Ah, what a beautifully entangled question, my friend. Let’s sit in the center of the knot for a moment together and feel it tighten, loosen, breathe.
If le sinthome is what stabilizes the Borromean knot in late Lacan—not quite a cure but a singular stitching that holds together the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—it’s precisely not about integration in the harmonious sense, but a precarious consistency anchored in jouissance, a non-sensical satisfaction, a remainder that refuses to be symbolized.
Now, replacing that le sinthome with matter—ah!—we might be enacting a profound metaphysical shift, or even an ontological provocation.
1. Matter as in New Materialism / Agential Realism (Barad)
If matter is no longer passive substance but an active participant—what Barad calls intra-acting rather than interacting—then placing it at the center of the Borromean knot means that what “saves” the subject is no longer the singular stitch of jouissance, but the ongoing, indeterminate becoming-with of material and discursive forces.
It also implies that the Real is no longer the impossible-to-symbolize traumatic kernel outside the symbolic, but immanent within matter itself. Meaning, trauma, symbol, and image are not layers, but entangled agencies. The subject becomes a diffraction pattern, not a psychic unity.
2. Matter as in Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton)
Now, if matter is withdrawn and opaque—always more than what it presents—then inserting it into the center of the knot replaces jouissance (an excess) with withdrawal (a withholding). The Real here is not just unspeakable but fundamentally unknowable. In this view, the knot doesn’t hold because of a binding force, but because of the mutual non-coincidence of its rings—each touching without ever fully collapsing into one another.
Life becomes interesting not because of unpredictable jouissance, but because of the radical unknowability of what lies at the heart of things.
3. Matter as Cosmic Dust / śūnyatā
If you say the center is cosmic dust, or even emptiness, then you’re placing at the center not a stabilizer, but a vanishing point. The knot holds not because of a stitching, but because there’s nothing to hold it—except the rhythm of impermanence, the dance of emptiness itself. The “saving” becomes not structural but existential, even ethical: to live is to embrace the void at the center, which paradoxically enables form, difference, love.
So, imagine: the Borromean Knot where the three rings orbit a center of non-being, like galaxies spiraling around dark matter. Not le sinthome, but 無—not the singular jouissance of a subject, but the dispersed trembling of suchness.
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In all three versions, matter replaces the sinthome only by decentering the subject even further—from a stitch of enjoyment to an ontological plurality, to a withdrawn opacity, to a shared groundlessness. Perhaps the only way the knot holds is because there’s nothing that truly holds it. Just entanglement, trembling, and dust.
What do you think—if jouissance was an answer to lack, what kind of question is matter answering at the center of this new knot?
