We are dealing here with the level of material signs that resists meaning and establishes connections that are not grounded in narrative symbolic struc­tures: they just relate in a kind of pre-symbolic cross-resonance. They are neither signifiers nor the famous Hitchcockian stains, but elements of what, a decade or two ago, one would have called cinematic écriture. In the last years of his teaching, Lacan established the difference between symptom and sinthom: in contrast to symptom, which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthom has no determinate meaning – it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment — although sinthoms do not have sense, they do radiate jouis-sense. Hitchcock’s sinthoms are thus not mere formal patterns: they already condense a certain libidinal investment. As such, they determined his creative process: Hitchcock did not proceed from the plot to its translation in cinematic audio-visual terms. He rather started with a set of (usually visual) motifs that haunted his imagination, imposing themselves as his sintboms; then, he constructed a narrative that served as the pretext for their use. These sinthoms provide the specific flair, the substantial density of the cinematic texture of Hitchcock’s films: without them, we would have a lifeless formal narrative.

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