Sinthome

sinthome

The term sinthome is, as Lacan points out, an archaic way of writing what has more recently been spelt symptÙme. Lacan introduces the term in 1975, as the title for the 1975-6 seminar, which is both a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar's focus on the BORROMEAN KNOT, and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Through this coincidentia oppositorum - bringing together mathematical theory and the intricate weave of the Joycean text - Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his final topology of the subject.

1. Before the appearance of sinthome, divergent currents in Lacan's thinking lead to different inflections of the concept of the SYMPTOM. As early as 1957, the symptom is said to be 'inscribed in a writing process' (Ec, 445), which already implies a different view to that which regards the symptom as a ciphered message. In 1963 Lacan goes on to state that the symptom, unlike acting out, does not call for interpretation; in itself, it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no one (Lacan, 1962-3: seminar of 23 January 1963; see Miller, 1987: 11). Such comments anticipate the radical transformation of Lacan's thought implicit in his shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom - as a signifier - to his statement, in the 1974-5 seminar, that 'the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him' (Lacan, 1974-5: seminar of 18 February 1975).

This move from conceiving of the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious 'structured like a language', to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's jouissance, culminates in the introduction of the term sinthome. The sinthome thus designates a signifying formulation beyond analysis, a kernel of enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic. Far from calling for some analytic 'dissolution', the sinthome is what 'allows one to live' by providing a unique organisation of jouissance. The task of analysis thus becomes, in one of Lacan's last definitions of the end of analysis, to identify with the sinthome.

2. The theoretical shift from linguistics to topology which marks the final period of Lacan's work constitutes the true status of the sinthome as unanalysable, and amounts to an exegetical problem beyond the familiar one of Lacan's dense rhetoric. The 1975-6 seminar extends the theory of the Borromean knot, which in the previous seminar had been proposed as the essential structure of the subject, by adding the sinthome as a fourth ring to the triad of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, tying together a knot which constantly threatens to come undone. This knot is not offered as a model but as a rigorously non-metaphorical description of a topology 'before which the imagination fails' (Lacan, 1975-6: seminar of 9 December 1975). Since meaning (sens) is already figured within the knot, at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary (see Figure 1), it follows that the function of the sinthome - intervening to knot together real, symbolic and imaginary - is inevitably beyond meaning.

3. Lacan had been an enthusiastic reader of Joyce since his youth (see the references to Joyce in Ec, 25 and S20, 37). In the 1975-6 seminar, Joyce's writing is read as an extended sinthome, a fourth term whose addition to the Borromean knot of RSI allows the subject to cohere. Faced in his childhood by the radical non-function/absence (carence) of the Name-of-the-Father, Joyce managed to avoid psychosis by deploying his art as supplÈance, as a supplementary cord in the subjective knot. Lacan focuses on Joyce's youthful 'epiphanies' (experiences of an almost hallucinatory intensity which were then recorded in enigmatic, fragmentary texts) as instances of 'radical foreclosure', in which 'the real forecloses meaning' (seminar of 16 March 1976).

The Joycean text - from the epiphany to Finnegans Wake - entailed a special relation to language; a 'destructive' refashioning of it as sinthome, the invasion of the symbolic order by the subject's private jouissance. One of Lacan's puns, synth-homme, implies this kind of 'artificial' self-creation.

Lacan's engagement with Joyce's writing does not, he insists, entail 'applied psychoanalysis'. Topological theory is not conceived of as merely another kind of representational account, but as a form of writing, a praxis aiming to figure that which escapes the imaginary. To that extent, rather than a theoretical object or 'case', Joyce becomes an exemplary saint homme who, by refusing any imaginary solution, was able to invent a new way of using language to organise enjoyment.