Amor: semblantes e sinthoma

Abstract

The text starts by questioning how an analytical experience responds to the issue of sexual identity and then proposes a thesis to be demonstrated: the analysis forges a sexual identity which is not part of the order of the semblant. Such a certainty of an identity is not given by Oedipus or even by the significant, who always leave the question of the sexual being in the air. The guarantee cannot derive from the Other; it comes from the act, but at the same time, the sexual act is a real which is not able to inscribe itself in the being. To pose the issue in such terms means to consider that the sexual always provokes symptom, the single answer given by the subject to the “there is no sexual relation”; that the choice of the partner, no matter the sex, is always a symptom and it is the analysis what allows to live this symptom in another way; that is, through a new enoding between love and jouissance. If love under the semblant is what works as one more form of replacing the real of sex, in the act of passage from the semblant to the symptom, identification of the symptom, it is not a mirage any longer, once it maintains on one hand what constitutes the One of a subject – its irreducible essence – and, on the other hand, the acceptance of the Other jouissance as different, and equally irreducible.