Pornography, psychoanalysis and the sinthome: ignorance and ethics

ABSTRACTThis article conjoins pornography and the radical ethics of psychoanalysis to attend to the Real ignorance that pornography generates. Rather than a pathological symptom of the impossible sexual relation or a relativistic enjoyment assimilable to capitalist and patriarchal paradigms, Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome informs an approach to pornography as that which has the potential to undo regimes of phallocentric knowledge and form new bonds between fantasy and social reality, symptom and artwork, jouissance and ethical (sexual) relationality. I will explore the sinthomic potential of pornography in a selection of films and texts that represent the radical deconstruction of knots that solidify meaning and signification, and perform the creative elaboration of subjective knowledges tending towards substantialization. I demonstrate how the ‘savoir-faire’ that pornography supports and can engender – an absolute unknowability that exposes our essential ignorance – holds unique possibilities for creati...