Desire and postponement in contemporary relationships
The osculum, as Jacques Lacan develops it in relation to courtly love,1 designates a ritualised gesture of the erotic bond: a ceremonial kiss that does not aim at carnal consummation, but at sustaining desire in its symbolic elevation. It is not a question of reaching the Other, but of maintaining them as the cause of desire.
This logic allows us to read certain modes of bonding in contemporary digital relationships: social networks, dating apps, virtual exchanges, or long-distance relationships. We can speak here of a digital osculum, understood as the minimal gesture of symbolic contact that does not consummate the bond, but keeps it active and tense. An unanswered "seen", a like on a story, a minimal reaction or a brief message – "how are you?", "I thought of you" – operate as signs that do not offer the body or jouissance but keep desire in suspense.
As in courtly love, an economy of postponement is established. Words, images or even declarations of affection are exchanged, without the encounter taking place. The bond is sustained without consummation or rupture. It is a contemporary form of asceticism of desire, in which what is decisive is not what is obtained but what is preserved as impossible. "The object […] is introduced oddly enough through the door of deprivation or of inaccessibility."2
Lacan emphasises that the troubadour does not seek to possess the Lady, but to serve her as the cause of his desire. In many digital relationships, the subject is caught in a similar circuit: they depend on the other to obtain a sign of recognition, a response, a signal. The jouissance is not found in fulfilment, but in the waiting itself. It is a jouissance of lack, closer to neurotic logic than to a romantic encounter.
Today, the digital Lady can be embodied in a profile, an idealised crush or an ever-present and ever-inaccessible partner. Her presence is intermittent and enigmatic, which elevates her to the function of object a. Thus, the logic of the osculum reappears in micro-contact without encounter, in the ritual of waiting and in the idealisation of the Other as inaccessible.
What Lacan pointed out in medieval erotic technique is thus reactivated in digital bonds: a structure of desire that sustains jouissance in lack and not in fulfilment. The osculum marks that symbolic threshold – neither pure flesh nor pure sign – that keeps desire alive, even when the crossing never takes place.
[1] Lacan J., (1959-1960) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter, Hove, Routledge, 1999, p.153.
[2] Ibid., p.149
