"Profile", "match", "likes", are the contemporary terms used to describe the increas-ingly elusive encounter with a romantic partner. By offering "matches based on affini-ties" and even a "compatibility score between partners", algorithms present them-selves as substitutes for the relation between the sexes, which cannot be written. As a new subject supposed to know about romantic encounters, bearing supposedly scien-tific knowledge based on calculation and prediction to find "the ideal match", algo-rithms claim to orient the encounters and reduce their contingent nature.
Lacan objects to the Aristotelian solution, pointing out that it is impossible to write a logical or mathematical law of the relation between the sexes. For the speaking being, sexuality makes a hole in the real. In romantic encounters, nothing is written in ad-vance, there is no compass, no pre-established programme. "Lovers are in fact con-demned to learn the other's language indefinitely, by trial and error, searching for keys that are always revocable. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings with no way out,"1 Jacques-Alain Miller remarks.
However, if the inexistence of the sexual relation is structural and if romantic disarray has always existed, the knot of the current malaise lies in the tendency to address this void through the insatiable economy of the lack-of-jouissance.2 The contemporary clinic shows that the dissolution of social bonds produces lonely and isolated subjects who seek to treat this real through a proliferation of encounters and partners, trying to deal with the failures of love through hyper-consumption. The partner becomes an available and replaceable object, inscribed in an accelerated temporality that excludes the elaboration of the subject's lack and structural solitude.
This contemporary tendency to reject the real through supposedly scientific knowledge and to fill the void of the impossible writing of the sexual relation with surplus-jouissance, specific to capitalist discourse, is in no way a solution to the impasse of sexuality; it is a current symptom of our civilisation that allows us to interpret "the subjectivity of the era".
The episode "Hang the DJ" from the British series Black Mirror offers a critical take on this modern quest for the "ultimate partner". Guided by an algorithmic system, the subjects are engaged in a series of programmed links and breakups. The system prom-ises to reduce misunderstandings and the risks of love, as well as the hazards of the encounter. The protagonists initially express a certain relief at these programmed en-counters: "it's better when everything is planned", "everything is so much simpler when you know where you're going from the start." However, as the experiment pro-gresses, this attempt at control reveals its impasse.
In the clinic, the subjective effects of this contemporary economy of connection, which seeks to make the sexual relation exist in a compulsive and imaginary way, can be seen in the form of boredom, anxiety, disappointment and sadness. More than ever, what we are listening to on the couch is the repetitive and generalised failure, the mis-fortune [mal heur] of the non-encounter and the solitude of the One.3
Analytical discourse questions the supposed contemporary solutions of compensating for the impossible writing of the sexual relation, by offering an alternative: to treat in each analysand his belief in the sexual union – his lying truth in the face of the incura-ble.
[1] Miller J.-A., "Does Psychoanalysis Teach Us Anything about Love?", Interview with Jacques-Alain Miller, conducted by Hanna Waar, Psychologies Magazine, No. 278, October 2008. Available online: congresamp.com.
[2] Cf. Lacan J., "Radiophonie", in Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 435. [Unpublished in English]
[3] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 1999, p. 120.
