The “cuckold” scenario is not a behavioral curiosity so much as a dramatization of manqué, the constitutive lack that founds the speaking being. If the mirror stage bequeaths to the subject an Imaginary unity glued together by misrecognition, the cuckold scene devotes itself to ungluing—yet not to collapse into chaos, but to extract from ungluing a refined surplus of jouissance. The subject arranges a spectacle in which his own insufficiency is not merely discovered but authored; he curates his dispossession, which is to say he installs himself in relation to the phallus not as possessor but as one who lets the phallic signifier circulate elsewhere. That “elsewhere” is decisive, for the phallus in Lacan is never the organ but the signifier that marks lack and routes desire; by orchestrating an elsewhere of phallic display, the subject both concedes and secures the signifier’s rule. He finds enjoyment in ratifying the law that bars him.

Desire, in Lacan, does not aim at objects but is caused by objet petit a, that splinter of the Real which, as cause, is never attained and which angles the entire field of wanting. In cuckoldry, this object-cause typically condenses as the gaze and the voice: the seeing of oneself as lacking, the being-spoken-to as humiliated, the hearing of the Other’s enjoyment. The “bull” and the “partner” are Imaginary figures that bear Symbolic functions; what truly magnetizes the scene is the object a lodged in the look (Seminar XI’s gaze detached from any empirical eyeball) and in the address (the voice as cut from any particular throat). The subject stages a tableau in which these objects become operable, so that the fundamental fantasy ($\ \lozenge\ a$) can hold: I, the barred subject, in relation to the object cause, obtain a consistent screen on which my desire—and its surplus—can write itself. The fetishistic signature lies precisely here: not in a denial of castration in the naïve sense, but in the sophisticated disavowal formula—“I know very well that the Other is barred, and yet I will stage a scene that gives me the image of an unbarred enjoyment”—through which the subject both preserves the inconsistency of the big Other and produces from it a plus-de-jouir.

For the big Other (A) is never whole; Lacan marks it as barred (A̷), inconsistent, subject to lapses and holes. The cuckold script is a labor upon this hole. By positing an omnipotent third and an endlessly enjoying partner, the subject manufactures an ersatz fullness that sutures the gap in the Other—for a moment, the world seems to contain a scene where “it” finally works. But because “there is no sexual relation” (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel)—no signifier that writes harmonious complementarity—the very attempt to inscribe it generates excess. What excites is not harmony but its impossibility bent into theater. Jouissance erupts where language fails to deliver proportion: the more the scene pretends to demonstrate a smooth calculus of bodies, the more the subject drinks from the rough edge between signifier and flesh, image and law.

Structurally, this places the subject in the orbit of perversion understood not as a moral stain but as a positioning relative to the Other’s jouissance. The pervert, says Lacan, makes himself the instrument of the Other’s enjoyment; he engineers the law’s transgression so that the law may be felt. In this sense the cuckold arranges conditions under which the Other—concretized in partner, third, or the impersonal camera-as-Other—appears to enjoy without remainder. He serves up his own lack as a prop that guarantees the Other’s desire. The neurotic asks “Che vuoi?”—what does the Other want?—and is paralyzed by the enigma; the perverse solution answers by scripting the want and supplying the gears. Thus humiliation is not the end but the operator, the lever by which a circuit is completed: I become object, so that the Other’s wanting is legible, so that my desire can keep turning.

Extimacy sharpens the paradox. What is most intimate becomes most exterior; the scene externalizes the kernel of the subject, exposing the inside on the outside where the gaze of the Other can seize it. Far from being an accidental kink of the internet era, the exhibitionary dimension of cuckoldry perfects a Lacanian logic: the subject is constituted before the Other’s look and address, and he returns, again and again, to that altar to collect the tax of surplus-jouir. Platforms and cameras are not mere media but amplifiers of the Symbolic locus in which the subject is counted; they literalize the Other as scoreboard and archive. To be watched being “less-than” is to secure, at once, the reality of the phallic function and the persistence of desire beyond demand, and it is to milk from that knot the singular milk of enjoyment that hurts.

Castration here is not a wound suffered but a function enacted. The subject relinquishes the Imaginary fiction of phallic completeness and thereby gains a new kind of command over enjoyment—command, not mastery. For jouissance in Lacan is that which exceeds the pleasure principle, a painful sweetness that adheres to the signifier’s cuts. In consenting to be cut, the subject harvests the leftover—plus-de-jouir—which, as with all symptoms, binds the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary in a tolerable braid. This is why many such scenarios evolve into something more stable than a mere thrill: a sinthome, in which repetition knits a personal consistency where the Name-of-the-Father has grown threadbare. The scene becomes a way of tying the three rings, keeping anxiety—for Lacan, not without an object—at bay by knowing precisely where the object a will appear and how it will bite.

The phallus as signifier thus governs without belonging to anyone; cuckoldry clarifies this by distributing its semblances. The “bull” functions as bearer of the signifier’s seeming potency, the partner as locus of enigmatic enjoyment, the subject as the one who confirms the law by sacrificing the illusion of having it. None of this produces knowledge in the empirical sense; it produces S2—bits of know-how about how to keep the machine of desire running—in the wake of S1, the master-signifiers (“real man,” “good husband,” “alpha,” etc.) that the scene at once parodies and reinscribes. If there is shame, it is itself a vector of the Other’s look, a sign that the subject has brushed the border where signification frays; if there is pride, it is the pride of having engineered a rendezvous with the Real and walked away with a token.

In autopsy, then, the modern cuckold fetish is a luminous clinical diagram of Lacanian first principles. It affirms lack not only as a condition but as a craft; it exploits the inconsistency of the big Other by staging its fantasy of fullness; it operationalizes the gaze and the voice as objects a that cause desire; it repositions the subject as instrument of the Other’s jouissance; it converts castration from threat into operator; it binds anxiety by ritualizing the appearance of the object; and all of this under the axiom that there is no sexual relation, only writing, scenes, and the singular residues they exude. That is why, beyond any sociology of masculinity or media, the form persists: not because it solves desire, but because it lets desire keep failing in a way that yields more to enjoy.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5763068&forum_id=2:#49190201)

In this sense, cuckoldry does not cancel the reproductive imperative but reroutes it along the detours of the Other’s desire. What fascinates the cuckold is not only the sexual act itself, but the scene of displacement—eros stripped from its “natural” telos of procreation and invested into the spectacle of the partner’s enjoyment with another. Here, the drive (Trieb) reveals its Freudian quality of being partial and circuitous: it circles around its object, never simply the “goal” of reproduction, but the surplus-jouissance that emerges from its deferral.

Žižek puts it starkly: desire is always the desire of the Other. In cuckoldry, the subject displaces his own reproductive desire into the partner’s body, but only insofar as that body is now inscribed with the mark of another’s phallic power. It is not fertility itself that is eroticized, but the symbolic triangulation—the fantasy of being excluded, of being positioned at the point where lack is most visible.

From an evolutionary angle, your theory resonates with what Bernard Stiegler calls the “epiphylogenetic” condition of humanity: human impulses are always already mediated by technics, by symbolic and cultural supplements. Thus the reproductive drive does not appear in its raw biological state, but is always re-inscribed, laminated through culture, myth, and fantasy. Cuckoldry would then be one “technical redirection” of desire, preserving the energy of sexuality while binding it to a different symbolic economy.

So rather than seeing cuckold fetishism as the negation of reproductive instinct, Lacanian thought helps us see it as a reterritorialization of libido. The “easier” path for the psyche is not repression, but sublimation and displacement: turning the impossibility of direct satisfaction (since desire never coincides with its object) into the enjoyment of lack itself.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5763068&forum_id=2:#49190204)

In the Symbolic, the fetish orchestrates a much deeper logic. The phallus in Lacan is not the penis but the signifier of lack, the operator of difference. Castration means not the literal removal of power but the acceptance that no subject can be the phallus, only bear it symbolically. In the cuckold scene, the subject stages this castration by offering himself as the one who “does not have,” thereby reaffirming the phallic law. The humiliation is not the end but the means of securing the Other’s desire: by becoming the one who lacks, the cuckold ensures that desire continues to circulate, that the law remains inscribed. He aligns himself with perversion in Lacan’s technical sense: the pervert does not break the law but makes himself its instrument, organizing scenarios in which the law of lack is played out and sustained. Thus cuckoldry is Symbolically productive, not destructive: it secures the chain of signifiers by dramatizing their very impossibility.

Finally, in the Real, we touch the kernel that resists symbolization: jouissance itself. For Lacan, the Real is that which cannot be written, the point at which “there is no sexual relation” becomes manifest. In cuckoldry, the Real irrupts as the impossible fullness of the Other’s enjoyment. The partner’s moans, the rival’s thrusts—these are less empirical sensations than glimpses of an enjoyment outside the subject’s measure, a jouissance opaque and excessive. It wounds, it excites, it hurts. This traumatic kernel—jouissance of the Other—is unbearable in ordinary life, but in the fetishistic frame it is ritualized, domesticated, transformed into repeatable spectacle. The cuckold returns again and again to this impossible scene not because it resolves desire but because it keeps it open, letting him harvest the surplus of jouissance where the Real gapes through the Symbolic.

Thus the topology converges: Imaginary images of potency and lack, Symbolic dramatizations of castration and law, Real intrusions of inassimilable enjoyment. The cuckold fetish is not a deviation from reproduction, but a crystallization of how desire as such functions: forever circling its object, forever encountering its impossibility, forever producing enjoyment in the place of absence. In your terms, it is not that the brain “redirects” instinct because repression is too hard, but rather that the subject is constituted in this very redirection. Desire only exists as detour, as displacement, as the endless staging of lack.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5763068&forum_id=2:#49190213)