ABSTRACT
Toward the end of this chapter, the author returns to issue, if only to pose the question of whether homosexuality is not the kind of term that constantly threatens-or promises-to become its own referent, that is, to constitute the very sexuality to which it refers. Against a psychological reductionism that might locate military acts as acts of individual psyches, the author proposes to turn to psychoanalysis as a way of reading the text of a highly symptomatic regulation of military citizenship. In this sense, Freud's text proves to be as much diagnosis as symptom, and though the author proposes to read his text psychoanalytically, the author will also be proposing a way to read psychoanalysis allegorically. In Freud’s discussion of the formation of conscience in Civilization and its Discontents, the very prohibition against homosexuality that conscience is said to enact or articulate is precisely what founds and constitutes conscience itself as a psychic phenomenon.
