Relationality as Process of Becoming

Relationality as Process of Becoming is a concept coined in Mari Ruti's engagement with Lacanian desire-theory to reframe how intimate relationships — and by extension love — are to be valued. Rather than measuring a relationship's worth by its durability or by the constancy of the love it supplies, the concept positions the relationship as one episode within the subject's broader ontological trajectory: a trajectory constituted by lack, animated by desire's inherent mobility (Flexibility of Desire), and oriented toward an object that is always partially unreadable because it carries the echo of das Ding. The relationship does not complete the subject; it participates in — and, at its best, accelerates — the subject's ongoing self-constitution.

The concept turns on a specific handling of idealization. Rather than treating idealization as a distortion that love eventually corrects, Ruti reclaims it as a legitimate mode of sublimation: the beloved becomes the contingent object raised to the dignity of the Thing, condensing in their person the objet petit a — that remainder of the impossible lost object that makes desire circulate. On this account, what the relationship offers is not satisfaction (which would extinguish desire) but an animating encounter with the Thing's echo. When the relationship ends or falters, the subject is not simply bereft; the encounter has been formative — a moment in an open-ended process of becoming — and can be appreciated as such rather than experienced only as loss.

Within mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p, this concept functions as an applied ethical conclusion drawn from the structural logic of Lacanian desire. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts. From Desire and Lack it inherits the premise that the subject is constitutively incomplete: desire is not a drive toward a specific goal but a movement sustained by the very gap that makes satisfaction structurally impossible. From Das Ding and the Lost Object it draws the claim that what the beloved crystallizes is never the beloved as such but the echo of an impossible Thing, which means no relationship can deliver final plenitude — yet this is precisely what makes the encounter with the other productive rather than futile. From Objet petit a it takes the notion that a contingent object can occupy the structural place of the lost object without being identical to it, grounding idealization as a form of sublimation rather than illusion. The concept is therefore best understood as an ethical extension of these structural descriptions: it asks what practice of relating follows once one accepts that Lack is constitutive and desire is mobile (Flexibility of Desire). Its answer — value the animating power, not the longevity — also draws implicitly on the distinction between desire and Jouissance: clinging to a relationship as a source of constant enjoyment would be a demand for jouissance where only desire can honestly operate.

The concept is distinctive within the corpus because it moves from ontology to what might be called an ethics of temporal reconciliation: the subject is invited to hold a relationship's finitude without melancholia by re-situating it as one episode of becoming rather than a failed bid for completeness. This is an extension, not a critique, of the canonical concepts; it does not revise the structural account of desire or lack but applies that account to the concrete domain of intimate life, drawing a therapeutic or existential consequence from it.

The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth LivingMari Ruti · 2014 (p.92)

when we view it as merely one component of our process of becoming, we may be able to better appreciate our lives even when we do not have a constant supply of love

The phrase "merely one component" does the crucial theoretical work: it displaces the relationship from the position of the sovereign Good (the Thing itself) to that of a partial, mobile term within an open process — aligning precisely with Lacan's insistence that no object can be das Ding, only a surrogate that keeps desire in motion. "Process of becoming" then names the subject's ongoing trajectory of self-constitution through lack and desire, signalling that the end of a relationship does not arrest that process but is itself absorbed into it.