CODA: Encore—Notes on Lacan’s Reference to Mysticism in the Late Seminars

This chapter argues that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s twentieth seminar entitled Encore (Still, 1970–1971), presented at age 71, places a period, or point, at the end of a sentence constituted by the combined titles of the eighteenth (Of a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance, 1971–1972) and nineteenth (… Or Worse, 1972–1973) seminars. Returning to the fifth (1957–1958) and sixth (1958–1959) seminars, in which Lacan described, in the context of his “graph of desire,” the point as that what in a chain of signifiers functions as a stop retroactively granting the chain with meaning, De Kesel presents Encore as functioning like a point that reflects on Lacan’s former seminars. Like the philosopher’s earlier work, Encore (still) portrays human beings as subject to, and of, desire. Linking people’s unquenchable desire for satisfaction to feminine jouissance and the ecstatic experiences of mystics—a fleeting, momentary fulfillment of an endless desire for the absent (divine) lover—Encore states, once more, with another set of signifiers, that the hoped-for attainment of the object of desire—the signified, meaning, closure—must be suspended, yet again.