The Third (included) in the interdependence between the human and the social

Abstract

The article argues that most of today’s social theories tend to look at social phenomena in ways that lead to a conflation of what is human and what is social, or to disconnect one from the other. They remove the Third as an emerging effect (therefore included) of social relationality which is generated not only by the contributions of the terms of the relations but by a plus which is the reciprocity effect of the relation itself. In this way, the ontologically constitutive relationality of the social in which the Third resides is obliterated. This outcome is both a reflection and a regenerator of most of the human crises that we experience today in social life. To get out of these crises, relational sociology proposes to go beyond the monistic and dualistic semantics of the Third by adopting a relational cultural matrix capable of connecting the human and the social, while main-taining their distinctions. The basic thesis is that a social form is human if and to the extent that the social relations that compose it are produced by subjects who mutually orient themselves on the basis of the superfunctional sense that exists in the Third generated by their relationship.