ABSTRACT
The core of this essay is a clinical vignette that meets up with a political category where the co-incidence of opposites—implantation and intromission (Laplanche) fantasizing and fantasying (Winnicott)—opens up colonization from the realm of cultures and geographies to that of the most intimate and troubling. As it traces the effects of a desire that co-opts the body and psyche of the one in the service of the other, as per a parent's sexual abuse of a child, the vignette underscores the extent to which we are colonized in the most elemental of gestures and at our most basic, most structural of cores, the extent to which, in other words, we are libidinal in so far as we are colonized and colonized so as to be libidinal. The vignette becomes a prompt for a reassessment of the relational and clinical dimensions of the capacity to be alone, of the entanglement of solitude with loneliness, separateness with abandonment.
