Nonrelation

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (25)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.240

   **You came to Poland to give a lecture about love. What is love according to Lacan?**

   Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes two registers of love in Lacan: an imaginary (narcissistic) love structured by fusion/projection, which Lacan critiques as delusional and even psychotic, versus a symbolic love defined paradoxically as "giving what you don't have," which is theoretically productive and oriented toward difference.

   Lacan certainly does not believe that love is the great unifier or endorse the ancient notion that love is a fusion of two people into one.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.241

   **But that doesn't mean I ¿ ll this lack, does it?**

   Theoretical move: Fink explicates Lacan's tripartite distinction between love (imaginary), desire (symbolic), and jouissance (real), arguing that the subject's deepest stake in relation is not to satisfy the other's desire but to function as its cause — as an irritant, a gap that cannot be closed — and that these three registers rarely align, which is what makes love-relationships structurally precarious.

   Those three rarely come together perfectly, meaning that it isn't easy to make relationships work.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.260

   **Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE

   Theoretical move: Fink's comparative table critiques contemporary relational/intersubjective psychologies by contrasting them with both a caricature of Freud and a proposed Lacanian approach, arguing that the Lacanian framework—grounded in Saussurean linguistics, the topology of the Klein bottle/cross-cap, and the structure of the unconscious as the Other's discourse—supersedes ego-psychology and object-relations models that reduce treatment to behavioral reconditioning or perspectivist reality-testing.

   Saussurian linguistics allows Lacan to leave behind the question of the referent, focusing instead on the relation (or nonrelation) between the signifier and the signified

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.17

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING, VOLUME 2 > **My Approach to Case Studies Here**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that publishable case studies inevitably involve mastery-effects, selective framing, and suppression of contradictory material, and that the ideal of therapist-patient agreement rests on an impossible fantasy of total intersubjectivity—one Lacan's theory of structural misunderstanding forecloses.

   The belief that therapist and patient should ideally agree about what is going on or what went on implicitly relies on a belief in the possibility of some sort of total intersubjectivity. In Lacan's view, no such intersubjectivity is possible

5. #05

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_93"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0111"></span>**instinct**

   Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes instinct (a rigid biological concept belonging to animal ethology) from the drive, arguing that human psychology is governed not by instincts but by culturally-determined complexes that compensate for a constitutive biological inadequacy ("vital insufficiency"), making any purely instinctivist account of human behaviour untenable.

   this is to suppose a harmonious relation between man and the world, which does not in fact exist

6. #06

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.173

   **10** > <span id="page-170-0"></span>**Analytic Action**

   Theoretical move: The L Schema is deployed to argue that genuine analytic action operates along the Symbolic axis (between speaking subjectivities) rather than the Imaginary axis (between egos), and that the analyst's ethical responsibility is to keep this distinction operative — thereby reframing non-Lacanian notions like "timing, tact, and dosage" within a register-theoretic framework where the unconscious speaks between analyst and analysand as a "pact" grounded in the big Other.

   the 'relation' between ego and (alter-)ego is a non-relation (i.e., a 'relation of exclusion'). The only real relation is between the 'single couple' of the analyst's and analysand's subjectivities

7. #07

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.637

   Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *X. Female Sexuality and Society*

   Theoretical move: The passage closes Lacan's remarks on female sexuality by posing three open questions about the social dimension of female sexuality—its relation to incest prohibition, female homosexuality's social function (as counter-entropic rather than degrading), and women's transcendence of the contractual/labour order—insisting these questions exceed any field of needs.

   why does the social instance of women remain transcendent to the contractual order propagated by labor?

8. #08

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.666

   Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Sade's *Philosophy in the Bedroom* completes and reveals the truth of Kant's *Critique of Practical Reason*: both the Kantian moral law and the Sadean maxim of universal jouissance share the same deep structure—the split between the enunciating subject and the subject of the statement—showing that the moral imperative always requisitions us as Other, and that Sade's formulation is more honest precisely because it makes this split visible rather than covering it with the fiction of an inner voice.

   I cannot pass up the opportunity to point out the exorbitant nature of the role people grant to the moment of reciprocity in structures, especially subjective ones, that are intrinsically incompatible with reciprocity.

9. #09

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.680

   Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's apologue from the Critique of Practical Reason as a lever to argue that desire—not the moral law—is the deeper truth that Kant's examples inadvertently reveal, while simultaneously gauging the limits of Sade's attempt to articulate a right to jouissance, showing that Sade's work ultimately fails to transcend the fantasy structure it tries to expose.

   when desires line up in a chain that resembles the procession of Breughel's blind men, each one, no doubt, has his hand in the hand of the one in front of him, but no one knows where they are all going

10. #10

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.189

    Silence > The mouse

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kafkan "strategy of art"—exemplified by Josephine's voice as a minimal, ready-made gap within the law—inevitably defeats itself: the very institutionalization of the exception reinserts it into the symbolic order, closing the gap it opened and confirming that art's transcendence is always domesticated back into a social function.

    the disruptive power of the gap turned out to accommodate the continuity all too well

11. #11

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.127

    Signification and Desire > Signified Incongruence

    Theoretical move: The structural gap between signifier and referent (Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung split) generates an irreducible comic dimension inherent in all signification: language simultaneously has too few and too many words, and this double inadequacy is the formal condition of possibility for jokes.

    This absence of relation, which Frege hopes to overcome, is the basis for the comedy that inheres in all signification.

12. #12

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.67

    POWERS OF HORROR > FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the sacred has a "two-sided" structure: one side anchored in the Freudian murder-of-the-father narrative (guilt, atonement, obsessional ritual) and a hidden, non-representable other side organized around the maternal, incest-dread, and non-separation of subject and object—a side that Freud repeatedly gestures toward but ultimately suppresses in favor of the paternal-signifier account, and which Kristeva proposes to theorize through abjection and phobia.

    toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion

13. #13

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.87

    POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT? > FEAR OF WOMEN—FEAR OF PROCREATION

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that pollution rituals and abjection are socially elaborated responses to the archaic generative power of the mother, functioning to separate the speaking being from the body and secure patrilineal/patriarchal order; the Indian caste system's endogamy is read as a special case where sexual balance is achieved at the cost of multiplying abjective separations elsewhere in the social hierarchy.

    Non-separation would threaten the whole society with disintegration.

14. #14

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.194

    POWERS OF HORROR > BROTHER ...

    Theoretical move: Kristeva's analysis of Céline's anti-Semitic fantasy reveals it as a structure of abjection: the Jew is constituted as the unbearable conjunction of Law and Jouissance, brother and father, subject and object, such that anti-Semitic discourse becomes the symptom of its own repressed identification with the abject — a psychoanalytic-structural argument that anti-Semitism is the inverted, possessed servant of the very monotheistic symbolic power it attacks.

    the Jew becomes threatening. So, in order to be protected, anti-Semitic fantasy relegates that object to the place of the ab-ject

15. #15

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.163

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect—centered on the claim that affect is not repressed but "unfastened," displaced, and estranged from signifiers—constitutes a principled theoretical position rather than a neglect of affect; crucially, this entails that the parlêtre's affective life is irreducibly alienated from signifier-mediated subjectivity, such that there is no representational rapport between affect and signifier.

    Lacan insists upon the disjunctive break creating a discrepancy or gap between affects and their nonrepresentative 'representations'... (to paraphrase one of his most [in]famous one-liners) il n'y a pas de rapport représentatif entre l'affect et le signifiant.

16. #16

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.

    there is no common space between the two, no general thought of Hegel applied to two domains, there is no way to bring them together (in a big One book which would be simultaneously logical and historical)

17. #17

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.147

    Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

    Theoretical move: Župančič distinguishes the temporality of jokes (instantaneous, final, discontinuous) from that of comedy (stretched, inaugural, building on discontinuity as its very material), and uses this distinction to argue that love is structured like comedy — a nonrelation that lasts — organized around a central obstacle-object that paradoxically enables rather than blocks relation.

    love is structured like comedy... it could be defined as a nonrelation that lasts. Comedy is the genre that uses the supplementary nonrelation as the condition of a relation.

18. #18

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.162

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Hölderlin's "eccentric path" and the Thermidorian problem to argue that the gap between utopian aspiration and sober actuality cannot be resolved by narrative mediation alone; the true Hegelian move—reading this gap as Concrete Universality itself—requires displacing the bipolar structure (narrative vs. dissolution) with a triple structure, reread via the drive, and ultimately locating the parallax tension between poetico-mystical and political relating to the Thing as the irreducible truth of emancipatory politics.

    another case of parallax where the two elements can never meet precisely because they are one and the same element in two different spaces.

19. #19

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.320

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

    What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian 'il n'y a pas de rapport...': if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics.

20. #20

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.364

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Over the Rainbow Coalition!

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent antagonism between liberal multiculturalism and conservative-populist fundamentalism is ideological mystification: populist fundamentalists are the symptomatic truth of liberal hypocrisy, and the real enemy shared by both is capitalism's logic of expanding demand—which conservatives disavow by blaming "human nature" rather than capitalism itself. The radical Left must therefore traverse the culture-war frame and seek unlikely allies across the rainbow coalition.

    in fighting the dissolute liberal permissive culture, they are fighting the necessary ideological consequence of the unbridled capitalist economy that they themselves fully and passionately support: their struggle against the external enemy is the struggle against the obverse of their own position.

21. #21

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.252

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

    Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

    the fact that sexuality can spill over and function as a metaphorical content of every (other) human activity is not a sign of its power but, on the contrary, a sign of its impotence, failure, inherent blockage

22. #22

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.28

    The Kantian Parallax

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian parallax — the gap between phenomenal and noumenal — must be re-read as constitutive of reality itself rather than merely epistemological, which is the precise move Hegel makes: not overcoming the Kantian division but asserting it "as such," thereby revealing that the Real is not a substantial hard core but a purely parallactic gap between perspectives whose "substance" is the antagonism that distorts every symbolization.

    the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, nonsubstantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.

23. #23

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.382

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

    the gap that separates a something from nothing, from the void of its own place... Bartleby's gesture is what remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego content

24. #24

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.7

    introduction

    Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as the theoretical core of dialectical materialism, arguing that the irreducible non-relation between two incommensurable perspectives (e.g., revolutionary politics and art, historical and dialectical materialism) is not an obstacle to dialectics but its very engine, and that this gap must be inscribed back into the particular itself rather than resolved by a higher synthesis.

    Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip.

25. #25

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.35

    <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

    Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

    the (Lacanian) non-relation means is precisely that there is no neutrality of (social) being. At its most fundamental level, (social) being is already biased. The non-relation is not a simple absence of relation, but refers to a constitutive curving or bias of the discursive space