What lurks beneath: The erotic charge of the Laplanchean unconscious and the digital object

Abstract

This paper takes a feminist approach to rethinking the significance of user-device interaction, attachments and dependency. It suggests that Jean Laplanche’s resignification of ‘seduction’, the function of the ‘enigmatic message’ and reconfiguration of sexuality as a ‘charge and tension’ are particularly useful for theorising the relationship that smartphones, as digital objects, have to unconscious sexuality and psychic life. The paper suggests that the draw of user-device interactions is connected to the rhythms of unconscious sexuality and that this opens up a space for thinking beyond subject-object dichotomies and ultimately offers hope for a shift in the cultural imaginary.