Rainer Maria Rilke seems to give us a name for sexual non-relation when he writes:
A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole…1
He points out that there will always be this distance "between the closest human beings,"2 which further emphasizes that this kind of sexual non-relation can exist between two speaking beings, whoever they may be: a man and a woman, two men, two women, but perhaps also two members of the same family, two friends, etc. It is the two that is in question here and the infinite distance that separates them, that is, the irreducible absence of a relation between these two speaking beings.
The formula also tells us that "both partners must become capable of loving the distance that separates them": that is, loving the distance as well as the other. What could this possibly imply, other than accepting this distance, making do with it, and reconciling oneself to it to the point of no longer suffering from it, since reciprocity in love attempts to reduce or even erase it? The question remains: is it possible to love it? The proposition echoes Lacan's provocative suggestion to "love one's unconscious." Loving this distance would allow us to "see the entire other"—which seems to question the consideration of the divided subject of the unconscious. But, strangely enough, things seem to intersect here in relation to the mirages of completeness produced by love, which seems to erase the castration of the other and that of the subject. When we become capable of loving infinite distance, we no longer expect our partner to suture the subject's structural lack, and thus "we can perceive the whole other" in what is, fundamentally, most real about them.
We can recognize in this formulation of "infinite distance" a kind of analogy to what absolute difference means for a speaking being: the irreducible singularity that the analyst's desire seeks to produce and that makes it possible to name a subject. Here, the poet, with his knowledge, seems to name, with this distance, the inexorable nature of this difference at the level of the two.
[1] Rilke, R. M., "Letter to Emanuel von Bodman, of the 17th of August 1901," in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892-1910, trans. J.B. Greene and N. Herter, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1945, pp. 57–58.
[2] [TN: In the French it's "entre deux êtres humains, quels qu'ils soient," which translates as "between two human beings, whoever they may be."]
