#non-relationality

[…] “knowing the other in the biblical sense” is to engage with the point in the Other where knowledge is lacking. And from the religious perspective, this lack of knowledge in the Other (missing signifier of the sexual relation) is no small matter. Hence the shame. The sight of naked bodies is not “shameful” because of these bodies as such, but because of what these naked bodies fail to convey, namely, the sexual relation.

If we look at the history of political (and class) oppression, we can also see how the enforced idea of a “harmonious” system or social organism has always been accompanied by the most brutal forms of exclusion and oppression. The (Lacanian) point, however, is not simply something like: “Let’s acknowledge the impossible (the non-relation), and instead of trying to ‘force’ it, rather, put up with it.” This, indeed, is the official ideology of the contemporary “secular” form of social order and domination, which has abandoned the idea of a (harmonious) totality to the advantage of the idea of a non-totalizable multiplicity of singularities forming a “democratic” network. In this sense it may even seem that the non-relation is the dominant ideology of “capitalist democracies.” We are all conceived as (more or less precious) singularities, “elementary particles,” trying to make our voices heard in a complex, non-totalizable social network. There is no predetermined (social) relation, everything is negotiable, depending on us and on concrete circumstances. This, however, is very different from what Lacan’s non-relation claim aims at. Namely: the (acknowledged) absence of the relation does not leave us with a pure pluralistic neutrality of (social) being. This kind of acknowledging of the non-relation does not really acknowledge it. What 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—the latter is “biased” by the missing element of the relation. In this sense, to conceive democracy, for example, as a more or less successful negotiation between elements of a fundamentally neutral social being is to overlook—indeed, to repress—this consequential negativity, operative at the very core of the social order.

Object a is not a sexual object. Rather, it is a-sexual. It is the objective counterpart of the non-relation (we could say that it is non-relation as object). Yet it is also what is at work in all forming of ties, in the very structuring of (discursive) being qua being.