Laplanche calls le sexual as distinct from le sexuel, that is the
polymorphous perverse sexuality of the component part-drives.
Indeed, gender is in part constituted by unconscious wishes conveyed
through the enigmatic assignation of gender, so that one might say
that gender emerges, from early on, as an enigma for the child and
also a demand that targets the child. So the question may well not be,
‘what gender am I?’ but rather, ‘what does gender want of me?’ or
even, ‘whose desire is being carried through the assignation of gender
that I have received and how can I possibly respond?’
An enigma is, of course, a puzzle or paradox, but also a riddle to be
solved. For Laplanche, the nature of the primary enigma is precisely to

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be insoluble. And in this sense, gender is insoluble as well. In his

account of the drive and transference, he rewrites the Kleinian posi-
tion: the desire for the breast may well be less fundamental than the
desire of the breast, that is, the erotogenic character of the breast and
the mode through which its desirousness is communicated. Here
Laplanche invokes the confusion of the child in the face of the breast
that it needs, but which it encounters, unconsciously, as at once
desirous and enigmatically demanding: thus he asks, ‘What does this
breast that feeds and excites me want of me? What incites me to
become excited? What does it want to say to me that it doesn’t know
itself?’10 In Laplanche’s rendition, the child asks him or herself ques-
tions in the face of the breast and its desire, and the breast, treated as
part-object, is imbued with a desire and want of its own.
So it is not mere analogy to claim that gender appears as an enigma
as well. The other’s body not only appears in gendered form but also
conveys a gendered meaning or assignment as part of the demand of
desire. Hence, I can imagine a different set of puzzled questions emerging
for the child: ‘what do my parents want from me when they call me a
girl?’ Being ‘called’ a girl is no simple operation; it never happens just
once. It is a ‘call’ that is repeated and fortified through various institu-
tional means, but, as Laplanche points out, there is more packed into
this call than can be understood by any child. And I would add: there is
more packed into this call than can be understood by any subject at any
time in his or her life. Indeed, the call is, by definition, overwhelming,
carrying more wish and fantasy than its carrier can know or its receiver
can decipher. Our primary encounter with gender, then, takes the form:
‘What does “gender” want of me?’ or, equivalently, ‘what is this perpetual
noise that we call gender, a demand upon me I cannot know and to
which I stand no chance of ever responding adequately?’

ASSIGNMENT AND AGENCY

How does this understanding of gender affect our ways of considering

gender assignment and reassignment? If I decide to reassign my gender,
then I am ‘deciding’ in the context of having already been decided
upon, by others, in ways I cannot fully fathom. This does not mean
that I am determined in advance either by biology (instinct) or indeed
by social interpellations. It only means that there is no assignment of
gender that is not at the same time a certain communication or

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demand and the unconscious wishes it masks. If we are confused

about what gender we might be, it is because the desires that have been
impressed upon us, indeed, those that have traversed and infi ltrated
us, are in some ways permanently enigmatic and inciting to us. Whose
desire is my desire? And whose desire is enacted in the gender assign-
ment that I have received, without really ever having received it in a
knowing way? We may seek to master this situation by choosing our
gender, but we would make an error if we thought we could undo the
unconscious through the exercise of a radical autonomy. The uncon-
scious is the breach in radical autonomy, and that cannot be reversed.
Nevertheless, the separation of drive from instinct is what opens up a
certain future through displacements that are not predictable in
advance. So if we ask the question, ‘what gender might I become?’, we
ask it in the context of a prior question: ‘what has been made of me,
and whose desire has gendered me in the ways that I cannot fully
fathom?’ To maintain that something unfathomable happens in the
course of being gendered is just another way of saying that we are to
some extent brought into existence through the desires of others, and
that the imprint of those desires is what, paradoxically, gives us our
own. ‘Our own’ desires are not radically autonomous, but invariably
haunted and animated by others, by what remains foreign to us, not
‘of’ me and yet ‘of’ me, and without which I could not survive.
If an agency is available to us that is not the same as mastery, and
not radical autonomy, then it will be one that knows that there is no
final triumph over the unconscious. Rather, it would be one that tries
to navigate the domain of gender without eradicating the very condi-
tions for the life of desire. One might try to make gender and desire
one’s own, but that would mean disavowing the ways in which we are
invariably, and from the start, bound up with others in ways we never
chose. So gender is a way of being bound up with others, a way of
navigating that bind. The assignation of gender is one way in which
the drive separates off from instinct and opens a qualitatively new
future, one that does not transcend biology or the impress of the other,
but is determined by neither. We are neither radically enslaved by
gender nor radically free, but we are caught in a bind that begins,
necessarily, with an assignment that is against our will, yet which
installs and incites the very possibility of will, of desire, and of sexu-
ality. To have been intervened upon by others whose care is necessary
for survival, and to develop erotic life on the basis of these primary

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contacts, is part of what it means to be constituted in a larger discourse

and a surrounding culture – this is a trauma, to be sure, and one that
does not stop happening, but it is also what establishes our chance at
aliveness and of living on, in ways that draw on biological and cultural
sources, but which curiously and incessantly depart from any biolog-
ical or cultural determinism.

NOTES
1. Editors’ note: ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Freud and the Sexual: Essays
2000-2006, John Fletcher (ed and trans), Jonathan House, Nicholas Ray,
New York, International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011, pp159-201.
2. Editors’ note: Laplanche invents a neologism in French by transforming
the German component adjective Sexual- into a free-standing noun, in
pointed contrast with the standard French term sexuel. (In German
Sexual mainly appears as a bound adjectival root in combination with a
noun, e.g. Sexualtrieb – sexual drive, Sexualtheorie – sexual theory). This
is an attempt to register terminologically the difference between the
enlarged Freudian notion of sexuality (le sexual) and the common sense
or traditional notion of a mainly genital sexuality (le sexuel). This termi-
nological innovation can’t be captured in English as the German term
Sexual coincides exactly with the spelling of the standard English term
‘sexual’, rather than contrasting with it as in French. The English transla-
tors of the volume in which Laplanche develops this term, Freud and the
Sexual, op.cit., have chosen to signal Laplanche’s neologism by italicizing
sexual – pronounced with a long ‘a’: ah.
3. For a fuller discussion of this constitutive limit to cognitive mastery as
formulated by Laplanche, and of its ethical consequences, see Judith
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, Fordham, 2005, esp.
chapters 2 and 3.
4. This intromission, interruption, or trauma is, in Laplanche’s words, ‘at the
beginning, a wound, conceived of as a “piercing” of the surface of the
body’. See Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970), Jeffrey
Mehlman (trans), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976, p129.
5. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), SE 7, pp123-245,
p135.
6. See ‘Drive and Instinct: distinctions, oppositions, supports and inter-
twinings’, in Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, John Fletcher (ed),
John Fletcher, Jonathan House, Nicholas Ray (trans), New York,
International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011, pp5-25, p22.
7. To explain this last point, Laplanche returns, as he does time and again,
to those opening paragraphs in Studies in Hysteria (1893-1895, SE 2), in
which Freud talks about how primary impingements continue to act long

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after the event of their inception. Freud writes, for instance, ‘the hyster-
ical phenomenon is not of a kind implying that the trauma merely acts
like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads
an independent existence’ (p6). And then slightly later, he continues: ‘we
presume that the psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the
trauma – acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be con-
tinued to be regarded as an agent that is still at work’ (ibid).
8. See John Fletcher, ‘The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic
Signifier in the Work of Jean Laplanche’, in Jean Laplanche: Seduction,
Translation, and the Drives, John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (eds),
London, ICA, 1992, pp93-120.
9. For an analysis of ‘kinship’ and its heteronormative determination within
psychoanalysis and philosophy, see Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim:
Kinship between Life and Death, New York, Columbia UP, 2000. On the
opposition, among certain psychoanalysts in France, to gay and lesbian
parenting, see esp. 69ff.
10. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987), David Macey
(trans), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989, 126.

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