​Chapter 20. Relation

Relation is what the meeting becomes when it lasts and it comes after the name. It is the field a performed name enters, the space where it meets another.

The model handed down makes relation a tie between what things are. Two human beings are bound by a shared nature; God and creature by a hierarchy of natures; man and woman by the complementarity of two natures fitted to each other; teacher and pupil by a role one fills toward the other. In every case the relation hangs from the natures at its ends, and the tie is only as real as the essences it runs between. With no essence, there is no tie between essences to draw. With no nature, there is no law of hierarchy or complementarity for the relation to obey. Without a role, there is no function left to carry it. The standing things at the two ends are gone, and the model has nothing left to span.

So relation has to be built from a different footing. It is not a bridge between two natures, and not a shared ground beneath two beings. It is the charged gap between two names given across that gap. One names the other; the other names back. The relation is not added to complete substances, as there are no substances to complete. It is the mutual holding.

The name holds the other as this one, and the counter-name returns the same hold from the other side. Relation begins where this double address stays open. The old picture of a bridge thrown across two banks fails because it needs banks, and there are no standing natures. There are only names given and returned, and the live distance they keep between them. That distance is charged by the refusal of reduction: neither name folds into the other, and neither folds into a common essence beneath them both.

Two names given across the gap are necessary and not yet sufficient. They make the relata addressable, and leave the relation still to form. What forms it is the engagement of the acts the names point at. Two gestures meet, and their energies work together or cannot, and that working-together is the relation itself, syn-ergon, energy spent into a shared field. Where the acts amplify one another, each reinforcing what the other holds, the relation is cooperation, the synergy of the alike. Where they answer across their difference and make one movement of two, it is eros, the synergy that joins without merging, the co-action love is raised on. If two acts cannot occupy the one field at all, the relation is enmity, the gap held open by the impossibility of sharing it. Each is a meeting of groundless acts, and which one forms is settled by the acts that meet.

The gap is fragile, and there are four ways one name turns the other back into a what. Each one feels, from the inside, like drawing closer.

The first is explanation. The other's gesture is run back to its causes — she does this because of her childhood, her class, the wound she took, and the type she belongs to. The gesture becomes a deposit read off an archive, accounted for and foreseeable, and the gap closes into a diagnosis. The who on the far side is gone; what faces you is a case you have solved. "I understand why you did that" can be the gentlest way there is of removing a person from the room.

The second option is use. The other is taken as a means to an end of mine, his gesture is bent to serve my purpose, fitted into my goal as a part fits a machine. The space between two acts flattens into a line of cause and effect, me the cause and him the instrument. No gap stays open between a hand and the lever it works; one of the two has stopped being a name.

The third is fusion. The two gestures are declared one. The difference between us is an illusion, or a wound to be healed, or a stage to be grown out of — the romance of two becoming one flesh, the mystic dissolving into God, the monist's single substance wearing two faces. Deny the gap and name is gone, and the relation with it. What remains is a unity, a new nature, two names melted down into one essence.

And the role is the fourth. The name is swapped for a function: mother, teacher, beloved, enemy, goddess, pupil, savior, traitor. A role is often the true residue of an encounter, a real address — this person did stand as a teacher to me, and to name it is to name something that happened. It turns into a wall the moment it starts to use the other up, when "mother" or "beloved" is taken to exhaust who the person is, and any gesture that breaks the role is met as a fault, a failure to be what they are for. The function then sits where the name was and buries it.

The relation itself leaves a deposit. Two people act across a gap long enough, and the gap sets into a thing with a description: we have a history, this is what we are to each other. The living co-action cools into a standing account of itself, a shared nature neither of them made and both of them serve. Then one acts in a way the account does not contain — pulls away, answers someone else — and the other reads the break as damage to what they are, as though a nature had been wounded. The deposit of the relation has begun to command the acts that were supposed to feed it. Two people who once held a gap between them now hold a thing, and the thing holds them.

So relation begins where a name, already performed, enters the company of others and is answered without being reduced. It leaves sovereignty intact and does something else to it: it tests it. The question a relation puts to a name is whether the name can be met and stay a name — whether it holds through the encounter, or closes into one of the four. The two shapes where the test bites hardest, where a name is likeliest to be kept whole or to be lost, are love and enmity.