Jacques Lacan, Encore

This chapter discusses Lacan's Seminar XX as a theorization, in terms of psychoanalysis's emphasis on sexual difference, of Bataille's account of the deep divide within Christian mysticism. Bataille's work raises the question of how mysticism can be the site of both the desire to be everything; to escape the particularity, limitations, and constraints of the body; and of the recognition that one is not everything, of embodied subjectivity in all of its pleasurable and painful affects. For Lacan, this doubleness is rooted in the nature of human language as both bodily and irreducible to the materiality of the body, and in the nature of human subjectivity as embodied and yet always also split from the body. Lacan's work also opens the possibility of undermining that same set of associations, for he insists that the goal of psychoanalysis is to refuse the claims to mastery and wholeness on which male-dominant culture, society, and their unconscious rest.