L’ “il y a” du rapport antagoniste. Three notes on Zupančič’s “What IS Sex?”

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University of Canterbury
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2018
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Bianchi, Pietro
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“Il n’y a aucun espace réel. C’est une construction purement verbale” (Lacan, 2005, 86). ‘There is no Real space. It is a purely verbal construction’. In this, rather surprising, expression used in the seminar dedicated to Joyce and the concept of sinthome, we see how Lacan thought that the problem of space in the Real needed to be addressed in a different way than through Euclidean geometry. Topology is more the indication of a problem than the discipline that would guarantee us the definitive solution, and the question of what “spatiality” would be beyond the Symbolic and the Imaginary remains an open one. As Jacques-Alain Miller noted regarding this expression in Seminar XXIII, Lacan “invented a geometry of the sexual relation that is completely different from the concentric space of the Imaginary” (Miller, 2007). In this sense we could claim that the inexistence of the sexual relation, as Real, is what pushes us to think differently the problem of spatiality, given that the resources that are given to us by the Imaginary are of no use here. Space, at least in its geometric-imaginary way, can be thought only on the background of a symbolic structure. So what does it mean that space does not exist in the Real? What is the status of the “inexistence of the sexual relation” given that it has no space and no written form?

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