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 unanaly-

sable, and amounts to an exegetical problem beyond the familiar one of

  Lacan's dense rhetoric. The 1975-6 seminar extends the theory of the Borro-

  mean 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 con-

stantly 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 supple-

mentary 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 fore-

closure', 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 theore-

tical 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.