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The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar XX, Encore (1972–73), advances a sustained argument that the sexual relationship does not exist — not as an empirical claim about human love, but as a formal, structural impossibility grounded in the asymmetry between the two modes of sexuation. The seminar opens by refusing any ontological foundation for psychoanalytic discourse and develops the thesis that jouissance, not substance, is what the signifier operates upon: the body "enjoys itself" only by being corporalised in a signifying way, making jouissance the third term beyond Cartesian thinking and extended substance. Lacan introduces the famous formulae of sexuation — the masculine universal grounded in the paternal exception, and the feminine not-all defined by the absence of any such exception — to show that "woman" cannot be written under a definite article, that she is properly "half-said," and that her supplementary enjoyment opens onto the barred Other and, through it, onto a mystical or infinite register that phallic enjoyment cannot reach. The seminar persistently interrogates the status of knowledge (savoir), arguing against any Wissentrieb and insisting that the unconscious is structured like a language not because "being thinks" but because the speaking being enjoys while knowing nothing about it, a condition Lacan names in lalangue — language in its raw, pre-grammatical, jouissance-bearing dimension. Love is reread throughout as operating in a "hommosexual" (soul-to-soul) register that structurally bypasses sex, and as the sign of a change of discourse rather than of the Other's jouissance. The seminar deploys topology — compactness, open sets, the torus, and above all the Borromean knot — as the only adequate "writing" of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject. It concludes by proposing that knowledge is an enigma constituted by lalangue, that love is the illusory passage from contingency to necessity in the modal logic of the not-ceasing-to-be-written, and that the subject is nothing beyond the hypothesis that is necessary for lalangue to function.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XX is the single text in the Lacanian corpus where the theory of sexuation receives its fullest formal articulation alongside the theory of jouissance. No other seminar or essay simultaneously develops the four formulae of sexuation (the masculine universal/exception pair and the feminine not-all/no-exception pair), the modal logic of the necessary/impossible/contingent/possible quadrant as applied to the non-writing of the sexual relationship, the distinction between phallic jouissance and Other (feminine) jouissance, the structural alignment of Woman with the barred Other S(Ø), and the reconception of love as a sign of a change of discourse — all in a single sustained inquiry. Where Seminar VII grounds ethics in das Ding and Seminar XI grounds the four fundamental concepts in alienation/separation and the drives, Encore grounds the entire analytic project in the irreducibility of the sexual non-relation and the enjoyment that circulates around that impossibility. It is the seminar where Lacan most explicitly refuses ontology in favour of what he calls par-être (being-to-one-side), insisting that analytic discourse neither subsists in any substance nor refers to any being, but is sustained solely from the saying.

What also makes this text irreplaceable in the corpus is its development of lalangue as a concept distinct from both Language (in the Saussurean or Jakobsonian sense) and from the Unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis. By writing lalangue as one word, Lacan marks the pre-symbolic, jouissance-saturated stratum of the mother tongue that exceeds any grammatical or communicational function and that constitutes the real unconscious substrate of analytic work. This concept, barely present anywhere else in such density, opens a line toward the later work on the sinthome and toward the body as the site of inscription of jouissance, and it substantially complicates any reading of the earlier "linguistic" Lacan. Furthermore, the seminar's use of the Borromean knot — introduced here for the first time as a sustained topological demonstration rather than mere illustration — establishes the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary triad in its three-ring form, marking the pivot toward Lacan's final teaching and grounding the asymmetry of the One and the Other (woman as l'un en moins, the less-One) in a topology of knotting rather than in any logic of complementarity.

Main themes

  • The sexual non-relation as the structural foundation of all discourse
  • Sexuation: the masculine universal/exception and the feminine not-all
  • Jouissance as substance: phallic jouissance versus Other (feminine) jouissance
  • Lalangue as the jouissance-bearing substrate beneath language
  • The topology of the Borromean knot as writing what cannot be said
  • Love as a sign of a change of discourse, not a sexual relation
  • The function of the letter and writing in analytic discourse versus linguistics
  • The modal logic of necessity, impossibility, contingency, and the non-writing of the sexual relationship
  • Knowledge as enigma: the unconscious knows without knowing it knows
  • The refusal of ontology: par-être, the not-all, and the half-said

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972 — p.4-16
  • Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972 (including Recanati interventions) — p.17-53
  • Seminar 3: Wednesday 19 December 1972 (linguisterie, the signifier, jouissance) — p.59-76
  • Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973 (the function of writing) — p.77-94
  • Seminar 5: Wednesday 16 January 1973 (compass points: written, Other, phallus, love) — p.95-133
  • Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973 (love, courtly love, woman and the Other) — p.134-172
  • Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973 (hainamoration, true/real, objet a as semblance) — p.173-188
  • Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 (Jean-Claude Milner on linguistics; Recanati on the not-all) — p.189-221
  • Seminar 11: Wednesday 8 May 1973 (unconscious, knowledge, Christianity, jouissance) — p.222-239
  • Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 May 1973 (no metalanguage, Borromean knot, topology) — p.240-261
  • Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 June 1973 (lalangue, knowledge, love, contingency) — p.262-277

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972 (p.4-16)

Lacan opens the year by situating both his own position and that of his audience within the logic of encore — the drive to repeat, grounded in an I don't want to know anything about it that is structural rather than merely psychological. He distinguishes this from mere ignorance: it is not that knowledge is withheld but that something in the speaking being constitutively refuses the knowledge that concerns it most — namely, the knowledge of the sexual relationship. The title Encore thus names both the seminar's formal object (repetition) and its affective ground (the drive's insistence that outruns satisfaction).

The seminar then moves to enjoyment (jouissance) as its primary concept, framing it topologically from the outset: enjoyment, in its sexual dimension, is specified by an impasse, a gap, a limit — and to speak of this space is to already do topology. Lacan introduces the concept of compactness from modern topology (the intersection of a finite number of closed sets implies the existence of the intersection for an infinite number) to model the structure of phallic jouissance: it 'covers' the impossibility of the sexual relationship. The complement — open sets that exclude their limit — models the feminine not-all. The argument is that the structure of feminine sexuality cannot be derived from anatomy or from any biological complement, but only from this logical-topological requirement that the locus of the Other is not homogeneous.

Crucially, Lacan declares that analytic discourse breaks with all philosophy and with any reference to substance or being precisely because the impasse of sexed being is constituted by jouissance rather than by predication. The fracture of the formula 'sexed being insofar as it is involved in enjoyment' is what shows that no predicate is ever sufficient — being that poses itself as absolute is always already the interruption of sexed being by jouissance.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Topology, Not-all, Compactness, Sexual non-relation, Signifier Notable examples: Bed as the founding figure of law and enjoyment; Common law concubinage as the legal trace of jouissance

Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972 (including Recanati interventions) (p.17-53)

Lacan opens this session by reframing the first seminar retroactively: despite its surface content about love, he says, he was speaking about stupidity (la bêtise) — the constitutive condition of analytic discourse and of the encore drive. Stupidity here is not a defect but a structural feature: analytic discourse is sustained by the truth that there is no sexual relationship, a truth that was never unavailable but that no discourse prior to psychoanalysis could make its foundation. The discourse of the analyst is formally set up in stupidity, and this is not a critique but a precise location.

François Recanati then presents an extended intervention developing the concept of the 'sectioning of the predicate' (sectionning du prédicat) — the structural impossibility at the heart of predication. His key move is to link this to the Platonic myth of the Symposium (Aristophanes' sexion — the cut that makes two from one, with an x to mark its sexual dimension) and to Diotima's figure of love as intermediary (metaxu), arguing that love everywhere there are two acts as an interpretant, an operator of the series. The ordinal number theory of Cantor is then deployed: each ordinal both records the gap (the passage from 0 to 1, from 1 to 2) and leaves that gap irreducibly open, so that the limit (encore) insists as an absolute unreachable frontier. This structure maps directly onto psychoanalytic repetition: each interpretation repeats and records the gap it cannot close.

Recanati extends this through the Port-Royal logic of predicate and substance, demonstrating that substance is structurally defined as what is lacking — the predicate is an effect of lack, its covering-over, yet it can never complete the substance it covers. This relay-structure, where each predicate provisionally takes the place of substance only to be displaced by the next, is identified as the operation of Being qua discourse. Lacan intervenes to press the articulation of the sectioning of the predicate as the very point where Being encounters its impossibility — and where language represents Being for the word, leaving the gap of impossibility permanently open. The Peircean notion of the interpretant (sign's capacity to produce another sign indefinitely) is used to show that repetition is grounded in an irreducible impossibility: the hole between object and representamen, which structurally mirrors Lacan's claim that there is no sexual relationship as the unspeakable truth conditioning analytic discourse.

Key concepts: Repetition, Point de capiton, Signifier, Lack, Master Signifier, Unconscious Notable examples: Cantorian ordinal series (0, 1, 2, 3, 4) as formalisation of repetition; Plato's Symposium: Aristophanes' sexion and Diotima's intermediary; Peirce's interpretant and semiotics of repetition; Bacon's cryptographic passage between inner and outer letter

Seminar 3: Wednesday 19 December 1972 (linguisterie, the signifier, jouissance) (p.59-76)

With Jakobson present in the audience, Lacan introduces the neologism linguisterie to name precisely what he does that the linguist does not: where Jakobson can lay claim to everything that relates to language under the banner of linguistics, Lacan insists that what follows from the unconscious being structured like a language cannot be subsumed under scientific linguistics — it requires a different field. Linguisterie takes the unconscious as accessible only through the said (the analysand's speech), not through the formal object of linguistic science. This is not a territorial dispute but an epistemological one: analytic discourse is, for Lacan, the foundational condition of possibility for all four discourses, and love — introduced here through a joke about his first seminar — is identified as the sign of a change of discourse, not of the Other's jouissance.

Lacan then poses the question: what is a signifier? He resists the collectivising move implied by the indefinite article ('a signifier'), noting that the linguist has no predicate adequate to ground such a collection, and uses the example of the proverb and the locution à tire-larigot to show how significance fans out beyond any controlled lexical or semantic determination into what he calls the 'submersion of desire.' The signifier is finally situated at the level of the enjoying substance — the body insofar as it is corporalised by the signifier. Lacan deploys all four Aristotelian causes: the signifier is the material cause of enjoyment (it centres a part of the body as its site), the final cause (it brings enjoyment to a halt), and the efficient cause (it limits enjoyment). The formal cause is grammar — it is not for nothing that 'Peter hits Paul' is the founding example of grammar, because it is the division of the subject in enjoyment that grammar formalises.

Key concepts: Signifier, Jouissance, Language, Lalangue, Subject, Discourse of the Analyst Notable examples: Jakobson's linguistics as foil for linguisterie; The proverb and à tire-larigot as illustrations of significance beyond semantics; Peter and Paul as the grammatical example of subject division

Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973 (the function of writing) (p.77-94)

Lacan announces this session as centred on the function of writing (l'écrit) within analytic discourse, opening with a self-deprecating anecdote about the Écrits — a collection he designed not to be read. The provocation is serious: to read a letter is not the same as to read in general, and what analytic discourse is concerned with is precisely what is read beyond what the subject has been urged to say. The analyst must read stupidities — the dimension of what 'doesn't hold up' — and this reading is precisely what gives writing its irreducible function in the analytic context, distinct from the function of speech.

The session develops the distinction between ontology (the philosophical accentuation of the copula 'to be') and what analytic discourse requires: an abandonment of the world as a totality supported by being. Lacan uses Aristotle's own hesitation — his use of to ti en einai (what it was to be) rather than simple essence — as evidence that even within the discourse of the master, being is produced from the position of being under orders, of the signifier as imperative. The letter, by contrast, is what emerges from discourse as an effect — and this is illustrated through the distinction between the Chinese character, the algebraic letter, and the letter as it operates in set theory. Joyce's Finnegans Wake is invoked as the limit-case where language plays with writing, producing something closest to the slip: a text that says more than it knows, readable in an infinity of ways, located squarely in the register of analytic discourse.

Key concepts: Letter, Signifier, Language, Real, Matheme, Unconscious Notable examples: Écrits as designed not to be read; Joyce's Finnegans Wake as the slip in written form; Chinese character versus algebraic letter versus set-theoretic letter; Aristotle's to ti en einai versus simple essence

Seminar 5: Wednesday 16 January 1973 (compass points: written, Other, phallus, love) (p.95-133)

Lacan maps out the year's four compass points: the function of the written, the Other, the phallus, and love. He restates that the enjoyment of the Other is not a sign of love, and insists that 'the Other' must be recast: it is the other sex, but precisely as that which is constituted as absolute Other from the place of phallic enjoyment — which is itself not referred to the Other as such. The phallus is identified as the signifier without a signified, the signifier whose function in analytic discourse must finally be articulated as regards effects of absence.

Lacan then argues that analytic discourse compels an abandonment of the ontological 'world' in favour of par-être (being-to-one-side), and that mathematics — specifically set theory's use of the letter — provides the orientation point for reading the effects of language where the sexual relationship is absent. The mathematical letter does not point to a world; it reveals grammar (the structure only visible through the written) as the trace of what cannot be said directly. The session revisits Logical Time to show that intersubjective inference is structured around the objet petit a — the three-person scene reduces to two-plus-o, where each subject is the stake in the other's thinking and figures as the o-object under the other's gaze.

The seminar then deploys modal logic systematically: necessity = does not cease to be written; impossibility = does not cease not to be written; contingency = ceases not to be written; possibility = ceases to be written. The sexual relationship is impossible (does not cease not to be written). Phallic enjoyment is the necessary correlate of this impossibility. Stoic material implication (if p then q) and Bentham's utilitarianism (thinking about what old words are actually used for) are brought in to formalise the structure: enjoyment 'fails' (faillit) in the same register in which it is 'required' (faut), so that 'the enjoyment that is required' translates immediately as 'the enjoyment that fails.' Metaphor is identified as repression's first effect, and the objet petit a is positioned as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

Key concepts: Phallic Jouissance, Other Jouissance, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Four Discourses, Phallus Notable examples: Logical Time and the three prisoners as illustration of the o-object; Bentham's Theory of Fictions and utilitarianism; Stoic material implication; Modal square: necessary/impossible/contingent/possible

Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973 (love, courtly love, woman and the Other) (p.134-172)

Lacan returns to 'an other satisfaction' — the satisfaction of the word — as distinct from phallic jouissance, linking it through Aristotle's notion of justice as the happy medium (juste milieu) to the prosdiorism ('all', 'some') that structures quantification in the sexuation formulae. He then engages extended discussion of courtly love, arguing against both Marxist and idealist readings: courtly love is not a dialectical synthesis of the erotic and the spiritual, nor simply a feudal ideological formation. It is rather the historically singular emergence — a 'meteor' — of a male attempt to circumvent the impossibility of the sexual relationship by constructing the Lady as an absolute, elevated obstacle. The obstacle (enstasis in Aristotle) is found to be structurally present in Lacan's own formulae, and his readers are directed to the Aristotelian logic of the obstacle as a resource for understanding the Agency of the Letter.

Lacan then develops the logic of the barred Woman (La with a bar) in relation to the barred Other S(Ø): the Woman cannot be written under the definite article because whatever is stated about her can only be stated from a not-all. She has a structural relationship to S(Ø) — to the locus of the Other insofar as it is radically Other, without an Other of the Other. On one side, Woman is related to S(Ø); on the other, she can have a relationship with the phallic signifier Φ. This reduplication is what makes her not-all. The 'hommosexual' dimension of love (soul loving soul, l'âme aime l'âme) is elaborated at length: love in its philosophical tradition, from Aristotle's philia through Dante to courtly love, is structured outside sex, oriented toward the Supreme Being, with friendship (philoi) as its human remainder. Lacan names the outside-sex (hors-sexe) as the man on whom the soul speculates, and turns this back on the question of women's jouissance: what women love in their partners is also the hommosexual soul, which means that women too are implicated in the hommosexual circuit — yet their relationship to the Other remains privileged and uncharted in a way that escapes any masculine reduction.

Key concepts: Not-all, The big Other, Feminine Sexuality, Desire, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Point de capiton Notable examples: Courtly love as a 'meteor' and its relationship to the absence of the sexual relation; Aristotle's philia and the Supreme Good; Augustine and the hommosexual dimension of the soul; Cornelia mother of the Gracchi as exemplary name

Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973 (hainamoration, true/real, objet a as semblance) (p.173-188)

Lacan opens with the neologism hainamoration — the conflation of hate and amoration — arguing that psychoanalysis's unfortunate use of 'ambivalence' as a substitute term has obscured the structural necessity of the hate-love coupling. The argument runs: Empedocles (invoked by Freud) posits God as the most ignorant of all beings because God does not know hatred; Christians translated this non-hatred into love. But the analysis of knowledge requires that hatred be given its proper place — love without hatred is illusory.

The session then distinguishes systematically between the true, the real, and the imaginary semblance. The real is what the symbolic approaches but cannot subsume: the semblance (which results from the symbolic) is not the real, and must be strictly distinguished from imaginary supports. The objet petit a is identified as a semblance of being — it appears to give the support of being and everything in Aristotle that concerns being (essence, contemplation, the look as cause of desire) is readable from analytic experience as concerning the objet a. The analyst, by placing the objet a in the position of semblance in the discourse of the analyst, is uniquely positioned among all discourses to examine what is involved in truth as knowledge. Lacan then introduces Augustine's scene of jalouissance (jealous jouissance): the infant who grows pale watching its milk-brother at the breast. This primal scene of substitutive enjoyment founds desire through metonymy — the demand addressed to the Other produces the objet a as its leftover, and Lacan closes on the question: is having the objet a the same as being it?

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Real, Truth, Jouissance, Discourse of the Analyst, Fantasy Notable examples: Empedocles and Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Augustine's pallidus conlactaneus and jalouissance; Aristotle's contemplation as objet a of the look

Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 (Jean-Claude Milner on linguistics; Recanati on the not-all) (p.189-221)

Lacan invites Jean-Claude Milner, a linguist, to present on the current state of linguistics in order to dramatise the gap between linguistics and linguisterie. Milner outlines the crisis within linguistics since Saussure: the structuralist hypothesis (language has properties deducible from its nature as sign) grounds a science with a stable object, but transformational grammar destabilises this by introducing competing interpretations of the notion of 'property' — the Chomskian empirical-inductive (properties are discovered a posteriori) and the rationalist-deductivist (properties follow from essence). More deeply, the symmetric locutor/interlocutor subject that underlies both Saussurean and Chomskian models is being dissolved by linguistics' own positive syntactic exploration, which encounters heterogeneous subjects and power relations it cannot account for, pointing linguistics toward psychoanalysis.

Lacan responds by distilling his own concept of lalangue — written as one word to mark the difference from Language — as the concept that linguistics cannot reach: the mother tongue in its pre-grammatical, jouissance-bearing dimension, the site of the equivocations and condensations that analytic work operates on. He then introduces the formal sexuation schema for women: the not-all (pas-tout) is grounded in the absence of any x that denies the phallic function, not in the existence of an exception. This means the feminine position cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity, which would always imply an exception; it must be read through the infinite, where no determinate exception can be constructed. The formula ∄x.¬Φx (there is no x that denies the phallic function) on the feminine side, paired with ∀x.Φx (all x is subject to the phallic function), produces not a complement to the masculine all but an open, undecidable relation to the barred Other.

Recanati returns to argue through Berkeley's semiotics and Kierkegaard's relationship to Régine that the 'supplementary feminine jouissance' risks being nothing but the signifier of the masculine quest/fatum. For Berkeley, the signifying chain's effect is the fortuitous encounter between chains of signifiers and chains of signifieds. For Kierkegaard, Régine is already on a hither side of the ethical choice he agonises over — she is structurally exempt from the splitting of the subject that torments him. Lacan responds by identifying this structural exemption as the key feature: the Woman's relationship to the big Other resists masculine perspectival capture because there is no point of view of 'The Woman.'

Key concepts: Lalangue, Not-all, Sexuation, Language, The big Other, Feminine Sexuality Notable examples: Saussure's structuralism and Chomsky's transformational grammar as competing linguistics models; Milner on the epistemic crisis of modern linguistics; Berkeley's semiotics of the sign chain; Kierkegaard and Régine as illustration of feminine structural exemption from subjective splitting

Seminar 11: Wednesday 8 May 1973 (unconscious, knowledge, Christianity, jouissance) (p.222-239)

Lacan reformulates the unconscious through a series of difficult theses: the unconscious is not that being thinks (the traditional scientific assumption), but that being, in speaking, enjoys and wants to know nothing about it. This is a radical negation of any Wissentrieb: the speaking being already knows everything it needs to know, but this knowledge is completely limited to the insufficient enjoyment constituted by the fact that it speaks. The consequence for science is that Aristotelian science (founded on the reciprocity between nous and world, between what thinks and what is thought) has always misrecognised the real object of its inquiry.

The session then develops the inertia of language as the structural feature that distinguishes language from mathematical signs (mathemes, which are integrally transmissible): language carries a considerable inertia, visible in comparison with the matheme precisely because the matheme is transmitted without knowing what it means, while language always carries jouissance as its excess. Aristotle's De Anima is critiqued: 'man thinks with his soul' means man thinks with the assumed mechanisms of his body, but those mechanisms are already Aristotle's own thinking naturalised. Against this, Lacan positions the inertia of language at the level of language itself, refusing energetics or homeostasis as models.

The seminar then turns to Christianity and the Baroque as historical attempts to regulate jouissance — to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship. The Counter-Reformation's display of martyred bodies (the Baroque churches of Rome) is read as a 'regulation of the soul by corporal X-ray': the body made to testify to the jouissance the soul cannot absorb. All cultural and religious formations — Christianity's baroque obscenity, Aristotle's active intellect, mythology's polytheism — are so many failed attempts. Castration is the only price of any apparent satisfaction. The economy of enjoyment is not yet at our fingertips, but analytic discourse may provide a path — essentially contingent — toward it.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Unconscious, Lalangue, Real, Knowledge, Matheme Notable examples: Baroque churches of Rome as jouissance regulation; Counter-Reformation and Christianity as attempts to bridge sex and enjoyment; Aristotle's De Anima and the soul as thinking mechanism

Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 May 1973 (no metalanguage, Borromean knot, topology) (p.240-261)

Lacan opens by restating the thesis 'there is no metalanguage' — not as a claim about language in general but as a claim about being: there is nothing that subsists outside saying, and mathematical formalisation only ex-sists insofar as it is carried by the saying that presents it. The symbolic is not to be confused with being; it subsists only as the ex-sistence of saying. This reformulates the unconscious: 'I speak without knowing it, I speak with my body, and I always say more than I know.' The subject is nothing but this: the punctual, vanishing point that speaks.

Lacan then moves to the Borromean knot as a live demonstration. Three rings of string such that no two are linked — held together only by the third — embody the structural principle that removing any single element disperses all the rest simultaneously. This topology is presented not as metaphor but as the only adequate writing of what cannot be said about the RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) structure and about the subject's constitution. The session includes practical demonstration (Lacan working with actual rings of string), and extends the Borromean logic to four, five, and n rings, proving the general solution. The philosophical consequence is that the One engenders science not by measurement but by representing the fact that the One is alone, not truly knotted to anything resembling the sexual Other. The chain of Ones is what remains of any language when written. The Other is not added to the One but differentiated from it: the Other is l'un en moins (the less-One), and this is why in any relationship of man with woman, she ought to be taken from the angle of the less-One.

The distinction between the One (ring enclosing nothing but a hole) and the Other (the less-One) grounds the logic of desire: the objet a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy. The desire structure is: demand addresses the Other, the Other's structural not-knowing constitutes the not-all, and it is this not-all that, read through the Borromean logic, shows that the subject is constituted in the knot of RSI rather than in any one register alone.

Key concepts: Topology, Real, Objet petit a, The big Other, Subject, Desire Notable examples: Borromean knot (live demonstration with rings of string); Borromean extension to n rings; The One and the less-One as asymmetric poles

Seminar 13: Wednesday 26 June 1973 (lalangue, knowledge, love, contingency) (p.262-277)

In the closing session, Lacan returns to the pivotal claim that knowledge is a riddle (une énigme) — not a communication, not a tool, but an enigma constituted by lalangue as it operates in the unconscious. The unconscious is the den of lalangue: what the speaking being 'knows' is not a stated knowledge but a knowing-how-to-act (savoir-faire) that exceeds any articulation. Scientific discourse (exemplified through Bateson's work and behaviourist psychology's rat experiments) misrecognises this by reducing knowledge to learning, failing to grasp that the experimenter's own relation to lalangue is the hidden condition of any experimental montage. This is not a critique of science but a precise delineation of what analytic discourse can do that scientific discourse cannot.

Lacan then returns to the subject as constituted by the signifier: the hypothesis of the subject is necessary for lalangue to function, not imported from outside. The subject is nothing beyond the hypothesis that substantifies itself, merged with the very individual who supports it. When the signifier becomes sign — passes from pure difference to marking — it affects an other who is made subject or passes for being so. Being is always elsewhere, as the predicate shows: the subject is never anything but punctual and vanishing.

The seminar closes with the modal logic of love: love is the passage from contingency (ceases not to be written, the encounter) to necessity (does not cease to be written, the destiny). But this passage is illusory — it mistakes the contingency of the encounter for the necessity of the destiny, which is precisely what is unsustainable about love. The final question — whether knowing what the partner will do is a proof of love — is left open as a wager, completing the year's arc: to know is not to love; love operates precisely in the gap of knowledge that lalangue constitutes.

Key concepts: Lalangue, Knowledge, Contingency, Love, Signifier, Subject Notable examples: Bateson on communication and behaviourist rat experiments; The contingency/necessity modal structure of love; Subject as the necessary hypothesis of lalangue

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
  • Aristotle, De Anima
  • Aristotle, Metaphysics
  • Aristotle, Physics
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
  • Jakobson (Roman Jakobson, linguistics)
  • Jean-Claude Milner (linguist)
  • François Recanati (semiotician/philosopher)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIX (...ou pire)
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Empedocles
  • Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Fictions
  • Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way
  • Augustine (De Trinitate / Confessions)
  • Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica
  • Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
  • Heidegger, Being and Time
  • Spinoza, Ethics
  • George Berkeley (semiotics of the sign)
  • Charles Sanders Peirce (interpretant, semiotics)
  • Richard of Saint-Victor, De Trinitate

Position in the corpus

Seminar XX occupies a pivotal position in the Lacanian corpus: it is simultaneously the culmination of the structuralist-linguistic elaboration that runs through Seminars III, V, IX, XI, and the Écrits, and the threshold of the late topological-knotting work of Seminars XXII–XXIV and the writings on the sinthome. Readers coming from Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts) or Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) will find Encore presupposing and transforming both: the four concepts (gaze, voice, repetition, transference) reappear here folded into the sexuation logic, and das Ding of Seminar VII is retrospectively repositioned as what the objet a covers as semblance of being. The sexuation formulae first appear in draft in Seminar XIX (...ou pire, 1971–72), and readers should ideally approach Encore after ...ou pire to follow the argument's development; the official Encore must also be read alongside L'Étourdit (1973) to understand the formal distinction between the saying (dire) and the said (dit) that underpins the no-metalanguage thesis. For the topology, Seminars XXII (RSI) and XXIII (Le Sinthome) continue the Borromean knot work introduced here.\n\nWithin the broader corpus of Lacanian-influenced theory, Encore is the indispensable text for Žižek's deployment of the sexual non-relation, for Joan Copjec's work on sexuation and the Kantian antinomies, for Alain Badiou's reading of love as a truth procedure, and for Colette Soler's elaborations of feminine jouissance. Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject and Lacan to the Letter provide useful orientation for Anglo-American readers; Moustapha Safouan's and Marie-Hélène Brousse's essays on sexuation offer complementary theoretical context. The Cormac Gallagher translation used here, based on 'pirate' manuscripts, is notably closer to the spoken seminar than the official Fink translation (On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Norton 1998) and preserves Recanati's interventions in full — making it especially valuable for tracking the seminar's dialectical movement session by session.

Canonical concepts deployed