Forever Opaque: Glissant, Laplanche, and Return to Seoul

This article puts two concepts in dialogue: the French-Antillean theorist and poet Édouard Glissant's notion of “opacity” and the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's notion of the “enigmatic signifier.” Together, these two thinkers question the fiction of a self that is transparent to itself, the desire to render the other transparent, and the idea that comprehension and understanding are prerequisites to living and working alongside one another. In the second half of this article, these ideas are applied to an interpretation of the film Return to Seoul (dir. Davy Chou, France/Germany/Belgium/South Korea/Romania/Cambodia/Qatar, 2022), an elliptical portrait of a Korean-French adoptee revisiting the country of her birth.