With-Without Structure

The "with-without structure" is Zupančič's formulation for the specific ontological status of the missing signifier in Lacan's account of sexual difference and surplus-enjoyment. It names the paradox that the absence of a signifier is not a simple void or privation but a structurally active absence — one that organizes the entire field around it. To be "with-without" a signifier means that the hole left by its non-existence is itself a positive force: it is present as an absence, operative as a gap, generative as a missing term. This is not negation in the Hegelian sense (which would be sublatable into a higher synthesis) but a non-dialectizable remainder — a constitutive lack that persists and determines structure without ever being filled.

Zupančič locates this move within Lacan's late work, where "pure loss" migrates from the body to the signifying order itself. The missing signifier — the signifier that would complete the sexual relation, that would make Woman "exist" as a universal — leaves a hole that does not simply disappear. Instead, it produces surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) at exactly the site of its absence. The "with-without" formulation thus captures the logic by which absence is not nothing: the subject is not simply deprived of a signifier, but carries that absence as something — a structural mark, a determinate negativity — around which desire, drive, and sexual division are organized.

In what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic, the with-without structure appears at a pivotal moment in Zupančič's argument about the ontology of sexual difference. It is her way of making precise what Lacan's formula "there is no sexual relation" really entails: not that something is simply absent, but that the absence has consequences — it is a "with-without," not a "without." This positions the concept as a specification and sharpening of several canonical Lacanian operations. It extends the logic of alienation — which already establishes that the subject's entry into the signifier is a losing proposition, a forced choice where something is always forfeited — by insisting that even the forfeited term does not vanish but remains structurally active as a hole. It deepens the account of the gap: where the gap designates the structural interval between registers or between signifiers, the with-without structure names the particular mode of the gap produced by a missing (rather than merely absent) signifier. It also intersects with the drive's logic of encirclement — just as the drive makes a tour around its unattainable object and finds satisfaction in the loop rather than the terminus, the signifying order makes a tour around the missing signifier, structuring itself in relation to what is constitutively not there.

The concept is equally central to Zupančič's account of jouissance and feminine sexuality. Surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) emerges precisely at the place of the missing signifier — not despite the hole but because of it — which aligns with Lacan's late move of locating loss within the signifying order rather than in the body. And with respect to feminine sexuality, the "with-without" formalizes why Woman does not exist as a universal: it is not that the feminine is simply unrepresented, but that the hole of its non-representation is operative, determining what gets organized around it. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Lacan's logic of the not-all (pas-tout), the structure of desire (which persists by circling around lack), and the dialectics of the signifier — while resisting dialectical resolution by insisting that the missing term cannot be sublated.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.57)

not simply without one signifier, but with-without one signifier—since this 'hole' has consequences, and determines what gets structured around it.

The theoretical weight rests on the hyphenated neologism "with-without": by fusing the two prepositions, Zupančič refuses any simple privation and insists that the absence is itself a form of presence — a "hole" (her word) that is not inert but causally active ("has consequences") and structurally generative ("determines what gets structured around it"), making the missing signifier function analogously to the objet a as a cause rather than a mere lack.