Neighbor-Thing

The Neighbor-Thing is a compound concept coined in Boothby's reading of Lacan to name the precise overlap between the figure of the proximate Other (the neighbor, Nebenmensch) and das Ding — the impossible, jouissance-saturated, unrepresentable kernel that every other person harbors. Where the Lacanian analysis of the Nebenmensch already splits the neighbor into a recognizable imaginary face and an alien "constant portion" that resists symbolization, the Neighbor-Thing collapses this split into a single hyphenated formula: the neighbor is not merely the occasion for encountering the Thing, but is structurally identical with it. The neighbor presents, in the concreteness of an embodied encounter, the very void around which desire circulates without closure.

Within the ethical and theological argument of Boothby's text, the Neighbor-Thing operates as the structural target of both the Decalogue and the Gospels. The second tablet of the Ten Commandments — prohibiting murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting — is read as a series of juridical measures designed to "make room" for the Neighbor-Thing: to preserve the Other's place and its threatening jouissance without annihilation, appropriation, or foreclosure. The commandment to love the neighbor, as Jesus radicalizes it, goes further still: it enjoins an active embrace of this threatening, Real dimension rather than a defensive management of it. The divine is relocated from a transcendent beyond (the unnameable Yahweh of the first tablet) into the wholly immanent encounter with the jouissance-laden, anxiety-producing other who stands directly before the subject.

The concept appears exclusively in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, where it serves as a pivot between Boothby's reading of the Decalogue (p.133) and his Lacanian interpretation of the Christian commandment of neighborly love (p.145). It is best understood as a specification and extension of two canonical Lacanian concepts: the Neighbour and das Ding. From the Neighbour concept it inherits the insight that the proximate Other is the site of an extimate, threatening kernel — not the imaginary semblable but the bearer of an unassimilable Real. From das Ding it inherits the structural function of an "excluded interior," the void around which desire orbits and which no symbolic operation can fully domesticate. The hyphenation performs a theoretical fusion: it insists that these two figures — the Ding as abstract structural void, the Nebenmensch as concrete human other — are not merely analogous but co-extensive.

The Neighbor-Thing also enters into productive tension with the canonical concept of Jouissance. The neighbor's unsettling power, in Boothby's argument, is precisely the jouissance the neighbor harbors — an enjoyment that is opaque, potentially hostile, and irreducible to the subject's representations. The Decalogue's prohibitions (against coveting, false witness) are shown to be constitutive of the desire they forbid, replicating the Lacanian logic that Law and jouissance are co-constitutive rather than simply opposed. By locating the divine in the embrace of the Neighbor-Thing, Boothby also implicitly reframes the Ethics of Psychoanalysis: fidelity to the Real of the Other, rather than retreat to imaginary identification or the "service of goods," becomes the ethical and even theological imperative. This move goes beyond Freud's imaginary-level critique of neighbourly love (in Civilization and Its Discontents) by opening the commandment onto the register of the unconscious and the drive.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.145)

the groundbreaking event enacted by the teaching of Jesus is to locate the divine directly and without qualification in the embrace of the neighbor- Thing— the person who is standing right in front of you.

The phrase "directly and without qualification" does the critical theoretical work: it forecloses any transcendent mediation or imaginary buffer, insisting that the divine — structurally equivalent to the Real of das Ding — is encountered only in the wholly immanent, undefended exposure to the "neighbor-Thing," whose hyphenation signals that the concrete person and the impossible Thing are one and the same site of encounter.