This fantasy is also legible as an imaginary address to the enigma of the other – Laplanche’s primary other – who is not represented in the scene, neither washer nor the washed but who is dispersed throughout the fantasy. Fundamentally a dramatization of the awakening of the subject to “new life” and “new sexuality,” the scene conveys an image of passive receptivity or originary helplessness. What awakens here is the body as the true body, appearing in the guise of ego ideal or that which I wish another to see in me; yet, it materializes without authority, for the agency of the scene lies with the washer’s caring hands and neutral vision. As Laplanche puts it, “inspiration is conjugated via the other. Its subject is not ‘the subject’ but the other” and “in its resonance with the originary adult other, this other comes to re-open at privileged moments the wound of the unexpected, of the enigma” (99).
The fantasy of finitude, expressible as “death comes despite my life,” is also a fantasy of fatality, “my death as condition and evidence of new life”; the fantasy can be understood as a radical exposure or, as Laplanche puts it, the reopening and unbinding of the wound of the primary other’s incursion. This fantasy of one’s own death, legible as an imaginary address to, in Laplanche’s terms, the enigma of the primary other, inspires particular trans subjects to pursue a more sincere and authentic embodiment of themselves. Here, the bodily ego imagines a scene of its ideal body, the one seen by the corpse washer as only a body without surprises, as expected, indeed a body mirroring their own.
The trans fantasy of the corpsewasher evokes a religious rite and spiritual devotion as a symbolization of new life. To become the ideal body, the cis gendered body must die. Does the fantasy imagine the self as newly cis or transsexual? Does the accomplishment of SRS serve the function of erasing the labour of living conduct to replace it with the calm repose of indisputable gendered bodily form in deathly matter? Has the difference between cis and transsexual become indistinct and immaterial before the materialization of the new body, now only imaginable as lacking the animating soul? If the meaning of the religious ritual is not otherworldly but fixed on the experience of the washer after the self-in-conduct has relinquished the self, does it also carry a trace of ambivalent mourning for that unwanted body, who had to die so that they might live? Along the lines proposed by Laplanche and Freud that we imagine our own death through the death of the person “close to us,” I am suggesting that the trans-ness of the fantasy depends upon this translation or trace of the unwanted and mistaken body, while the inspiration allows the other, here the corpse washer in the “right” body, to re-appear, to re-open the wound of the traumatizing message. In Laplanchean terms, this is to read a fantasy of originary seduction and implantation of the enigmatic message (gender-sexuality) while also understanding it as a making oneself available to the “other, who comes to surprise me” (98). Serenity of the death rite is the language of this surprise.