Laplanche's Reconstruction of Freud's Other-Centered Subject: The Enigmatic Signifier and its Political Uses

Abstract

This essay continues the exploration of Freud's “exigency and going-astray,” as they are defined in Jean Laplanche's essay of that name, by tracing one major going-astray detected by Laplanche in Freud's thinking: Freud's erasure of his own radical discovery that the other is central to the self. In the process of restoring the Freudian model of the decentered self, Laplanche creates the theoretical category of the message, or the enigmatic signifier. I argue that Laplanche's model of the enigmatic signifier can be extended past childhood to illuminate the signifying processes of adult citizens forced to deal with enigmatic messages from the state. By way of example, I use the notion of the enigmatic signifier to analyze the US public's long-sustained patient acceptance of George W Bush's misleading rhetoric.