ABSTRACT
As one of contemporary culture’s more enigmatic sexual orientations, asexuality poses questions for psychoanalysis in particular and society in general. How is it sustained, given the absence of sexual attraction for another person that it represents? Jacques Lacan’s Seminar IV, Object Relations, brings an entirely new set of conceptual tools with which to approach this enigma. In this seminar the concept of absence, representative of lack, is not a negative, but is central to the human subject’s very relation to the world. Dispensing with the idea, and the ideal, of a harmonious object that completes the subject-Other relation, Lacan directs us back to Freud’s formulation that even in sexual desire there is a gap, something that does not work. As a result of this gap, the sexually desiring subject is driven to re-find the object. In asexuality, however, it is the object as “nothing” that is being sought. Using the radical innovations of Lacan, this chapter explores asexuality in terms of its relation to an object that can sustain the subject as absence just as much as presence.
