Sinthomosexutality

I’ve already defined this child-aversive, future-negating force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism, as sinthomosexuality, a term that links the jouissance to which we gain access through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack in Symbolic meaning-production on account of which, as Lacan declares, ‘‘there is no sexual relation.’’ Designating a locus of enjoyment beyond the logic of interpretation, and thus beyond the correlative logic of the symptom and its cure, the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive. For the subject of desire now comes to be seen as a symptomatic misprision, within the language of the law, of the subject’s sinthomatic access to the force of a jouissance played out in the pulsions of the drive. Where the symptom sustains the subject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fantasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the sinthome unravels those fantasies by and within which the subject means. And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, ‘‘the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,’’ the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, because incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: ‘‘What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.’’ 2 Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion—a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends. As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, however, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate intervention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs.