Courtly Love to Courtney Love - Still No Such Thing As a Sexual Relationship?

Lacan's references to courtly love in his twentieth seminar Encore of 1972-73 may seem intriguing and anachronistic at first. What can be the relevance of a medieval code of morals, which quite possibly was merely a literary movement, to the problems and difficulties of the relations between the sexes in the twentieth century, relations which, according to Lacan in seminar XX, are not working out?[1] Lacan also wrote extensively about courtly love in his Ethics seminar of 1959-60.…