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→There is No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship
=There is No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship=
Before turning to the example of courtly love, let me say something about one of Lacan's most perversely scandalous remarks about sexuality: there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. This formulation by Lacan is often understood, incorrectly I should add, in a similar vein to that of ex-US President Bill Clinton's equally scandalous remark that he did 'not have sexual relations' with Monica Lewinsky, a remark that nearly brought down his presidency. Bill Clinton took 'sexual relations' in this context to apply in a completely limited and literal sense to genital sex and thus, fortuitously for him, to exclude any other form of sexual activity. Lacan is not talking about sexual relations in this sense and is not suggesting that people do not have sexual relations with each other, of whatever form. Lacan is referring to a much more fundamental relationship than this - to the impossibility of a perfect sexual union between two people. Perhaps one of the most pervasive cultural fantasies we have today is of finding our perfect partner and of having a completely harmonious and sexually fulfilling relationship with our 'other half'. Indeed, many of the psychotherapies today are driven by the desire to achieve harmony and balance within families, between people and above all between the sexes. For Lacan this is a pernicious fantasy and the role of psychoanalysis is to reveal how any harmonious relationship is fundamentally impossible. It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other's desire. In other words, the 'major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them' (Salecl 2002:93). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. We can never be One, as Lacan says. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. According to Lacan, at least, masculine and feminine types of jouissance are irreconcilable. Let me now conclude this chapter with an example that Lacan takes from literature of the non-existence of women and the failure of the sexual relationship - that of the medieval tradition of courtly love poetry.
=Courtly Love=
