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In “Freud and the Scene of Writing” Jacques Derrida expressed his understanding of Freud’s idea of psychical genesis as, “delay which is in the beginning” (1978, p. 203). What is this delay? It signifies the later effects of emergence—a process, a trace, a Being not defined by presence—found in the psychic processes that (re)create the sexual subject—Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit. The concept is taken up by Jean Laplanche in his “general theory of seduction” and is translated as afterwardness (1999, p. 260). Laplanche’s general theory of seduction and his theory of the “enigmatic signifier/messages” are at the heart of Quindeau’s thesis regarding subjectivity and sexuality (i.e. the sexual). At every significant juncture in this book, one is brought back to Quindeau’s (re)articulation of Laplanche’s theory of being overcome by the touch, fantasy, desires of the Other (der Andere, the other person), and the cumulative effects that form the capacity to “delay” and continually reinscribe, throughout life, the all-too-powerful early enigmatic messages of sexuality. Subjectivity is held hostage to the “alien-ness” (1997, p. 654) of the Other (das Andere, the unconscious). The psyche becomes a (re)writing machine which is not just seduced once, but constantly re-worked—a type of inter-desiring text—since new pleasures and experiences can be (re)inscribed through these acts of seduction and unconscious (re)inscriptions, “we may still maintain that the first time of the contact between two forces, repetition has begun” (1978, p. 202).
Quindeau explores the held historical assumptions and theoretical conceptualizations of sexuality and development found constituting the psychoanalytic subject. Quindeau, like Lacan, problematizes the assumptions of the relational and object schools’ grand narratives of a subject’s psychic journey toward individualization and independence. In place of this Western presupposition of self-sufficiency—an autological subjectivity—she offers a hybrid of