The Corpse Washer
“When I am buried, I want the corpse washerman to see a male body.” Proferred as an explanation for pursuing SRS even after legal reassignment has been achieved, this imaginary scene attests to a desire in excess of state law, community norms and religious dogma. Laplanche and Pontalis’s famous essay on fantasy (1968 [1964]) contains the oft-cited claim that the subject is dispersed in the scene setting of the fantasy rather than represented in a single element or character. The corpse washer fantasy may indeed be such a syntax for the desire of the SRS aspirant, but another, later formation of fantasy enables a reading of the fantasy as a particular form of sublimation of what Laplanche calls the enigmatic message as it is carried and repeated in an ongoing address to and from the other, who presents the enigma of gendered embodiment and desire (2014 [1999]: 77-104).
In 1999, Laplanche returned to Freud’s metapsychology to argue that the seduction theory holds the kernel of “human sexuality” insofar as the infant is the recipient of nurturing care, suckling and caresses, which communicate the sexual unconscious of the caregiver and inscribe this unconscious transmission as a mystery or enigmatic signifier (2014 [1999]). The mystery of the other’s desire has many psychic destinies but includes sublimation, which Laplanche associates with symbolisation. The enigmatic message marks the irreducible dimension of otherness for which the forms of translation (repression, sublimation etc…) are “process(es) of closure to the other’s address … an enigmatic … seductive … sexual address” in the service of a primary drive to “know” by resolving the enigmatic message in flattening sublimations that bind the drive or by opening up to otherness as traumatic enigma (91). Far from signalling a freedom we associate with creativity, symbolization contains mystery and shuts down unbound energy. As a counterpart to binding, inspiration is an orientation of openness to trauma that “drives” the subject to seek further expression or find new symbols.
Gender is part of the message and positioned prior to sexuality in so far as the sense made of the enigma (in touch, silence, gesture, and signs between adults) arrives as already gendered and to be translated, repressed, or foreclosed as the advent of sexuality through fantasy. Among the overwhelming priority of unconscious signifiers is the question of gender as a mysterious imposition of the other’s desire and iterative closure to the other’s address or as responses to a goad. Underlining the significance of Laplanche’s intervention for gender theory, Judith Butler writes: “Laplanche’s view is that we rethink gender assignment as an unconsciously transmitted desire, a view with implications for current sociological and legal approaches to questions of gender assignment and reassignment” (2014: 126-127). The corpse washing fantasy, as an answer to the suggestion that surgery is not necessary, engages the enigmatic other by repeating the gestures of intimate care and implantation in a fantasy of last rites.
The Muslim burial rite makes few demands but among them, the body must be washed and wrapped in a clean cloth to be buried within three days. Beyond that, simplicity is the rule and variation the reality. Even the prayers may be brief. Thus the extension and suspension of time in the fantasy – its “time of fantasy – which imagines the preparation of remains for burial when the aspirant is still living, is itself both reflective of the character of Muslim rites and a violation of the simplicity and “letting go” that this simplicity serves. Practices vary; it is of interest to note that among the general rules, the eldest relative of the same gender washes the body and so, the corpse washing fantasy carries the kernel of familial care and gender decorum in the scene of after death where the encounter between the caregiver and the self stages only serenity. The silent labor of the corpse washer, who looks but sees that there is nothing to see, affirms the symbolic recuperation of the subject in an imaginary form. As Laplanche puts it, contra “a certain Lacanianism,” “the ‘symbolic’ as well as the ‘imaginary’ are both in the service of the ego – and thus caught up in the almost inescapable position of ‘Ptolemaic’ reclosure”(2014: 91). Here, in the corpse washing fantasy, the symbolic reinscription and redemption of the body and its true, preferred and perceived gender works in tandem with the imaginary by “binding through the narcissistic image” (91).