Interpretant

In Seminar 20, the "interpretant" is introduced through Recanati's presentation as a Platonic concept drawn from Diotima's speech in the Symposium: Love (Eros) is described as that which, wherever there is a dyad — a Two — functions as the intermediary. Lacan and Recanati propose translating Plato's term as "interprétant" (interpretant), positioning it as the third element that mediates between two irreducible terms. Within the seminar's broader argument, this intermediary function is not simply a bridge that resolves the gap between two sides; rather, it names the structural position that is required precisely because the Two can never become One. The interpretant marks the place of irreducible non-relation — wherever there are two, something must be posited in-between, not to fuse the two but to register and sustain the gap between them.

This concept is inseparable from the seminar's treatment of "sectioning of the predicate" and the logic of the cut (sexion/section): the interpretant occupies the position of the logical third that arises at the point where predication fails to close over itself, where the indivisible cannot be reached by any finite division. Love as interpretant is not a reconciling third term but an infinitising function — it marks the place where the 'encore' (still/again) announces that no covering-over is complete. This aligns with Lacan's broader claim in Seminar 20 that there is no sexual relation: the interpretant is what fills — but never fills — the structural gap between the two sexes, or between any two signifying poles.

The interpretant appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher (p.25) as a single, precise theoretical moment: Lacan endorses Recanati's proposal to translate a Platonic term as "interprétant," mobilizing it to illuminate the logic of mediation-without-fusion that structures the whole of Seminar 20. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts. Most directly, it articulates the Gap: the interpretant does not close the gap between the Two but rather names the structural necessity of that gap — it is the operational marker that wherever there is a Two, the gap is constitutive and requires a third element to register it. This aligns with the Gap's definition as a "positive structural feature" rather than an absence to be filled. The interpretant equally resonates with Lack: if lack is what appears when the symbolic order "counts" and finds that things do not add up, then the interpretant is the figure that inhabits the place of that non-addition, functioning as the Eros that circulates endlessly without delivering unity. It also touches the Infinite: Love as interpretant enacts the "bad infinite" of the encore — always again, never done — but equally gestures toward a self-limiting structure, since the interpretant as Diotima's Eros is itself defined by incompleteness (it is neither mortal nor immortal, neither ignorant nor wise).

In relation to Master Signifier, the interpretant occupies a structurally different position: the S1 quilts and arrests the sliding of signification from above, while the interpretant operates laterally — it is what mediates, not what anchors. It thus belongs more to the register of Metonymy (the sliding chain, desire's displacement) than to the punctuation of the quilting point. Within the source's argument, the interpretant serves as the mythological and philosophical precursor to the seminar's formal account of nomination, the Name-of-the-Father, and the 'encore': the intermediary (Love/interpretant) names the infinite index that escapes every system of closure — a figure for the structural incompleteness that Lacan is formalizing throughout Seminar 20.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.25)

Love, says Diotima, is that which, everywhere there is 2, acts as an intermediary, namely an interprétant... one could very well translate in that way the word that Plato uses

The phrase "everywhere there is 2" is theoretically loaded: it signals that the interpretant is not an optional supplement but a structural necessity — the Two, as such, always already generates the demand for a mediating third. The word "interprétant" is equally significant because it frames this mediation not as ontological fusion but as a semiotic and logical function: to interpret is to stand between without collapsing the difference, which is precisely how Lacan figures Eros and, by extension, the irreducibility of the non-relation.