Subject: Re: sinthome
Date: 	Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:29:44 -0500


On Tue, 15 Feb 2000 13:37:43 -0500 Fredrik Hertzberg LIT <fhertzbe-AT-ra.abo.fi> 
wrote:

> Whatis sinthome? I've come across the concept in Zizek's essay "The 
> Undergrowthof Enjoyment", in my view one of his most interesting but also 
> difficult texts.

I originally sent this to Pulp Culture in December - in it there is a 
discussion of the sinthome - if it reads weird, it's because it is a response 
to a specific question about the connection between symptom, sinthome and real:

According to Lacan, symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not 
"discovered" but constructed retroactively - the analysis *produces* the truth. 
In other words, our knowledge of our symptoms is an illusion, it does not 
really exist in the other, the other does not really possess it, it is 
constituted afterwards...  as such, as Zizek notes, knowledge of the symptom 
comes to us from the future... "the paradox consists in the fact that this 
superfluous detour, this supplementary snare of overtaking ourselves and then 
reversing the time direction is not just a subjective illusion / perspection of 
an objective process taking place in so-called reality independently of these 
illusions.  That supplementary snare is an internal condition, an internal 
constituent of the so-called 'objective' process itself: only through this 
additional detour does the past itself, the 'objective' state of things, become 
retroactiely what is always was" (Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 57).  This 
kind of hallucinatory structure is an 'apparition in the Real.' ...

The sinthome is the point which functions as the ultimate support of the 
subject's consistency, the point of 'thou art that' - the point marking the 
dimensions of 'what is in the subject more than itself' and what is therefore 
'loves more than itself' the very core of enjoyment (jouissance).  The sinthome 
finds a kind of correlate with Lacan's notion of the objet petit a, the other 
in the midst of the Other itself... the object cause of desire, the free 
floating signifier which prevents enjoyment from being articulated into a chain 
(and thereby fulfilled absolutely).  So the object petit a is the object cause 
of desire and the sinthome is our subjective identification with x.  In fact, 
the sinthome, understood thus, *is* the singular element of the (meaningless) 
Real found within the subject.  Zizek argues that it is this unassimilateable 
element that provides for subversive measures to totalitarian systems... 
nonetheless - the subject cannot survive without symbolic support... so... is 
the sinthome arbitrary... I don't think so (although I've completely lost any 
coherent definition of what arbitrary means these days).  I suspect the 
sinthome is tied up with the object cause of desire... but the appearance of an 
identification with the symptom will be arbitrary... but, as we know from 
Lacan, desire is always the desire of the Other... so it must be, even if I 
can't make the connection at the moment, tied up with subject-object and 
subject-subject relations... (psychosocial development).

ken