Nonrelation
ELI5
The "nonrelation" is Lacan's way of saying that there is no perfectly fitting, gap-free connection between people (or between the sexes) — and that this missing fit isn't a problem to fix, but is actually what makes love, desire, and social life possible in the first place.
Definition
The nonrelation (non-relation) is one of Lacan's most consequential formulations, originating in his claim that "there is no sexual relation." Across both occurrences in this corpus, it is theorized not as a simple absence or failure of relation but as a positive, constitutive condition: a structural antagonism that curves or biases discursive space from the outset. As Zupančič argues in What Is Sex?, the nonrelation "is not a simple absence of relation, but refers to a constitutive curving or bias of the discursive space"—meaning every empirical relation is always already marked by a fundamental asymmetry, a surplus-enjoyment or lack that prevents any neutral complementarity. The non-relation is the a priori condition of (social) being itself, not something to be overcome or mourned.
This yields two important consequences developed in the corpus. First, politically: the fantasy of abolishing the nonrelation—replacing it with a harmonious Relation—is identified as the hallmark of social repression. Both oppressive ideologies that prescribe rigid social roles and liberal-democratic ideologies that celebrate a pluralist "network" of singularities fall into the same trap: each treats the nonrelation as a problem to be managed or dissolved rather than as the constitutive bias of existence. Second, in the register of love and comedy (Župančič, The Odd One in): the nonrelation is the very condition that enables relation. Love is redefined as "a nonrelation that lasts"—not a fusion or mutual completion of two subjects, but a comic structure organized around a central obstacle-object that paradoxically gives access to the other rather than blocking it. The nonrelation thus names not impasse but a structural productivity.
Evolution
In Lacan's own teaching, "there is no sexual relation" is a late formulation (developed especially in Seminars XVII–XX, roughly 1969–73) and belongs to his mathemic and logical period. It designates not an empirical fact about sexuality but a structural impossibility: the signifier cannot inscribe a proportionate, complementary relation between the two positions of sexual difference. The nonrelation is thus a formal claim about the limits of symbolization, intimately tied to the registers of jouissance and the Real.
In the secondary literature represented in this corpus, both occurrences are from Alenka Zupančič, writing in the 2010s. Her move is to extract the concept from its exclusively sexual-difference context and generalize it: in What Is Sex? (p. 35), the nonrelation becomes a claim about the fundamental bias of (social) being as such — a curvature immanent to discursive space that forecloses any neutral pluralism. This is a significant extension of Lacan, mobilizing the concept polemically against both revolutionary and liberal-democratic fantasies of a harmonious social order.
In The Odd One In (p. 147), Zupančič performs a further, more speculative move: she operationalizes the nonrelation aesthetically and temporally, coining the phrase "nonrelation that lasts" to describe love structured like comedy. Here the nonrelation ceases to be primarily a negative or critical concept and acquires a positive, generative character — it is the condition of the comic relation's endurance, the obstacle-object that enables rather than blocks access. This is a notably affirmative inflection absent from Lacan's own more austere formulations.
Taken together, the two Zupančič texts show a trajectory within secondary Lacanian literature: from the nonrelation as structural impossibility (shared with Lacan) toward the nonrelation as constitutive productivity — social, political, and aesthetic. The period tags are "unspecified" for both sources, but their intellectual context is clearly post-millennial Slovenian Lacanianism (the Ljubljana School), which characteristically converts Lacanian negatives into affirmative or dialectical resources.
Key formulations
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) (p.147)
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.
This is Župančič's pivotal positive revaluation of the nonrelation: rather than a failure, it is the structural condition enabling relation, and love is its durational form — a claim that directly reframes Lacan's 'there is no sexual relation.'
What Is Sex? (p.35)
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
This formulation generalizes the nonrelation from sexuality to social ontology, making explicit that it is a positive structural condition (bias, curvature) rather than a mere lack or gap.
What Is Sex? (p.35)
The aim to abolish the non-relation (and to replace it with a Relation) is, rather, the trade-mark of all social repression.
This sentence crystallizes the political stakes of the concept: every ideology that posits a harmonious Relation — whether conservative or progressive — is identified as structurally repressive.
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) (p.147)
This object functions as the obstacle that paradoxically enables the (comic or loving) two to relate to each other. Remove this obstacle, and their 'relationship' will fall apart.
Identifies the object (objet petit a) as the materialization of the nonrelation within the relation — it is what makes the relation work by preserving its constitutive gap.
Cited examples
Andrei Platonov's fictional 'Anti-Sexus' device (literature)
Cited by What Is Sex? (p.35). Zupančič uses Platonov's satirical invention of a self-contained pleasure machine — designed to liberate humanity from sexual dependency on the Other — to expose the fantasy of abolishing the nonrelation. The Anti-Sexus imagines a social order freed from the constitutive bias of sexuality, which Zupančič reads as the very fantasy that, when politically enforced, produces repression rather than emancipation.
The structure of comedy vs. jokes, and love as 'nonrelation that lasts' (art)
Cited by The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) (p.147). Župančič contrasts the instantaneous, final temporality of jokes with the extended, inaugural temporality of comedy to argue that love — as a durable nonrelation — is structured like comedy rather than like a joke. This illustrates how the nonrelation is not a momentary failure but a structural condition that can be inhabited and sustained over time.
Tensions
Within the corpus
no internal disagreements surface in the corpus for this concept
Across frameworks
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: The nonrelation designates a structural impossibility at the heart of human sexuality and sociality: no ideal complementarity between subjects can be achieved or even approximated. The aspiration toward mutual recognition, full transparency, and harmonious union is not an unfulfilled ideal but a misrecognition of the Real — the very fantasy of 'completing' the relation is what generates oppression and neurosis.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic frameworks (Rogers, Maslow) posit that authentic self-actualization and genuinely fulfilling interpersonal relationships are achievable through conditions of empathy, unconditional positive regard, and open communication. The 'gap' between persons is understood as a contingent product of psychological defenses, social conditioning, or unmet needs — not a structural necessity. Growth consists in progressively closing this gap toward fuller encounter and mutual recognition.
Fault line: The deepest disagreement concerns whether the gap or nonrelation between subjects is constitutive and irreducible (Lacan) or contingent and therapeutically remediable (humanistic tradition). For Lacan, aiming to overcome the nonrelation is itself the problem; for humanism, it is the goal.
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: The nonrelation is not a historical product of capitalism or ideology that could be overcome through critique and emancipation; it is a structural feature of the symbolic order as such, tied to the impossibility of fully inscribing jouissance in language. Even post-capitalist social arrangements would not abolish the nonrelation. Crucially, Zupančič argues that the ideology of 'democratic pluralism' — which acknowledges non-totalizability — is itself a form of ideological capture of the nonrelation.
Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas) treat the failure of genuine social relation primarily as a product of reification, commodification, and the colonization of the lifeworld by instrumental reason. The ideal of undistorted communication (Habermas) or non-identical thinking (Adorno) implies that authentic, non-alienated relation — while never perfectly achieved — remains a regulative ideal and critical standard. The gap is produced by historically specific conditions, not by a transhistorical Real.
Fault line: Frankfurt School critique retains a regulative ideal of non-alienated relation as the horizon of emancipation; Lacanian nonrelation forecloses such a horizon structurally, making the very desire for a harmonious social totality suspect rather than aspirational.
vs Object Oriented Ontology
Lacanian: The nonrelation is located in the symbolic order and the Real — it concerns the impossibility of fully representing or inscribing the subject and jouissance within language. The 'curvature' of discursive space is a consequence of the structural limits of signification, not of some intrinsic property of objects themselves. The nonrelation is fundamentally tied to the split subject and the Other.
Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman) holds that all objects — not just subjects — withdraw from full relation; no object ever fully touches or exhausts another. This 'withdrawal' is an ontological feature of objects as such, prior to and independent of language or the subject. OOO thus democratizes non-relation across all entities, whereas Lacan's account is specifically tied to the subject of the signifier and sexuality.
Fault line: OOO universalizes non-relation as a feature of all objects in a flat ontology; Lacan's nonrelation is specifically tied to the subject, language, and jouissance — making it an effect of the symbolic, not an ontological given prior to signification.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (12)
-
#01
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
-
#02
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
-
#03
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)
-
#04
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.
-
#05
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.
-
#06
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.
-
#07
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.
-
#08
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
-
#09
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.
-
#10
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
-
#11
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.
-
#12
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