LACAN'S "ENCORE" (1): The Title

We do not know what a title can do

I've been thinking about Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XX, called Encore, and I'm already wondering about the title. Often it's just left as such in English, “encore”. We know that the French word “encore” means again or still, and Lacan plays with the fact that it sounds like, if you put a hyphen, “en-corps”, in body, but I wonder if there's another meaning.

Lacan says we should transform substantives, nouns, (and I suppose other parts of speech) into verbs, so in my attempt to amplify the layers of meaning evoked by Lacan's title I searched for occurrences of the word “encorer”, which would be the infinitive form of a possible verb.

I discovered one site which confirmed the existence of “encorer”. The definition I found is from the CNRTL (Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales), which is a reputable French linguistic resource.

The definition given is: to experience extreme suffering, to be broken by pain. The verb is defined as reflexive, so the infinitive is properly presented with the reflexive pronoun “se”: s’encorer, and it is presented as a variant spelling (the pronunciation would be the same) of “ancorer”. “Encore” would be the imperative form of this verb: suffer! feel intense pain!

The example provided is from Book IV of Froissart's Chronicles, written around 1400. It reads:

“il [messire Boucicault] se desconfortoit et esbahissoit de lui meismes plus que nulz des aultres, et se ancoroit et merancolioit, avoit le coer trop pesant”.

A translation into modern English gives:

"He [Sir Boucicault] became distressed and was more astonished at himself than any of the others, and he suffered extremely and fell into melancholy, having a heart too heavy."

(Note: I am looking for further confirmaton of the definition given by the CNRTL, if anyone can help me out here).

This example is particularly interesting in the understanding of Lacan's choice of "Encore" for the title. It demonstrates the intense affective and physical nature of the suffering implied by this archaic verb, which aligns well with Lacan's concepts of jouissance and the interplay of pleasure and pain.

I find this definition interesting because it helps give multiple layers of meaning to Lacan's title:

(1) “encore”, "again" - repetition,

(2) “en-corps”, "in-body" - embodiment,

(3) "encore"/"ancore" - the injunction to suffer

(Note: this third sense of "encore" may well have been known to Lacan, given his immense linguistic culture).

This last sense itself evokes three themes of Seminar XX:

(1) "ou pire" (“or worse”, the title of the previous seminar) as worsening. The idea of worsening or intensification aligns with the extreme nature of the suffering implied in this archaic meaning. Lacan, as we shall see, plays on this expression in the opening paragraphs of the first session of this seminar.

(2) "jouis!" (“enjoy!) as the cruel imperative of the superego, enjoining an admixture of pleasure and pain through excess, a suffering/enjoyment too great for the ego to bear.

(3) feminine jouissance: a jouissance beyond the phallus, associated with mystical experiences or intensities that exceed symbolic representation. Feminine joussance is tied to intensity too great for the ego to bear, and thus to an intrinsic combination of enjoyment and suffering.

This multi-layered reading adds to our understanding of Seminar XX, by way of its title tying together themes of repetition, embodiment, suffering and enjoyment, in the context of feminine jouissance vacillating the limits of symbolic representation.