Encore

In Seminar 20 (as presented through Recanati's intervention guided by Lacan), "encore" names a specific logical structure: the index of the infinite that escapes every system of nomination. The theoretical move begins with the "sectioning of the predicate" — the structural cut (linked to Aristophanes' sexion in the Platonic myth) that divides any totality while never arriving at an indivisible remainder. Predication is constitutively incomplete: every attempt to cover over or name the real produces a residue that cannot be captured by the name. This residue is what Lacan calls the encore. As an index of the infinite, encore designates not a content but a formal position — the "always-to-come" that precedes nothing outside itself, the irreducible forward-pointing that cannot be grounded in a prior nomination. It is unnameable precisely because it is what any act of naming leaves behind as its structural excess.

Encore is thus symmetrically opposed to the 'non,' which names the radical initial negation that infinitises nomination from the other side (the side of originary refusal or exclusion). Together, encore and non mark the two poles of the infinite as it operates in the symbolic: encore as the infinite index that outruns every predicate, non as the negation that opens the space of nomination in the first place. The encore is not a positive object but a formal marker of incompleteness-as-productivity — closer to what Lacan elsewhere theorizes as the Real remainder of signification than to any empirical "more."

This concept occurs once, in jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher (p. 27), within Recanati's presentation on the logic of predication. It sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian structures. Most directly, encore is an elaboration of the Infinite: it is explicitly called "the index of the infinite," and maps onto what the corpus identifies as the productive, non-totalizable infinite — the infinite that cannot be captured by any finite covering system, analogous to Cantor's transfinite excess over any completed set. The encore is not the "bad infinite" of endless linear accumulation but rather the structural marker of why any closure fails from within. It is equally linked to Lack and the Gap: the unnameable character of encore — "does not hold onto a name" — is a specification of how the gap in the symbolic order resists suturing. The encore is, in effect, what the gap produces as its positive index: not mere absence, but a forward-pointing remainder. Its relation to the Master Signifier is one of structural opposition: the master signifier works precisely by arresting the slide of signification and quilting meaning, while the encore is what that quilting necessarily fails to capture — the excess that escapes nomination and thus infinitises the signifying chain.

The encore also resonates with Metonymy (as the structural "always one more" that propels desire along the chain), Negation (as the complement to the 'non,' the radical originary negation that opens nomination), and the Name of the Father (insofar as the act of nomination is what the encore structurally outruns). The Interpretant link (via Diotima's intermediary figure in the Platonic myth) suggests that encore functions like a Peircean index that points without capturing — a sign whose referential force is precisely its inexhaustibility. Within Seminar 20 specifically, the concept belongs to Lacan's sustained investigation of what cannot be said about sexual difference and jouissance: the encore is the logical form of what feminine jouissance is "always toward" — unspeakable, unnameable, infinite.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.27)

what is always to come will be what one could call the encore which, for its part, precedes nothing that is not itself. Namely, does not hold onto a name, is unnameable by this very fact. One sees that from that point of view, what I am calling the encore is the index of the infinite.

The phrase "precedes nothing that is not itself" is theoretically loaded because it captures the self-grounding, non-relational character of encore: unlike ordinary signifiers that derive value from what precedes or follows them in a chain, encore is its own sole precedent — it is the index that points only forward, into its own inexhaustible recurrence. The conjunction of "unnameable by this very fact" with "index of the infinite" then formalizes the connection: unnameability is not a failure but the positive logical signature of infinitude, the mark that any system of nomination constitutively cannot close.