This video is a gift from my brother David. David took an academic article of mine that I published last year and used it as inspiration for this video essay. When academics publish things, we hope for some form of engagement from an audience, but experience usually teaches us not to get too hopeful. Maybe there will be a footnote that mentions the work a few years down the track, maybe there will be an invitation to speak or write further on the topic, or maybe there will be a kind email from someone who appreciated the publication. I’ve received all of these forms of engagement and have been grateful each time. But academics usually wish for more. We fantasize about some audience scattered in the future who will not just read what we write but do something with it, who will see and feel that our words and ideas carry an energy or force that calls for more to be said, more to be thought, more to be created, even if it is critical. We want our work to inspire others just as others’ work inspired our own. Of course, academics can overestimate the importance of their own work, or become overinvested in how others use it or critique it. But the desire to have one’s voice heard and creatively responded to is a fundamentally human one. To be human is to be driven, to undergo ourselves as a force that is never exhausted or contained in what we alone can make of it. Which is why to be human is to need and want others, others whose own drivenness finds points of resonance with ours and who therefore enable the ongoing transformation that is the burden and gift of being human. We seek this transformation in love, in friendship, in art, in education, in therapy, and yes, in academic writing.
The essay that inspired this video is about transformation, specifically about the drivenness of human subjectivity, its origin in a primal situation of being-addressed, and the sort of ethics this calls for. It is titled, “Ethical-Religious Seduction: Laplanche and Kierkegaard on the Priority of the Other.”[i] In it, I read Soren Kierkegaard’s account of subjectivity through Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic metapsychology, specifically his “general theory of seduction.” I argue that the two thinkers’ respective accounts of subjectivity are resonant with each other in the priority they assign to otherness, both in the constitution of subjectivity itself and in the possibility of subjective transformation. Both Laplanche and Kierkegaard theorize subjectivity through scenes of transformation. There is an originary transformation at the ground of subjectivity itself, what Laplanche calls “primal repression” and what Kierkegaard calls “original sin,” both triggered by the not-yet subject undergoing and responding to a seductive, enigmatic address. And then there are subsequent scenes of transformation in which a repetition of being-addressed enigmatically incites a renewed opening and retranslation of subjectivity. In Laplanche, these subsequent scenes are created through “transference,” in Kierkegaard, they are created through “indirect communication.” (Go read the article for details!)
Why read Kierkegaard and Laplanche through each other? There are proper academic reasons, of course, but academic reason is also a site of the drive. Retrospectively, I have wondered whether using Laplanche to re-read Kierkegaard is a way of staging a scene of transformation, namely, my own. Translating aspects of Kierkegaard’s thinking into Laplanche’s metapsychology, which is part of a larger project on theology and psychoanalysis, is a way of unbinding and rebinding my attachment to a field that has, for better and for worse, shaped me deeply. I have often fantasized about abandoning theology. But maybe this fantasy marks an anxiety about the deeper possibility of transforming my relationship to theology. In the article, I write, “The reader first picks up Kierkegaard’s texts, like one first goes to analysis, with the supposition that this other knows something. However, the reason to keep reading, like the reason to keep going to analysis, is not for what this other knows but for what they don’t know, for their patient staging of enigma and the exigency of unknowing.” Unbinding our certainty about ourselves (including our intellectual interests), an unbinding incited by the other who opens the originary wound of subjectivity, is the beginning of transformation.
And so the gift: my article about the other wounded by the other. David cut my article into a video essay, transforming it with his own aesthetic “analysis.” What he gave back to me was not a different discursive argument but a surprising and seductive form. The video releases a movement of my ideas along a freer and more capacious associative chain, which is the particular unbinding-rebinding work of the Godard-inspired, montage form that David works with. What is released through this lysis of the text, its cutting with image, music, voice, and noise is a measure of unbound or enigmatic affect. This unbound energy generates an escape velocity that opens transformative paths beyond the circular orbits of meaning in which texts (and psyches) can get stuck. David’s video circuits my writing back to me through the cut of his otherness, restaging the complex path of transformation that is the fundamental structure and pathos of subjectivity. The technical psychoanalytic term for this is après-coup. What any subject “is” is lived in the “after-blow” of what it will have been. The originary transformation that founds the subject returns from the future by way of the others who address us along the way.
Thank you, David.
[i] Kline, Peter. “Ethical-Religious Seduction: Laplanche and Kierkegaard on the Priority of the Other” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 67, no. 1 (2025): 20-45. https://doi.org/10.1515/nzsth-2024-0027
