The Future of Diaspora

Abstract

In grammar, you say, the first person is the person who speaks. The second person is the person to whom I speak. The third person is the person of whom I speak. But who is the person who speaks to me?1And so I face this text. I must respond to it. But responding to this text, already mediated by the failed proximity of translation, I cannot fully face this text, I cannot transform the text into a face. I miss it. But, my missing of it, my failure to face up to it, is also an encounter with it, and engagement with it, and a responsibility it. [...] Now, I turn to this text, I work with it and it, having already failed it.2Afterwardsness, or the Possibility of Translating Oneself into the FutureIN AN INTERVIEW WITH CATHY CARUTH following the publication of his Essays on Otherness, a selection of texts taken from the French collection La Revolution copernicienne inachevee and focusing on the primacy of the other3 the formation of subjectivity, Jean Laplanche discusses aspects of his work that might imply new developments the theory of trauma, notably his reappraisal and reformulation of Freud's early theory of seduction as developed the latter's 1895 essay Project a Scientific Psychology. At the heart of his attempt to unearth a theory that him- self had abandoned 18974 lies Laplanche's determination to develop his own 'general' theory of primal or originary seduction, by contrast with what he calls Freud's special seduction theory, as well as to do justice - perhaps better justice, Laplanche provocatively argues his interview with Caruth, than ever did - to the crucial role of certain concepts that had himself discovered and then neglected later developments of his work, from primal fantasies, through 'leaning-on' ('Anlehnung'), to 'Nachtraglichkeit' (which is translated as 'deferred action' James Strachey's canonical rendering of the term, though Laplanche's suggestion of the English neologism 'afterwardsness' has now gained increasing acceptance).What Laplanche indeed ventures is that, when the famous Viennese psychoanalyst turned away, from 1897 onwards, from his first hypothesis that originary or traumatic seduction owes as much to the adult's unconscious sexual fantasies as to the child's reminiscences of the primal scene (thereby reducing traumatic seduction, his post-1897 work, either to the memories or to the fantasies of the subject), fact forgot the importance of his own theory,5 as Laplanche puts it, which consequently caused him to suppress the play between external and internal causalities that primal or traumatic seduction progressively generates the subject. For Laplanche, it is necessary to understand the primal situation not terms of a binary logic opposing the external (the brute reality of sexual molestation or the witnessing of parental intercourse, instance) and the internal (the child's memories and/or fantasies of the primal situation), but terms of a dialectical relation between the two. The preservation of this dialectical relation between external and internal causalities enables one to take into account what otherwise gets omitted: namely, the action of the adult other6 on the subject, particular the key role that the 'enigmatic message' unconsciously transmitted from the adult to the child the course of the primal situation will play later on the inevitable subsequent reworkings and re-imaginings of such a scene by the latter, which are essential to the elaboration of the child's own psyche. Freud is never to suspect this idea, writes Laplanche this respect, that the primal scene only has its impact because it bears a message, a giving-to-see or a giving-to-hear on the part of the parents. He adds:There is not only the reality of the other in itself, forever unattainable (the parents and their enjoyment) together with the other for existing only my imagination; there is also - primordially - the one who addresses me, the other who wants something of me, if only by not concealing intercourse. …