Hommosexuality

Hommosexuality (hommosexualité, with two m's) is a neologism coined by Lacan in Seminar XX to designate the fundamental erotic economy of the speaking being insofar as it is irreducibly structured as a relation of soul to soul — homme (man/human) to homme — rather than as a relation between the sexes. The deliberate orthographic doubling of the "m" fuses homme (man, human being) with homosexuality, exposing that what ordinarily passes for heterosexual love is, at the level of its deep libidinal grammar, a same-soul relation: the lover addresses not a sexuated Other but a mirroring subjectivity, a fellow parlêtre. This is not a claim about empirical sexual preference but about the structural impossibility of the sexual relationship (il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel): because sex as such does not produce a bond, all love — regardless of the genders involved — operates in a register that bypasses the sexed Real and remains fastened to the Symbolic and Imaginary registers of the soul, the subject, the signifier.

The concept is immediately anchored to two further moves in Lacan's argument. First, the historical illustration is courtly love, which Lacan treats not as a dialectical resolution of the tension between desire and law but as an isolated, unrepeatable "meteor" — a singular cultural formation that made visible the hommosexual structure by precisely staging an impossible, unconsummated love (love as love, soul-to-soul, precisely because sex is foreclosed). Second, the concept opens onto the question of the Other's jouissance: if love operates hommosexually — bypassing sex and aiming at the Other as subject — then what the lover implicitly asks is whether the barred Other (whether God, Woman, or the big Other as such) knows, whether there is a knowledge commensurate with love. Lacan's conclusion is that attributing omniscience to this Other actually forecloses rather than enlivens love, because love requires the Other's constitutive lack.

Within jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher, hommosexuality sits at the intersection of Lacan's three major late concerns: the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the topology of jouissance, and the question of feminine enjoyment. It functions as a critical specification of Jouissance: whereas phallic jouissance is partial and subjected to the signifier, hommosexuality names what happens when love attempts — and necessarily fails — to cross from the phallic register toward the Other jouissance. Love's hommosexual grammar is the symptomatic effect of that failure; rather than accessing the jouissance of the Other body, the lover loops back to a relation of parlêtres, souls exchanging signifiers. The concept thus extends the canonical claim that jouissance is structurally excluded from the Symbolic: love's substitution of soul-to-soul for sex-to-sex is the very proof of that exclusion.

The concept also critically re-reads Courtly Love (one of the eight cross-referenced concepts). Where courtly love might seem to idealize Woman as the absolute Other, Lacan insists it is in fact the purest historical exhibition of hommosexuality: the Lady is constructed as an opaque, unresponsive screen — she does not know, she does not enjoy in a way accessible to her troubadour — and love persists precisely because sex is off the table. This connects further to the Not-all: Woman, as not-all submitted to the phallic function, gestures toward an Other jouissance that cannot be symbolized; the lover who attributes omniscience to her (or to God) tries to fill that gap with Knowledge, and it is this attribution that Lacan argues diminishes love. Hommosexuality is therefore Lacan's name for the libidinal default that love reverts to whenever the sexual non-relation reasserts itself — which is always.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.165)

The development from which it results is hommo - with two m's - hommosexuelle, as is perfectly readable in history.

The phrase "with two m's" is theoretically loaded because the orthographic insistence enacts the concept's meaning: the doubled "m" grafts homme (the speaking human, the parlêtre) onto "homosexuelle," visibly short-circuiting the expected hetero-sexual difference and showing that the structure is legible — "perfectly readable" — not in individual psychology but in history, specifically in the historical meteor of courtly love.