I am sixteen years old and I have a hamster. This little male rodent was a gift from my boyfriend at the time. I hear that the caretaker's twelve-year-old daughter has a female hamster. We arrange to meet. I already have a passion for couples and I organise get-togethers for friends with the aim of pairing them up, always without success. Despite my numerous spying attempts, I have never managed to track down my parents in their lovemaking either. That evening, fascinated, we watch the hamsters through the cage glass, and that evening, they couple. But why?¹

Lacan refers to "the animal image of copulation [as] a sufficient model for what is involved in [the sexual] relation."² Things get complicated from the moment we are permeated by language. That's it: I understand that my friends are speaking beings and it won't work until I find the logic of love life that is likely to suit them. Because speaking-beings do not fit into any universal, they are singular, one by one. And it may not work either, given that there is no relation that can be written. But I don't know that yet. It is only in my analysis, where I make one of the most striking discoveries of what brought my parents together, that I manage to write Famous Couples. Unconscious Liaisons. The relation that cannot be written finds a way to produce unique encounters based on what causes exile for each of the partners: "very precisely that the encounter is unique", Lacan tells us in …or Worse, every Jack has his Jill.³ À chacun sa chacune, as we say in French.

But why is there no sexual relation? "Were there such a relation that could be articulated on the sexual plane […] in the speaking being, […] would it be expressed from all those of one same sex with respect to all those of the other? This is obviously the idea that is suggested to us […] in reference to what I have called the animal model, which is the aptitude of each of those on one side to be valid for all the others on the other side."⁴ However, our daily practice teaches us very well that it doesn't work like that. We are not hamsters… A relationship that can be written requires a signifier that names the masculine and another that names the feminine. However, there is only one signifier capable of naming sexual difference, the Phallus. There is no sexual relation in the symbolic.

Contrary to the thesis of Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote The Second Sex, Lacan explains: "From the moment language starts functioning, there is no second sex […] the heteros, which is the term that in Greek is used to say other, is in the position –– for the relation that in the speaking being is called sexual –– of emptying itself of its Being. This emptiness which it offers to speech is precisely what I call the locus of the Other, namely the locus in which the effects of the said speech are inscribed". ⁵

The Other is the place where speech is addressed, but cannot be inscribed as a partner. Just like the title of the chapter of the same name in ...or Worse, "The Vanished Partner", he vanishes behind the mirages of the sexual relation. Therefore, there is no sexual relation in the imaginary register, which acts as a veil to cover up the non-accord. "The relation of being to being is not the relation of harmony that has been prepared for us throughout the ages […] by a whole tradition in which Aristotle, who saw therein only supreme jouissance, converges with Christianity, for which it is beatitude. That gets us bogged down in a mirage-like apprehension."⁶

"Of all men, without exception, Socrates […] the wisest,"1 (as the Pythia called him, already aware of the non-concordance of the sexes,) was paired with a cantankerous woman, Xanthippe. When asked by those around him, astonished by this most mismatched of couples, he replied: "Just as riders with spirited horses […] once they have tamed them, easily master others, so too will I, who have to deal with Xanthippe, learn to adapt to other humans".⁸ An astonishing version of the marital relationship that would have earned him the harshest criticism of fourth-wave feminists, it is nonetheless revealing. Far from taking it literally, we read the detachment attributed to her in various anecdotes about her. She also speaks of a relationship with the Other sex that borrows nothing from the famous metaphor of the agalma that the lover finds in the beloved. The example of Socrates and Xanthippe is elevated to the rank of a paradigm by Lacan, who teaches us to see in it a figure of the Other, preceded by the letter H: Xanthippe, "presentified for him the Hautre as such, namely his wife's hatefulness".⁹ The accounts that have come down to us of Xanthippe depict her precisely as an unpredictable woman, constantly shouting and completely misunderstanding her husband's political gestures. Socrates is duly warned that the Other is not an extension of himself and is radically alien to him.

With humour, at the end of the Seminar, The Logic of Fantasy, Lacan evokes the neurotic's embarrassment in avoiding the encounter with the Other sex. And for that, he measures the neurotic's distance from the bedroom: "Phobia can happen in the wardrobe, or in the corridor, in the kitchen. Hysteria happens in the parlour – the parlour of nuns' convents, of course. Obsession happens in the toilet."¹⁰ The phobic's difficulty in exposing himself to the Other is well known, as is the hysteric's pleasure in talking about her adventures to her girlfriends, instead of living them, not to mention the troubles of the obsessional, pestered by his infinite doubts… Basically, Lacan tells us, the only bedroom where one arrives but so that nothing happens, where "the sexual act presents itself as foreclosure,"5 is the analyst's office. It is giving a chance to an act deserving of its name: the analytic act, which, unlike the sexual act that does not define man and woman as such, is eminently symbolic. It is part of a signifying operation that establishes a subject.

Lacan's teaching shows us that it is the One of jouissance that iterates in each of us and confines us to a narcissistic jouissance. To say "There is no sexual relation" is to grasp that there is only the One all alone. The Other is an empty place, a veritable fiction of the neurotic. To the "There is no", with Lacan, we can add the "There is something of the One."¹² Nor is there any sexual relation in the real, since jouissances are heterogeneous. Phallic and feminine, they only miss each other [desencontrarse]¹³.

That said, why then go towards the other rather than stay alone? Passing through the body of the Other seems necessary for the speaking being. Because narcissism is not equivalent with autoeroticism.

Lacan says that "Love makes up [supplée] for the absence of the sexual relation."¹⁴ Nevertheless, this supplementation is extremely fragile and is not enough to compensate for the defect in structure. At the next WAP Congress, we will have the opportunity to consider the different solutions found by parlêtres.

Connecting with the Other is undoubtedly possible through the One-missing [l'Un-en-moins]¹⁵. Making a dent in solipsistic jouissance opens the door to the encounter. If the Other is the empty place that offers itself to speech, there is a dialogue that can be attempted with the partner, all the while being aware that the sexual relation does not exist.

^[1] Text presented at the end of the most recent WAP Congress in 2024 as an introduction to the theme of the next Congress in 2026.
^[2] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIX, … or Worse, Transl. A. Price, UK/USA, Polity, 2018, p. 81.
^[3] Ibid, p. 82.
^[4] Ibid.
^[5] Ibid, p. 80.
^[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, Encore, Transl. B. Fink, London/New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1998, p. 145.
^[7] Laërce, D., Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres, Paris, Le livre de poche, 1999, p. 242.
^[8] Ibid.
^[9] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XIX, … or Worse, op. cit., p. 84.
^[10] Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV, La Logique du fantasme, Ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2023, p. 423. [Unpublished in English] ^[11] Ibid.
^[12] Miller, J.-A., "Back-cover", in Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XIX, … or Worse, op. cit.
^[13] From the Spanish infinitive v., desencontrarse: to fail to meet up, or a missed encounter.
^[14] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, op. cit. p. 39.
^[15] Ibid, p. 129. [l'Un-en-moins, can be variously translated: One-missing, One-less, One-too-few.]