Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
… Miller’s contention is that the analytic act in Lacanian theory was thought primarily as traversal, and thus as negation, as disinvestment. As we have seen, this is also how Žižek describes the act. If the fantasy is something in which one makes oneself subject, in which there is some procurement of enjoyment that comes along with a position recognized by the Other, then the disinvestment in question in an act is a separation from this position. Thus an act would entail a dissolution of the subject of fantasy and its replacement by a new subject. But what, if anything, does an act do to something like a sinthome? 160-161
Nothing at all, according to Miller. The sinthome does not budge after the libidinal disinvestment in fantasy that characterizes an act.
On of the problems explored in my closing chapters was the question of what remains of the Other after the act and what can be done with what could be considered a de-Othered symoblic.
Miller claims that in the sinthome one forms a partnership with something of the Other at the level of enjoyment — one enjoys the Other through one’s sinthome, and this enjoyed Other, which seems to occur in the form of an “enjoyed meaning” or sens-jouis, is contrasted to the Other as a site that guarantees meaning and confers recognition. What happens after the voiding of the Other is that rather than an investment in fantasy, which is mediated by the Other, there is a direct investment in signifiers as such; and it is on this basis that a partnership with the Other, on the level of enjoyment is forged (163).