Cultural Seduction as a Modality of the Desire/Power Immanence: a Proposal for Queer Psychoanalysis

Taking seriously the invitation of queer theorists (in particular those that draw on Michel Foucault) to consider the subject of desire as being produced by power relations, this article puts forward the concept of “cultural seduction” as an example of one of the modalities of what the author calls “desire-power immanence”. It proposes to psychoanalysts attuned to the articulation of sexuality and power the hypothesis that desires are the hypersingular products of the intrapsychic injection of phantasies – phantasies which are themselves public, and which circulate in social spaces in the form of cultural objects. By extending the Laplanchian theory of generalized seduction to the cultural objects that are considered as an important part of the adult world, we can posit a concept of “cultural seduction” which can account for both the hypersingularity of desire and for the processes of normalization which nonetheless condition desire’s existence.