Non-Specularizable Society

The "Non-Specularizable Society" (or, in Copjec's precise phrasing, "the society of [formed from] the nonspecularizable") names the social formation that Lacan posits as a replacement for the Imaginary, mirror-based model of social bonds. Where the dominant film-theoretical and historicist frameworks of the 1970s–80s understood society, the cinema screen, and ideology through the logic of the mirror — specular identification, imaginary capture, the dyadic relation of subject and reflected image — a Lacanian account insists that what constitutes the social link is precisely what cannot be mirrored back. The "nonspecularizable" refers to whatever exceeds or eludes the Imaginary register of resemblance and reciprocal identification: specifically, the Real of the gaze as Lacan theorizes it, and the Symbolic structures (language, the signifier, the Other) that subtend the subject's constitution but cannot appear as an image. The social bond, on this account, is not held together by mutual recognition or the shared screen of ideology but by a shared relation to what cannot be seen or reflected.

This theoretical move directly opposes the screen/mirror analogy dominant in apparatus theory (Baudry, Metz) and psychoanalytic film theory more broadly, where the cinema screen functions as a mirror producing imaginary identification. Copjec argues that Lacan's account of the gaze — as arising from the Symbolic/linguistic order rather than from voyeuristic or fetishistic optics — requires a fundamentally different social ontology. Rather than individuals bound together by what they recognize in each other (specular symmetry, imaginary identification), the nonspecularizable society is bound by their shared subjection to a gaze that never returns their look, to a structure that includes them without offering them a reflection. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the subject is constituted by a fundamental asymmetry with the Other: the Other's gaze is not a mirror but an encounter with the Real that disrupts imaginary closure.

This concept appears in the endnotes to Chapter 2 of Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (slug: radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso), a text whose central project is to contest the historicist and Foucauldian appropriations of Lacan in film theory and cultural criticism. The "Non-Specularizable Society" is therefore not an incidental coinage but a structural hinge in Copjec's polemic: it names what a genuinely Lacanian social theory must look like, as opposed to mirror/screen models of ideology.

Among the cross-referenced canonicals, the concept most directly concerns the Gaze (the gaze as unreturnable, arising from linguistic structure rather than optical voyeurism) and Fantasy (the frame that manages the subject's encounter with the Real that the gaze opens onto). It also intersects with Desire — insofar as the nonspecularizable is precisely what desire circles around without ever mirroring — and with Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in that refusing the imaginary consolation of the mirror and sustaining fidelity to the non-mirrored Real is ethically resonant with "not giving ground relative to one's desire." The Fetish, as the canonical perverse response to lack (the imaginary stoppage of the gap), stands as the foil the concept negates: where fetishism fills in the nonspecularizable with an imaginary object, the Lacanian social bond Copjec proposes is formed precisely around what cannot be so filled. The concept is an extension of Lacanian gaze-theory into social ontology, and a critique of Imaginary-register accounts of social cohesion.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (page unknown)

This notion is replaced in Lacan by what might be called 'the society of [formed from] the nonspecularizable.'

The phrase "formed from the nonspecularizable" is theoretically loaded because it inverts the standard sociological and ideological premise that society is constituted by shared images, mutual recognition, or specular identification — "formed from" signals a productive, generative relation to the nonspecularizable, not merely its absence; the term "nonspecularizable" itself is a negation of the Imaginary register, pointing toward the Real and Symbolic dimensions of the Lacanian gaze that exceed and found any mirror-relation.