Our gap of inner distance which renders our personal identity for ever problematic

The object thus is unrepresentable: it constitutes precisely that gap or inner distance which Lacan theorised for the psyche, and which renders personal identity for ever problematic (‘man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs’). 

The great binary oppositions – subject v. object, materialism v. idealism, economics v. politics – are all ways of naming this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and incommensurabilities are indispensable to productive thinking (itself just such a gap), provided we do not lapse into some complacent agnosticism or Aristotelian moderation in which ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’; provided, in other words, we perpetuate the tension and the incommensurability rather than palliating or concealing it.

Credit the wonderful  Fredric Jameson  for the above observations