In “pure” sex, the partner is reduced to a fantasy object, that is to say, pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the Real (of the) Other. (This also accounts for the status of the Lady in courtly love: precisely because of its endless postponing of the consummation of the sexual act, courtly love remains on the level of sexual desire, not love – the proof of this is the fact that the Lady is reduced to a pure symbolic entity, indistinguishable from all others, not touched in the Real of her singularity.) Lacan’s extensive discussion of love in Encore is thus to be read in the Pauline sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression: this second dialectic is clearly “masculine”/phallic, it involves the tension between the All (the universal Law) and its constitutive exception, while love is “feminine,” it involves the paradoxes of the non-All. -Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek