Hysteria and Sinthome in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx: A Queer Lacanian Reading

Introduction

Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel Sphinx tells the tragic love story between a nameless narrator, a white, French theology-student-turned-DJ, and A***, an African American cabaret dancer from Harlem. Garréta was a member of Oulipo, a group of French authors who sought to produce experimental literature through the use of constrained writing techniques. The constraint Garréta adopts in Sphinx is a lack of reference to the gender of either the narrator or A***, which is remarkable given that the novel was written in French, which encodes gender in every noun and adjective. As the story unfolds, this formal constraint drastically affects the novel’s content. Due to French grammatical rules, it largely precludes the narrator from saying anything directly about A*** without revealing their gender. They can only speak around A***, which results in a splitting of how A*** is described: either with metaphysical, mystical language, as “a spirit, a being, an other, a beautiful creature, a strange character, a phantomlike figure… an ephemeral body”; or with extremely corporeal and bodily language, describing “A***’s skin, arms, shoulder, scent, residual imprint, thighs, mass of hair, curved neck” (Garréta 127). As a result the reader never gets a coherent image of A***, beyond fragments—as Sphinx’s English translator Emma Ramadan notes, “because of the constraint Garréta chose for herself, A***’s character barely exists in the novel”; the narrator effectively erases A*** as an actual subject, relegating them to attributes that reflect themself more than A*** (127).

This erasure culminates in the novel’s climax, an explosive argument between the pair where the narrator complains that A*** is obscure in their desire, refusing to say what they want out of them, and A*** retorts that the narrator only engages with an image of A*** that reflects their own fantasies but not reality. A*** asks, “How do you see me, anyway?” before exiting the room, leaving the narrator, gazing into a mirror, to reply, “I see you in a mirror” (Garréta 73). This is followed by A***’s accidental death (Section II of the novel), the narrator’s psychotic collapse (Section III), their reconstruction of narrative through the writing of the manuscript that is Sphinx (Section IV), and, in the end, their murder (Section V).

Most critics of Sphinx have focused on the novel’s Oulipian constraint as écriture féminine, a mode of writing affirmed by French feminists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray that seeks to reclaim the female body by re-inscribing it in language through new, experimental signification strategies that flout the signifier phallus (cf. Cixous 1975). However, in her recent book Unbecoming Language (2018), Annabel Kim critiques these readings, which she argues tend to focus on sexual difference in the novel and often look for underlying gender relations of the two characters, trying to identify Sphinx as “a love story between two men, two women, a man and a woman, or something else,” which ignores the radical queer space of indeterminability present in the novel (Kim 22, see also 135). Instead, Kim reads Sphinx against such feminist “thinkers of sexual difference,” as a novel pursuing the destruction of difference itself (166). Garréta, she argues, stresses the linguistic constitution of difference by erasing gender, and by introducing race as a deficient substitute, she allows the dismantling of both forms of difference. In Kim’s reading, the narrator’s inscription of racial signifiers on A***’s body, which highlights the racial difference between the narrator and A*** to make up for the absence of sexual difference, is what results in A***’s death; thus, Garréta’s argument is that “bodies are not simply meant to be read and identified so much as to be lived in,” and the signification or differentiation of bodies “deadens our subjectivity, quite literally, in Sphinx” (142). Kim terms Garréta’s writing an “anti-differentialist poetics” or “poetics of unbecoming” that challenges language’s role in identity-formation and seeks to write an undifferentiated body beyond the boundaries language imposes on it (168). Kim reads Sphinx as arguing that “indeterminacy… is preferable to the fatal determinacy of presuming to know;” in other words, that it is better to be unable to determine identity than to fix or solidify it (142–3).

While Kim’s reading highlights the importance of race in Sphinx and the lack of some ‘underlying’ sexual difference that certain écriture féminine readings assume, I argue that it still falls short on multiple levels. Kim does not account for the dynamics of the climactic argument, nor the vital mirror symbolism at both the climax and conclusion. Her attribution of A***’s death to the narrator’s inscription of racial difference on their body completely ignores that A***’s character is first erased through the absence of sexual difference. Furthermore, her notion of anti-differentialist poetics, which she explicitly positions against Lacanian notions of jouissance, fail to explain the narrator’s period of psychosis. As Kim writes, “Unbecoming is not a transgressive violation of boundaries—the sort of limit experience that jouissance entails—but rather, an emancipatory reworking of subjectivity, a shedding of the ill-fitting identity clothes we wear” (168–9); and yet, this transgressive limit experience is precisely what the narrator experiences after A***’s death in Section III. Kim’s valorization of ‘unbecoming’ and non-difference thus ignores the entire tragedy of the novel: that these processes alone, without a subsequent resubjectivation, end in psychosis. Contra Kim, it is the indeterminacy of identity, not its fixity, that brings about the novel’s tragedy.

In this essay I develop a Lacanian reading of Sphinx that argues between Kim’s anti-differentialist position and that of French feminists, accounting for both the total lack of sexual difference and the recognition of this absence as the central catalyst for the tragic events of the novel, thus maintaining the queerness of the novel while also recognizing the particular role of this genderlessness in producing disaster. Numerous factors motivate the use of Lacanian theory, including mirror symbolism in the climax, complex unconscious dynamics, the narrator’s period of mourning, the centrality of language and form, and the prominence of identity, desire, and sexual difference in the novel. Through a reading of Lacan’s work on hysteria, desire, and the sinthome, I argue that Sphinx is neither écriture féminine nor an anti-differentialist poetics but rather a queer sinthome that signifies beyond the phallus. Reading the narrator as a hysteric subject, I claim that Sphinx deconstructs not difference itself, but difference as inscribed by the phallus. Analyzing the narrator’s psychic transformation throughout the novel via an engagement with queer and feminist readings of Lacan, this essay hopes to demonstrate that the novel’s formal constraint not only impacts the narrator but, in writing a genderlessness that cannot be inscribed within traditional, phallocentric signifying structures, also acts directly on, and hystericizes, the reader, uprooting their relation to language. By reading Sphinx as a sinthome—a creative reorientation of the symptom that upholds subjectivity without reliance on the phallus—it is possible to recover from the novel’s apparent ambiguity a radical queer politics.

Hysteria in Sphinx

Mirrors play a key role in Sphinx, especially in the climactic line of the novel: “I see you in a mirror” (Garréta 73). Why, when met with A***’s final question, should the narrator say this? To help elucidate this remark, I will begin by briefly summarizing Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and the three registers. The mirror stage denotes a stage in an infant’s development in which, originally experiencing its body in the Real as a fragmented assemblage of parts overwhelmed by jouissance (unsignifiable pleasure), it sees itself in a mirror. Because the specular image seems to show a single, coherent body, the infant simultaneously identifies with the image and sees it as a more ‘whole’ and ideal version of itself. Thus, this first identification consolidates its fragmented perceptions under a unified ego, bringing it into the Imaginary Order, but also creates an imaginary other (the specular image) fleshed out by projections that reflect this ‘more perfect’ ideal-ego such as the ideal body image or the divine image (see Écrits 75–81). In Sphinx, this is the primary mode by which the narrator idealizes A***: as a “divine” and “spectral figure” that transcends the body, but also in the narrator’s own image (Garréta 58).

The mirror stage forms the imaginary wholeness of the ego, but this is shattered by what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father, the primordial signifier that introduces the Other—an unknowable Other very unlike the ‘one-like-me’ imaginary other. Recognizing its embeddedness in this Other, the infant is inscribed with an essential lack, its jouissance prohibited by the Name-of-the-Father (see Sem. III). This prohibition is granted its power by the signifier phallus, which grounds all signification. The child can adopt one of two subjective positions in relation to the phallus, one of ‘being’ the phallus (the feminine position) or one of ‘having’ the phallus (the masculine position). This process of sexuation gives birth to the subject proper and inaugurates the infant into the Symbolic Order, the realm of signifiers and social meaning (see Sem. IV, XX).

Its wholeness destroyed, the subject constantly searches for other signifiers and identities to ‘fill’ this lack, propelled into constant linguistic movement as it moves from signifier to signifier. As Lacan says, the subject’s desire is the desire of the Other, a vain search to find in the Other an answer that will fill their own lack. The essential question of desire is thus not ‘What do I want?’ but rather ‘What do you want?’ (‘Che vuoi?’ in Lacan’s terms; see Écrits 671–702).

The subject is now split between the Imaginary and Symbolic, two essentially different but coexistent modes of relating: imaginary identification with the other as ‘one like me’, and symbolic desire of the Other’s desire. This split is essential to understanding the narrator and A***’s climactic argument, which can be read as a conflict between these two modes. The narrator describes the scene as follows:

I haphazardly reproached A*** for being cold and uncaring, for being shamefully narcissistic, too. I was reproached in turn for never having asked myself what I really wanted our relationship to be, for never allowing it to run smoothly by fault of never having considered, or taken into account, anything other than an image, other than my singular, and therefore false, vision of A***, with which I had been complacent… I demanded to know what was wanted of me, what need I had to satisfy. We only cut ourselves off when a stagehand entered with A***’s costume. Leaving the dressing room, A***, from the door, turned back and hurled this question at me without waiting for a response: “How do you see me, anyway?” (Garréta 72–3)

The two seem to speak past each other. ‘Che vuoi?’—the neurotic demand par excellence—is epitomized in the narrator’s demand “to know what was wanted out of me.” Meanwhile, the narrator’s exclusive engagement with an idealized image of A*** embodies the imaginary mode of relating: identification with a projected, idealized other-like-me, which grounds the possibility of empathy and love only insofar as the other is ‘like me,’ a false image or vision. As the narrator themself later admits, “I constructed each love too much in my own image” (85).

This dynamic embodies a very specific relational mode, what Lacan denotes the hysteric’s discourse. Lacan’s (2007b) Seminar XVII details what he calls the four discourses, fundamental relations that collectively structure the social field. The hysteric subject constitutes itself by the question ‘Who am I?’ , which is answered, through the hysteric’s discourse, by identifying with the Other’s desire in the corollary ‘I am who you say I am’ (see Wajcman 2003). In short, the hysteric’s discourse is a subject’s endless demand for an answer to their own lack from an Other who cannot provide it. Crucially, though, because subjectivity emerges through sexuation, the hysteric’s question of identity is always gendered; For Lacan, the hysteric’s ‘Who am I?’ can also be phrased as ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ (Sem. III 171/193).

In this light, Sphinx’s narrator ‘sees A*** in a mirror’ in a dual sense: they see themself in A***, projecting their own image onto A***; and they see A*** in themself, defining themself only by A***’s desire, saying that “it was an impossible task to set the boundaries of what I was, up to the edge where I blurred into the other—the indescribable other” (Garréta 86). A***’s question, “How do you see me anyway?” stuns the narrator, who has never confronted their own desire independent of the Other. If the narrator’s subjectivity is grounded upon signifying expressions of A***’s desire, then the latter’s indecipherability dislocates the narrator’s subjectivity and drives them to hysteric crisis. Amid this crisis, A***’s death forecloses any possible answer, leaving the narrator broken and lost.

It is not incidental that the narrator in Sphinx should be a hysteric subject, for this hysteria is produced precisely by the erasure of sexual difference. The signifier phallus structures the Symbolic Order, and both subject positions offered by the Name-of-the-Father are defined relative to it. If entry into the Symbolic necessarily involves sexuation, then the absence of sexual difference directly dislocates the subject’s identity. In Sphinx, the erasure of gender has left no signifiers the narrator can identify with or ascribe to A***; that is, the narrator’s hysteric ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ essentially cannot be answered due to the absence of sexual signification. With nothing to ground their position in the Symbolic Order, they rely on fantasy and projection by using A*** as an imaginary narcissistic mirror, endlessly searching for new signifiers, in particular racial metaphors that inscribe A***’s body as “black skin” against their own “white skin” (Garréta 36, see also 9). The narrator projects ideals and caricatures of liveliness, authenticity, and “soul” (62) onto this image of Blackness, with which they increasingly begin to identify, seeking to fill their lack via the Other:

My English still bears the stigmata of keeping company almost exclusively with black people. Imperceptibly, the expressions and characteristic improprieties of their speech slipped into the tissue of the academic English I had been taught in high school. This has disrupted my conversations: the language I speak is a monstrous hybrid, mingling Oxford and Harlem, Byron and gospel. (64)

Unsurprisingly, the (white) narrator’s goal of ‘becoming Black’ fails, and in stating later that “my soul probably wasn’t yet sufficiently black,” they recognize that their attempt to imitate Blackness through racial identifications proved insufficient to answer their hysteric question ‘Who am I?’ (106). The pair’s argument shortly thereafter foregrounds that the lack in the Symbolic persists despite the narrator’s attempts to fill their own lack via images and signifiers. Since the Symbolic is structured by the phallus, and the lack of sexual difference forces the narrator to rely on other identifications to try to ground their relations with A***, the lack of sexual difference evidently plays a primary role in the climactic split that only secondarily implicates racial difference.

Thus, it is not the inscription of racial difference that drives the pair apart, as Kim argues, but the erasure of sexual difference in the first place. This is not to claim that sexual difference is ontologically necessary for subjectivity; if hysteria is a historically contingent social relation, then an absence of gender should not inherently hystericize. It is only in a world governed by the phallus that the absence of the two sexual positions should dislocate the subject. Thus, Sphinx does not seek to destroy difference altogether, but difference as instantiated under the phallus.

Mourning and Psychosis

When met with A***’s ultimate question “How do you see me, anyway?” and subsequent death, the narrator finally confronts A***’s lack, uprooting the fundamental fantasy that renders their world consistent. A*** gave their life meaning, and with A*** gone, they begin spiraling into the Real, falling into “a chasm in which my devastating powerlessness devoured me even more violently… I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion… a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative” (Garréta 86). This collapse corresponds to what Lacan (2019) describes in Seminar VI as mourning, that “truly intolerable dimension of human experience that comes with… the death of another person, when that other person is essential to you” (336/397). Faced with the hole in the Other, and their own inability to constitute themself in reality, the subject is debased and can even begin to dissolve (359/425). When met with this lack, the narrator cannot reconstitute their subjective coherence and begins instead to desubjectify completely, “shedding my mask, my pride, through a fall and a superb defeat, a reduction to my most pure nothingness” (Garréta 87). Their ‘wholeness’ and subjectivity unravel into a “set of fragmented bodily elements” (Sem. VI 128/159), that is, the Real body: “I was blind, giving myself without a word, without a sign, existing as mere body heat. In my state of confusion I suddenly lost touch with reality” (Garréta 90). Their life narrative and memories of A*** fragment to the point that their “memory of all this is broken, incomplete” (27).

When confronting this hole in the Symbolic that phallic signification cannot capture, the hysteric subject is left without orientation, and the boundaries giving the world coherence begin to dissolve. Lacan notes that the psychic dissolution in mourning finds a meeting point with psychosis, in that images arise to assume the position of the phallus and act as “a palliative for the chaos that ensues owing to the inability of all signifying elements to deal with the hole in existence that has been created by someone’s death” (Sem. VI 337/398–9). The narrator’s bizarre identification with Blackness, resorting to racial images and signifiers to prop up their subjectivity in the absence of sexual difference may be understood similarly as nearing psychosis. A***’s final question hystericizes the narrator and dislocates their subjectivity from these identifications, and their subsequent death leaves the narrator in this state, prompting a total dissolution of their subjectivity and the signifiers that differentiate them from others, which results in psychosis.

It is in this light that I argue against Kim’s reading of Sphinx, which valorizes non-difference and the detachment of subjectivity from signifying systems. Kim’s reading of Sphinx does argue against pure desubjectivation, proposing what she calls “subjectivity without subjecthood,” which is not “the transcendence of being desubjectivated, of being outside oneself or no longer oneself (through self-shattering jouissance or otherwise)” but instead simply “is itself, without being mired in immanence, fixed or constrained by identity, pinned down by the various kinds of difference by which the social order would seek to immobilize it” (Kim 5). For Kim, subjectivity can shirk symbolic difference and exist on a plane of pure non-difference preceding the identities associated with the social world. Yet as Lacan shows, subjectivity necessarily emerges through difference, and the dissolution of symbolic difference necessarily leads to a dissolution of subjectivity into psychosis—which is precisely what happens in Section III of Sphinx. As such, I claim that ‘subjectivity without subjecthood’ effectively entails pure desubjectivation, and that Kim’s reading does not fully account for the events of the novel.

However, Lacan’s own theorizing eventually comes to a similar conclusion. Lacan argues that the analyst must situate themself, against the hysteric’s discourse, in the analyst’s discourse, continually refusing to answer the analysand’s Che vuoi? to ‘shake up’ their fixations of desire and help them ‘traverse’ their fantasy (see Sem. XVII, also Fink 1999). In Sphinx, A***’s response, “How do you see me, anyway?” mirrors this discourse, refusing the narrator’s Che vuoi? by essentially firing back the same question: ‘What do you want from me?’ This question certainly shakes up the narrator’s fixations of desire, as they spend most of Section III reflecting on how they saw A***, and what their own desire was; while A***’s death triggers the narrator’s psychotic break, it is A***’s question that precipitates this collapse by dislocating the narrator’s identifications and fantasies. That this question marks A***’s final words to the narrator suggests that hysterization alone may lead one not to traverse their fantasy but instead to desubjectivate.

It seems, then, that both Kim and Lacan meet at an impasse: simply dislocating identity and erasing difference very easily slides into psychosis. In the final section of this essay, I will examine how Lacan’s later work on the sinthome, which reconsiders subjectivity as always existing against the backdrop of psychosis, allows one to understand Section IV of Sphinx, which details the narrator’s resubjectivation through writing the manuscript that becomes Sphinx.

The Sinthome and the Hysteric Act

Lacan’s (2016) Seminar XXIII recognizes the limitations of his earlier theorizing which are also broached by Kim. Here, Lacan, in his study on James Joyce, advances from the notion of the symptom—a linguistic cipher addressed to the Other—to what he names the sinthome, an “old way of spelling what was subsequently spelt symptome” that describes a creative identification with the symptom which allows one to supplement the Name-of-the-Father with a new signifier (Sem. XXIII, 3). Lacan examines Joyce’s radical refashioning of language that culminated in Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce transforms English into a defamiliarized personal expression that subverts both form and content, thus using language not in its traditional mode but as a pure jouissance addressed to no one (79). As Lacan argues, this radical departure from ordinary language usage let Joyce stave off the worse effects of psychosis, as his creative process reorganizes the Symbolic according to his own jouissance, meaning the absence of the phallus does not result in a total loss of subjectivity. Lacan thus reads Joyce’s writing as a sinthome, a creative writing process in which a subject can reorient their relation to language and knot their three registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real) into a stable subjectivity. This process entails both a destructive refashioning of language by one’s jouissance, which dislocates the Symbolic, and re-symbolization beyond the Name-of-the-Father, and thus beyond the phallus. As I will argue, this Oulipian writing of Sphinx performs a similar process of reunifying the narrator’s subjectivity against the backdrop of psychotic dissolution and can thus be considered a sinthome.

As the narrator’s subjectivity unravels in Section III, in Section IV they reconstruct a coherent narrative of their years with A*** that have fallen into disjointed memories:

…perhaps, if I were to accomplish this task, I would be delivered from the torture inflicted on me by the endless rumination and unruly resurgences that, rather than coming together to form a continuum, only thrust to the surface fractured and atrociously mutilated limbs. (Garréta 114)

They thus begin writing the genderless text that comprises Sphinx, which completely repositions the subject in language: in abandoning sexual symbolization, the narrator refashions language as sinthome, permeating the text with a radically queer jouissance. If the absence of sexual difference is what put the hysteric narrator in crisis, the sinthomatic writing of Sphinx serves as a creative identification with this symptom, not imposing sexual difference but affirming the absence thereof and reorganizing the signifying system around this absence, rather than around the phallus. In other words, instead of suffering from the ‘symptom’ of gender ambiguity in the text (as embodied in the hysteric’s question, ‘Am I a man or a woman?’), the narrator chooses to play with this ambiguity, enjoying and identifying with their symptom. By rejecting the phallic demand for binary sexuation implicit in existing signifying structures, the narrator affirms the lack of sexual difference by writing a new mode of signification that centers this absence.

This is not to suggest that Sphinx should be understood as a single individual’s struggle with genderlessness tout court. On the contrary, Sphinx represents a profoundly political novel that writes queerness in an unprecedented way. Drawing from Valdés (2022), I argue that this queer re-symbolization constitutes not just a private sinthome but a hysteric act. Valdés defines a hysteric act as a political event whereby a hysteric subject can seize moments in which identities are dislocated in order to transgress the fantasy of subjective stability. This transgression involves a re-symbolization that, as Slavoj Žižek writes, “retroactively changes the very co-ordinates into which it intervenes,” transforming pre-existing signifying structures by affirming new modes of signification (qtd. Valdés 81). Since the hysteric’s question, ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ targets the instability of the two subject positions governed by the phallus, the hysteric act can change the symbolic coordinates in which gender is constructed: “to pose the question of ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ in an utterly sexuated Reality that relies on a hierarchization and classification of humans in two genders poses a radical questioning to Reality” (84).

The hysteric act thus makes no commentary on ‘male’ or ‘female’ genders, but changes the very symbolic structure from which these concepts emerge; the act of transforming structures of signification entails a shift from the content of an intervention to the form, as “the act of speaking, the form, is what allows for a moment of dislocation to turn into an act” (81). The Oulipian constraint of genderlessness in a language like French no doubt constitutes a profound formal reorganization of linguistic and signifying structures that allows the narrator’s queer jouissance to confront and restructure the Symbolic rather than undergo prohibition and become assimilated therein. Garréta’s constraint is thus both an intentional act and a political event, as it accepts the legitimacy of one’s jouissance even if it may be unsignifiable given existing modes of signification. Demonstrating the failures of psychosis and imaginary identification to produce change in a world in which queer indeterminacy cannot be represented, the hysteric act of Section IV in Sphinx thus constitutes an ethical act that grounds the narrator’s queer sinthome in politics.

I claim that the sinthome represents a particularly potent mode of political action. This hysteric act of ‘queering’ language actively produces a new way of speaking that allows queer indeterminacy to be represented linguistically without the imposition of phallic difference. As Morel (2006) argues, by unifying the three registers without the Name-of-the-Father, the sinthome shows a way out of the double-bind of phallic sexuation, as “it allows us to speak of sex… without reference to the phallus” (68). Garréta’s return to the Real body allows a reformulation of sexual difference through new signifying processes.

Sinthomatic production not only creates linguistic changes, but, as Verhaeghe & Declercq (2016) write, “creates the ‘Other gender,’” that is, sexual difference beyond the phallus which cannot be assimilated into existing (phallic) signifying structures (353). The sinthome, being ‘addressed to no one,’ does not just endlessly exchange signifiers, but instead says ‘something else,’ as “this new signifier, just like the Real cannot be exchanged with other subjects” (355). A subject’s sinthome comprises an oblique reply to another subject’s Che vuoi? by refusing to reveal their symbolic desire or assimilate to traditional signifying systems. Readers of Sphinx, then, are not given a clear answer to the question of what the text ‘wants’ (or is trying to say); instead, the very structure through which subjectivity emerges is dislocated and reworked, defamiliarizing the process of reading the text itself. The genderlessness of the text thus hystericizes both the narrator and the reader with its unfamiliar and alienating use of language. The language does “not ‘fit’ another subject” but instead forces the reader to engage in its own reorganized linguistic system (355). Insofar as the sinthomatic language in Sphinx is not ‘addressed to the Other’ but instead ‘enjoys its own symptom’ of queer indeterminacy, the hysteric narrator’s symbolic restructuration gives them a position of political agency by asserting their (queer) subjectivity without a total constitutive reliance on the Other and existing signifying modes. Rather, it is the Other who must reorganize in order to engage with the sinthome.

Indeed, it is virtually impossible, especially in French, to discuss Sphinx without engaging in Garréta’s constraint, lest one falsely impose gender on the pair. In this essay, written in English, I have plainly cheated, using shortcuts such as singular ‘they’ and gender-neutral terms like ‘the narrator.’ But French has no singular ‘they,’ nor ‘the narrator,’ only a masculine narrateur and a feminine narratrice. To even discuss Sphinx in the original French would require as radical a departure from standard language usage as Garréta performs in her writing of the novel. Reading Sphinx is thus no passive task, but involves an uprooting and hysterization of the reader themself.

Confronting the Reader/Other

There is an apparent paradoxical ambiguity in Sphinx then, as the text’s genderlessness both hystericizes the narrator and constitutes their sinthome; the erasure of sexual difference is both the trigger of psychosis and its remedy. This essay seeks to understand this paradox as a creative identification with the symptom that then confronts the reader with this same problem. Indeed, Garréta’s politicization of form radically reconceptualizes what a text can do: rather than writing a text-as-symptom meant to be passively interpreted, she writes a text-as-sinthome that directly acts on the reader and confronts us with the Real. Sphinx’s stance towards gender is ambiguous precisely because it is the reader themself who must respond to this hysterization. How one responds is crucial: one can regress to imaginary fantasy and the hysteric’s discourse, as the narrator does in Section II; one can fall into the Real, letting their three registers unravel into psychosis as happens in Section III; or, as in Section IV, one can work to refashion language as sinthome through one’s own creative writing process to establish a new kind of subject.

The purpose of this essay in analyzing Sphinx as a sinthome is to uncover a political confrontation with the reader which may be invisible to other interpretations. In looking for some ‘underlying’ sexual subjectivity beneath the genderlessness of the text, as écriture féminine readings often attempt, one misses Garréta’s construction of subjectivity beyond the phallus; yet by effectively advancing a process of desubjectivation, as Kim’s anti-differentialist poetics implicates, one runs the risk of psychosis and ignores the possibility and necessity of resubjectivation. The sinthome reading of Sphinx maintains the queer indeterminacy of the text in a way that écriture féminine readings struggle to because it does not rest upon some notion of the female body, but is able to fully capture the genderlessness of the text as is. As Azari (2008) argues, “Lacan’s theory of writing (écriture) confirms the French feminists’ argument that a woman can find her true self by way of writing which can inscribe something that exists. However, écriture for Lacan is beyond any gender imperatives” (5). Moreover, the sinthome paves the way for the re-constitution of the subject against the backdrop of psychosis, which Kim’s desubjectivizing reading largely ignores. It thus permits an analysis of Sphinx that maintains the absence of sexual difference without valorizing the absence of difference per se, by reading the text as a reorganization of symbolic difference according to the narrator’s queer jouissance, making the language of Sphinx “a signifying formation beyond analysis” (6). Through a reading of Sphinx as a sinthome, one uncovers a more radical political layer in the text, which resists the pull of interpretive closure and instead directly affects the reader with its writing of a foreign, subversive, and hystericizing use of language that exposes the contemporary Western notion of gender as historically situated and ultimately arbitrary. Insofar as the sinthome “enables a subject to venture beyond the phallic and symbolic signification,” it allows the subject to surpass the two unstable sexuated subjectivities and rewrite itself as ‘sexuated otherwise’ (52). Reading Sphinx as a sinthome demonstrates that it not only critiques the gender binary (the dissolution of which can flirt with psychosis without new differentiations to ground the subject), but writes into reality a concrete mode of existence beyond this binary, demonstrating that gender ambiguity need not be a hysteric symptom to be suffered but a way of living to be enjoyed.

Conclusion

What, then, is Sphinx’s politics? Is it écriture féminine, reclaiming woman’s body from phallic significations? Or is it a destruction of all identity through non-differentialist language? When analyzed as sinthome, Sphinx is demonstrably both and neither. Sphinx is like écriture féminine in that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her,” as Garréta’s return to the Real body ‘confiscated’ by the phallus allows for a rewriting of the subject (Cixous 880). But it is not woman’s body to which Garréta returns, as she shows that the Real body is nothing but undifferentiated parts, and there are no gender relations underlying the queer indeterminacy of the text—and in this sense, Sphinx embodies anti-differentialist poetics. Yet as Lacan shows, this dissolution of difference can dissolve the subject with it and trigger psychosis, as it does with Sphinx’s narrator. It is not desubjectivation itself, but the creative reorientation of the subject that follows, that lets one assert their social position without a reliance on the phallus. Through a hysteric act that targets political tensions in language via upheavals in form, Garréta reconstructs a kind of subject sexuated otherwise, not erasing difference altogether but formulating new systems of difference beyond the phallus. This reading of Sphinx as a queer sinthome shows an otherwise ignored dimension of its ethico-political nature: in acting on the reader, Garréta directly challenges us to respond with our own hysteric act, our own jouissance, our own sinthome.

Works Cited

Azari, Ehsan. Lacan and the Destiny of Literature. Continuum, 2008.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen. Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–893.

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Garréta, Anne. Sphinx, trans. Emma Ramadan. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015.

Kim, Annabel L. Unbecoming Language. Ohio State University Press, 2018.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007a.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object Relation, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity Press, 2022.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and its Interpretation, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity Press, 2019.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg. London, UK: Norton, 2007b.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Polity Press, 2016.

Morel, Geneviève. “The Sexual Sithome,” trans. Roland Végső. Umbr(a): Incurable, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 65–83.

Valdés, Alicia. Toward a Feminist Lacanian Left. Routledge, 2022.

Verhaeghe, Paul & Declercq, Frédéric. “Lacan’s Analytical Goal: Le Sinthome or the Feminine Way.” Psychoanalytische Perspectieven,  vol. 34, no. 4, 2016, pp. 336–357.

Wajcman, Gérard. The Hysteric’s Discourse. The Symptom, no. 4, Spring 2003, from

www.lacan.com/hystericdiscf.htm.

Javor Stein is a senior in Comparative Literature and Linguistics & Psychology. They are particularly interested in colonial ideologies of fluency and communication in literature and science. Outside of academic pursuits, they enjoy playing jazz music and writing short stories.