Please do an explicatory study of Later Lacan, from Seminar XX onward, for me. Thanks. (ChatGPT, 2025-4-6)
I’d be glad to prepare an explicatory study of Later Lacan (from Seminar XX onward) for you. Could you let me know:
1. Are you looking for a comprehensive overview of each seminar (XX to XXV and beyond), or a conceptual focus on major themes (e.g. jouissance, sinthome, lalangue, sexuation, the Real)?
2. Do you want the study to include connections to clinical practice, literature (e.g. Joyce), or other fields like politics, art, or philosophy?
3. Would you like the format to be more of an essay, a conceptual map, or a timeline of Lacan’s theoretical shifts?
Once I know this, I can tailor the study accordingly.
1. Both a comprehensive overview of each seminar (XX to XXV and beyond), and a conceptual focus on major themes (e.g. jouissance, sinthome, lalangue, sexuation, the Real)
2. Includes connections to clinical practice, literature (e.g. Joyce), or other fields like politics, art, or philosophy?
3. In the format to be more of an essay. (ChatGPT, 2025-4-6)
The Later Lacan: Seminars XX–XXV and Key Concepts of His Final Teaching
Introduction
Jacques Lacan’s “later” period typically refers to the final phase of his teaching (early 1970s through his last seminars in the late 1970s). This period begins around Seminar XX (1972–73, Encore), which marks a turning point both in French intellectual life after May 1968 and in Lacan’s own approach . During these years Lacan’s focus shifted significantly – from the structuralist emphasis on language and the Symbolic order that characterized his earlier work, to new explorations of jouissance (enjoyment), the Real, and innovative concepts like lalangue and the sinthome. His style also became increasingly idiosyncratic and inventive: he played with puns and topology, pushing psychoanalytic theory into novel territory. In what follows, we will survey Seminars XX through XXV (and briefly beyond) to trace the major arguments and innovations of Lacan’s later work. Along the way, we will highlight key late-Lacanian themes – jouissance, sinthome, lalangue, sexuation, the Real – and explain how these evolving ideas impacted psychoanalytic clinical practice (especially Lacan’s view of symptoms, interpretation, and the end of analysis). We will also discuss how Lacan’s dialogue with literature (notably James Joyce), as well as with philosophy, art, and politics, informed this period. Finally, we will consider how “Later Lacan” departs from (or deepens) the concerns of his earlier, structuralist phase.
Seminar XX: Encore (1972–1973) – Jouissance and Sexual Non-Relation
Delivered in 1972–73, Seminar XX (Encore) is often seen as inaugurating Lacan’s late teaching . In Encore, Lacan places jouissance (enjoyment in the psychoanalytic sense) at the center of psychoanalytic theory. The seminar is explicitly a “theory of jouissance” in its complex relation to love and desire . Here Lacan famously declares that “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” – “there is no sexual relationship” (no intrinsic, complementary relation between the sexes in the symbolic order) . This provocative thesis is linked to Lacan’s development of the formulas of sexuation, a logical chart differentiating the masculine and feminine positions. Lacan argues that the so-called “masculine” side is defined by all subjects being submitted to the phallic function (castration), whereas the “feminine” side is “not-all” under the phallic function, which allows for a supplementary jouissance beyond the phallus . In other words, phallic jouissance (the enjoyment tied to the phallic signifier and organ) is the limit of enjoyment for men and women, yet women in particular can experience an “Other jouissance” in excess of it .
Feminine jouissance is exemplified by the ecstatic experience of mystics. Lacan points to Bernini’s baroque sculpture of Saint Teresa – depicted swooning in bliss as an angel pierces her with a divine arrow – as an image of this ineffable enjoyment . Saint Teresa’s ecstasy, in Lacan’s reading, is jouissance beyond words: “You need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming,” he quips, emphasizing that this spiritual ecstasy is essentially a form of sexual enjoyment . Encore thus posits two modalities of jouissance: a limited, Symbolic/phallic jouissance tied to language and the body, and an unlimited, Other jouissance “that is hers… that belongs to that ‘she’ that doesn’t exist,” i.e. to Woman as such . Lacan even suggests that God (in so far as God is imagined as enjoying an absolute love) can be thought of as based on feminine jouissance . In sum, Seminar XX radically revises Freud’s phallocentric view of sexuality, proposing that “The Woman does not exist” as a complete, attainable category since the feminine is defined by a “not-all” openness to a surplus jouissance .
Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652). Lacan cites this image of mystical rapture to illustrate “Other (feminine) jouissance” beyond the phallic limit .
Alongside jouissance, Encore weaves together themes of love, knowledge, and language. Lacan maintains that it is love which compensates for the absence of a sexual rapport – “What makes up the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love” he states . Love, in this context, is a kind of improvisation that bridges the gap between two speaking beings where a natural sexual harmony is lacking. Lacan also introduces the idea of “lalangue” around this time (a term appearing in his 1972 essay L’Étourdit and echoed in Encore). Lalangue denotes the raw, jouissance-laden dimension of language – the babble of the mother tongue with its polyphony and nonsensical resonances . In contrast to language as a system of structured signifiers, lalangue emphasizes that words themselves can produce enjoyment (sound play, puns, the jouis-sens or “enjoy-meant” that exceeds meaning) . By highlighting lalangue, Lacan blurs the line between language and libido: “Language is now shown to have not only effects of meaning, but direct effects of jouissance,” as one commentator puts it . Indeed, in Encore Lacan asserts that “jouissance is what is Useless”, a beyond of utility that language curbs yet also strangely supports . This period thus sees Lacan “hollowing out” the primacy of the signifier, seeking what in language escapes sense and yields enjoyment. By the end of Seminar XX, he has formalized the non-existence of the sexual rapport with logical formulas and thoroughly examined the structures of jouissance – clearing the ground for a new, topological mode of theorizing to come .
Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent (1973–1974) – The Unconscious and the Knot
Following Encore, Seminar XXI: “Les non-dupes errent” (translated roughly as “The Non-Duped Err”) continues Lacan’s trajectory by turning to problems of knowledge, truth, and the Real. The French title is a pun – les non-dupes errent sounds like “les noms du père” (the Names of the Father) – indicating a link between skepticism toward the big Other and going astray. Lacan’s maxim here is that those who are not “duped” by the symbolic order nevertheless err. In other words, a subject who refuses to be fooled by the accepted social semblances or the paternal law (Name-of-the-Father) might think they’ve sidestepped illusion, but this very refusal can lead to a kind of psychic derailment. Lacan is suggesting that one cannot simply opt out of the symbolic; denying its structuring role (being “non-dupe”) may result in errance, a drift in the Real (as seen, for example, in psychosis). This pun also heralds Lacan’s move to pluralize the Name-of-the-Father – no longer a single, absolute Father signifier guaranteeing meaning, but potentially multiple “names” or substitutes for that function. Indeed, from this point on, Lacan entertains the idea that many different signifiers or constructs (not just the Oedipal father) might knot a subject’s reality. This pluralization is one step toward the concept of the sinthome a couple years later (Joyce’s art will be seen as one such substitute for the Name-of-the-Father).
Technically, Seminar XXI is where Lacan begins to introduce topological models in earnest. He had been playing with topology in the late 1960s (the Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus, etc.), but by the mid-70s he found an apparatus to bind everything together: the Borromean knot. A Borromean knot consists of three interlinked rings in such a way that if any one ring is cut (removed), the other two fall apart (they are not directly chained to each other) . Lacan uses this as a model of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary (RSI): three orders of human experience that are “linked all together or not at all.” Each ring represents one register, and only the intertwining of all three sustains the subject’s reality . If one order is “cut” or missing (for instance, if the Symbolic does not anchor the subject, as in psychosis), the entire structure of meaning collapses. Lacan’s turn to the Borromean knot marks a decisive shift “from linguistics to topology” in his teaching . As he later put it, topology is not a metaphor – it is meant as a literal (or Real) schema of how the mind is organized . Seminar XXI lays the groundwork by emphasizing knot theory and by revisiting many previous concepts (the seminar covers topics like truth, knowledge, and semblance, often in dense wordplay). We see Lacan aiming to go “beyond the unconscious” as previously conceived, formulating instead a notion of the unconscious as something that “ex-sists” outside the subject’s knowledge – an unknown knowledge that only manifests through slips or inventions . In fact, Lacan offers a new “formula for the unconscious” in Seminar XXI/XXIV: “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue…” – “the unknown that one knows from a blunder (bévue)” . This aphorism underscores that truth arises via errors and slips; we only know the unconscious through the bévues (mistakes) where another knowledge speaks.
By the end of Seminar XXI, Lacan is fully engaged in re-thinking psychoanalysis with these new tools. He has begun “making knots, designing knots, complicating the knot” in place of relying on linguistic theory . This period, as Jacques-Alain Miller later observed, is one in which Lacan even treated psychoanalysis itself with suspicion – as if to “cleanse” it of its earlier certainties . Indeed, Lacan would provocatively describe psychoanalysis during this time as a kind of “fraud” or superstition that needs renewing . All of this anticipates the dramatic changes of the next seminars, where the Real and jouissance take center stage in new ways.
Seminar XXII: RSI (1974–1975) – Knitting the Real, Symbolic, Imaginary
The very title of Seminar XXII, “RSI,” announces its focus on the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary – Lacan’s three fundamental registers – and their interrelation. In this 1974–75 seminar, Lacan systematically employs the Borromean rings as the structuring model for the psyche . He proposes that the “essential structure of the subject” is this Borromean triad: none of the three orders has primacy; rather, meaning (Symbolic), image/consistency (Imaginary), and being/jouissance (Real) are knotted together in an inextricable way . If any link is broken – for instance, if the Symbolic does not anchor the Real and Imaginary – the subject’s world falls into disarray. In classical Lacanian theory, one might say the Name-of-the-Father (the Oedipal signifier) was what ensured the linking of meaning and jouissance. But by Seminar XXII, Lacan is seeking a more general or formal understanding: the Borromean knot abstracts this linking function without tying it exclusively to the father. This move foreshadows his introduction of the sinthome as a possible fourth ring that can supplement or replace the paternal link in holding the knot together .
Clinically, RSI is significant for further redefining the symptom. In 1974–75 Lacan famously stated: “the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him” . This definition marks a clear departure from the earlier idea of the symptom as a coded message to be deciphered (the Freudian symptom full of repressed meaning). Now the symptom is seen as a particular jouissance-formation, a unique way each subject organizes and feels the Real of their unconscious . Already in the early 1960s Lacan had hinted that a symptom is “a pure jouissance addressed to no one,” not a sign appealing for interpretation . In RSI, he cements this view: the symptom is how you enjoy (suffer from/enjoy) your unconscious, beyond any communication. This paves the way for the concept of the sinthome (a term he will introduce in the next seminar) as the distilled essence of that enjoyment. In short, Seminar XXII consolidates Lacan’s shift from a hermeneutic (interpretation-focused) approach to a topological approach. Lacan is less interested in what the symptom means and more in how it is knotted into the subject’s reality. By formalizing the R-S-I knot, he sets the stage for understanding pathological structures (like psychosis or neurosis) in terms of knot failures or peculiar knotting – and for appreciating that a symptom might be what holds a person together rather than what needs to be eliminated at all costs .
Before moving on, it’s worth noting that during this period Lacan also engaged in extra-seminar writings that complement RSI. For example, in 1974 he wrote Television, a short text where he asserts that “the unconscious is the fact that there is no universe of discourse” (no all-encompassing metalanguage), reinforcing the notion of an irreducible gap in knowledge. Likewise, his continued interest in logical paradoxes (e.g. the liar’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness) and set theory shows Lacan interrogating the limits of knowledge – themes very much alive in RSI. The Real, as he is coming to define it now, is “that which has no sense”, the part of existence that resists meaning and yet insists (for instance, the impossible core of sexual non-rapport) . In later commentary, Miller noted that Lacan’s “later teaching… defines the real in terms of the exclusion of sense” . Seminar XXII drives home this point: the Real is approached not through interpretation but through structure (knotted structure), and the analytic aim is gradually shifting toward handling the Real rather than making sense of it.
A Borromean knot of three interlinked rings. Lacan in Seminar XXII insists that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are bound in a Borromean knot – if any one link is cut, the whole chain falls apart . This models the fragile unity of the subject.
Seminar XXIII: Le Sinthome (1975–1976) – Joyce and the Symptom that Knots
Perhaps the crown jewel of Lacan’s late seminars is Seminar XXIII: Le sinthome. The old French word “sinthome” (an archaic spelling of symptôme) is chosen to signal that Lacan is proposing a new conception of the symptom . In this seminar, Lacan performs a remarkable case study of James Joyce, using the Irish writer as a springboard to elaborate what the sinthome is. It’s a true interdisciplinary venture: Lacan brings together literary analysis of Joyce’s works (especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and mathematical topology (continuing from RSI with an even more elaborate knot theory) . Through this “coincidentia oppositorum” – the meeting of art and formal theory – Lacan “redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his final topology of the subject.”
Joyce is central because Lacan believed Joyce “invented” something in his writing that kept him from psychosis . Biographically, Joyce’s father was an impotent and failing figure, and Lacan reads Joyce as having a precarious symbolic anchor for his identity (raising the question of a psychotic structure due to a foreclosed Name-of-the-Father). Yet Joyce did not go psychotic; instead, he poured his jouissance into his writing, forging an idiosyncratic use of language (full of puns, neologisms, multilingual wordplay) that effectively created a supplementary organizational principle for his psyche. This something is what Lacan calls Joyce’s “sinthome.” The sinthome is a 4th ring in the Borromean knot: in Seminar XXII Lacan had the triad of RSI, but now he adds the sinthome as an extra loop that can tie the other three together . “The 1975-6 seminar extends the theory of the Borromean knot… by adding the sinthome as a fourth ring to the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, tying together a knot which constantly threatens to come undone,” as one summary explains . In Joyce’s case, Lacan suggests that his literary oeuvre (the unique style of Finnegans Wake, etc.) was his sinthome – a creative solution that compensated for a deficient father-function and held his mental registers together .
Crucially, the sinthome has no interpretable meaning in the unconscious – it is “a signifying formulation beyond analysis, a kernel of enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic” . We might say the sinthome is the irreducible Real core of a symptom, the part that won’t dissolve through analytic interpretation. For Lacan, “the sinthome is what allows one to live” by providing a unique organization of jouissance . In other words, it’s that “special thing” about a person – their signature symptom or creative singularity – that stabilizes their identity and enjoyment. Where Freud aimed to heal symptoms by making the unconscious conscious (interpretation), Lacan’s late teaching suggests that what truly defines a successful analysis is the subject’s relationship to their sinthome. He famously declared that the end of analysis involves the subject “identifying with the sinthome.” Rather than expecting to be cured of all symptoms, the analysand comes to own their symptom, to recognize it as their way of jouissance and no longer see it as imposed by the Other. This is a radical rethinking of cure: it is not about eliminating the symptom but about finding a modus vivendi with one’s incurable kernel of enjoyment .
In Seminar XXIII, Lacan’s style reaches new extremes of inventiveness. He puns that “Joyce le symptom” (Joyce the symptom) is also “Joyce le sinthome”, elevating Joyce’s name to the concept. He plays on the Irish pronunciation of Joyce’s daughter’s name “Lucia” as “lux, cia” (light, here) and countless other Joycean riffs. One of Lacan’s famous quips from this seminar is about the Borromean knot itself: “Ça sert à rien, mais ça serre.” – “It’s good for nothing, but it holds (tight).” This pun (untranslatable except as above) neatly captures the spirit of the sinthome: it serves no useful purpose in the common sense (no communicative meaning), but it secures the subject. The sinthome ties together the loose ends of RSI like a knot. In Joyce’s case, his writing didn’t “mean” in a normal way (Finnegans Wake notoriously makes a nonsense of meaning), but that very nonsense gripped a real at the level of jouissance, becoming a new anchoring point for him . This leads Lacan to suggest that an artist of Joyce’s caliber achieves through their art something analogous to what an analysis aims for: a re-knitting of the psyche. Joyce “didn’t need analysis,” Lacan muses, because he already found his sinthome. This reflects Lacan’s engagement with literature at its zenith – he treats Joyce’s literary innovations (the play with lalangue in Joyce’s text) as a source of theoretical insight. In fact, Lacan even credits Joyce with “triggering” a change in the status of the unconscious: after Joyce, the unconscious is no longer just the discourse of the Other (structured like a language), but also something one can make use of through a sinthome, through inventive writing .
By the end of Seminar XXIII, Lacan has fundamentally altered the classical analytic horizon. The sinthome embodies the idea that a symptom might be “unanalysable” in its deepest core – and that’s okay . Analysis is no longer about infinitely dissolving symptoms into meaning, but about isolating the sinthome and assuming it. This concept had huge “clinical” implications: it suggested that what analysis produces is a knowing-how-to-live-with-one’s-symptom (savoir y faire avec son sinthome) rather than a total resolution. In Lacan’s own School, this was tied to the procedure of the “Pass” (where an analysand-turned-analyst testifies to what they’ve learned at the end of their analysis, typically a moment of identifying with a sinthome). In sum, Le Sinthome marks the culmination of late Lacan: a marriage of artistic intuition and psychoanalytic theory, yielding a new conception of the human subject as a “parlêtre” – a speaking-being whose being is knotted out of language and jouissance, and who must invent a unique solution to the inherent deadlocks of that condition.
Seminar XXIV: L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (1976–1977) – Unconscious, Love, and New Signifiers
Seminar XXIV wins the prize for the most enigmatic title in Lacan’s seminar series. “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre” is a multilayered pun. Broken down, it reads roughly: “The Unknown Which Knows from a Blunder (une-bévue) Wings to Death (or to Love)”. Phonetically it plays on L’insu que sait (what is unknown that knows) versus L’insu que c’est (the unknown that is), as well as on “l’une-bévue” (a slip-up, a Freudian slip) sounding like “l’Unbewusste” (Freud’s term for the unconscious) . The ending “s’aile à mourre” echoes “c’est l’amour” (it is love) even as it invokes mourir (to die) and la mourre (an old hand-guessing game) . In short, Lacan is compressing a thesis: the unconscious is to be defined as “what one knows only by making a mistake”, and this – with a wing (aile/elle) – leads to love (and perhaps to death as well) . This new formula for the unconscious shifts emphasis from the structured unconscious (as in “structured like a language”) to the insistence of truth in errors – truth is not whole, it flashes up in moments of non-knowledge.
Seminar XXIV revisits many familiar themes of sexual difference, knowledge, and symptom, but with an air of retrospective self-critique. Observers of this seminar noted that Lacan, though wanting to go “further than the unconscious” as previously conceived, ends up largely repeating some established ideas – but doing so in an increasingly playful, baroque manner . For instance, Lacan wordplays that the hysteric should be turned into “hystoric” (history) on the figure of a torus (a donut-shaped surface) . He multiplies puns: transforming matière (matter) into “âme-à-tiers” (soul with a third), and so on . These linguistic acrobatics themselves demonstrate lalangue at work – Lacan’s teaching style has become an embodiment of his theory that meaning is continually subverted by the jouissance of the signifier. It’s as if he is performing the unconscious rather than describing it.
Amidst these word games, Lacan touches on the theme of love again. The pun “s’aile à mourre” = “c’est l’amour” suggests that love remains intertwined with error and the unknowable. (Love, one might infer, is like a game of mourre – a guessing game – where one risks error; yet in that very risk, something takes flight aile.) One notable historical anecdote Lacan brings in is the case of the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard (18th-century French religious enthusiasts whose hysterical fits were famous) . He uses it to illustrate that the hysteric’s discourse can both threaten knowledge and produce knowledge via the master signifier – a point he had made back in 1969, now revisited . This shows Lacan linking the past (even his own earlier ideas) to the present quest.
The overarching aspiration of Seminar XXIV is encapsulated toward the end: Lacan expresses the “desire to discover a new signifier… ‘A signifier that, like the Real, would not have any kind of meaning.’” In other words, he is searching for a pure signifier of the Real – something that would symbolize without signifying, carrying no meaning but anchoring nonetheless. This idea is arguably an outgrowth of the sinthome concept (the sinthome is essentially a signifier that enjoys rather than signifies). We can sense Lacan’s restless push here: after identifying the sinthome, he still wonders if psychoanalysis might generate a brand-new SΩ (master signifier) that doesn’t fall into the old trap of sense – a final knot or matheme that “pins” the Real. The seminar, however, ends on this open note: no such ultimate signifier is explicitly found. Lacan leaves us with the quest itself, emblematic of the unfinished, exploratory nature of his late work.
In summary, Seminar XXIV consolidates Lacan’s late insights while magnifying his experimental style. It reinforces the redefinition of the unconscious (as “knowing in not-knowing” through slips ), continues the topological formalizations (knotted toruses and such), and underscores the enduring lack at the heart of knowledge and sexual relation – a lack love tries to fill. It is the penultimate step before Lacan’s “concluding” seminar, and one can feel him circling around an unsayable Real that his decades of teaching have approached but never fully pinned down.
Seminar XXV: Le moment de conclure (1977–1978) – Concluding the Teaching and The Limits of Science
As the title indicates, Seminar XXV: “The Moment to Conclude”, was Lacan’s attempt to wrap up his annual seminar series (1977–78). In this final full seminar, Lacan both recapitulates key themes and pushes his radical questioning of psychoanalysis and its place in knowledge to a breaking point. One major focus of Seminar XXV is a critical examination of science and knowledge as they relate to psychoanalysis. By this time, Lacan had spent years trying to formalize psychoanalysis into a rigorous discourse (recall his notion of mathemes and the logical graphs of earlier seminars). Now, strikingly, he pulls back from that project. Lacan declares in Seminar XXV that “science itself is nothing but a fantasy and… the idea of an awakening is properly speaking unthinkable.” In other words, the fantasy that science (or any body of knowledge) will allow us to fully awaken to the Real truth is just that – a fantasy. This statement amounts to a deep skepticism toward the very pursuit of a complete, consistent truth of the Real (the kind of pursuit Descartes initiated by invoking a guarantee from God). For Lacan, by 1977, any notion of a Big Other of Science that could finally tell us “what is really real” is a mirage. The Real, as earlier concluded, has no ultimate Sense to be unveiled .
In this seminar Lacan goes so far as to critique the paradigm of science which he had earlier paralleled with psychoanalytic knowledge. He suggests that modern science carries an intrinsic “death drive” – a relentless push for knowledge/power that disregards the subjective truth. “Science is related especially to what one calls ‘death drive’,” Lacan asserts, noting how the technological domination of nature often sacrifices the very human happiness it ostensibly serves . This is a far cry from the mid-1960s Lacan who sought recognition for psychoanalysis as a kind of structural science of the unconscious. Now, in concluding, Lacan portrays psychoanalysis as almost heretical to the scientific ideal: psychoanalysis deals with contingency, with the nonsensical kernel of enjoyment that science cannot grasp . He even notes that science secretly depends on a fantasy of God (a guarantor of order) , a point he had made before but now underscores to highlight science’s limit.
Another thread in Seminar XXV is a reflection on dreaming and awakening. Lacan comments that “one spends one’s time dreaming, one does not dream simply when asleep” (as an echo of the idea that our reality is shot through with fantasy), and that the true “awakening” would mean encountering the Real – something fundamentally impossible. If earlier in his career Lacan aligned psychoanalytic enlightenment with some kind of waking up (traversing the fantasy to see the truth of desire), now he is suggesting that a full awakening to the Real would be traumatic or unreachable. We are left instead to work with our symptoms and fantasies, not expecting a total liberation.
Crucially, Seminar XXV addresses the end of analysis in a concrete way. By now Lacan’s School (the École Freudienne de Paris) had implemented the “pass” procedure for recognizing when an analysis is concluded, and Lacan refines what this conclusion entails. He reiterates (from the sinthome insights) that “the end of analysis can be defined. It is when you have gone through the fantasy and identified with the remainder (the sinthome).” In plainer terms, an analysis ends when the analysand has stripped away the illusions of the big Other and come to embrace their own singular mode of jouissance – the irreducible symptom that constitutes their being. Lacan also indicates that at the end of analysis, the analysand “becomes the cause of himself” (in the sense of assuming their object a, their lack, as their cause). All of this reinforces the late Lacanian view that therapy is not about normalizing the subject, but about the subject’s assuming the truth of their own eccentric enjoyment.
In mid-1978, Lacan, now in his late 70s, truly began to conclude his public teaching. After Seminar XXV, he held only a fragmentary Seminar XXVI (1978–79) and a very brief Seminar XXVII (1979–80), before discontinuing the seminar format. Tellingly, he dissolved his School in 1980, in a final act of institutional critique – stating that he wished to prevent his teachings from becoming ossified or turning into hierarchical dogma. This “Dissolution” can be seen as the ultimate logical step of his later years: Lacan stepped “outside” his own earlier discourse, essentially acknowledging that psychoanalysis itself must be questioned and reinvented, lest it become a semblance of knowledge that covers over the Real . As one commentator noted, in these last moves Lacan was treating “the existence of psychoanalysis as a superstition” that needed purifying , almost as if to clear the ground for a future analysis “beyond psychoanalysis.” Lacan’s moment of concluding was thus not a neat resolution but a challenging open-ended gesture. He imparted no final doctrine, only the insistence that the work of analyzing – both the psyche and the field of psychoanalysis – is never complete and must continually grapple with its own impossibility.
Implications for Clinical Practice: From Interpretation to the Sinthome
The theoretical shifts of Lacan’s later work brought corresponding shifts in clinical psychoanalytic practice. Early Lacanian technique, following Freud, focused on interpreting the unconscious structured like a language – deciphering the symbolic meanings of symptoms, slips, and dreams to relieve neurotic suffering. Late Lacan does not entirely discard interpretation, but profoundly reorients it. If the symptom is no longer viewed primarily as a ciphered message but rather as “the way a subject enjoys the unconscious” , then the aim of treatment is not to eliminate the symptom but to separate out its kernel of jouissance. The analyst’s task becomes to help the analysand recognize and assume this sinthomic core. In practice, this meant that Lacanians placed less emphasis on translating symptoms into Oedipal narratives or familial meanings, and more on making the analysand hear the jouissance in their own speech. Lacan suggested that an analyst’s intervention might be an equivoque (a pun or enigmatic phrase) that hits the real of the analysand’s speech rather than providing any supposed “insight.” An interpretation in the late perspective is successful if it provokes a moment of non-sense that reveals the subject’s mode of enjoyment – for example, by homophonously highlighting a hidden jouissance in a word the analysand just spoke. This aligns with Lacan’s idea of lalangue: the analyst responds at the level of the letter and the sound where the unconscious jouissance resides, rather than at the level of ego-level meaning. Such interventions can produce a kind of shock of recognition or a new encounter with the real of the symptom.
One concrete change in Lacan’s school was an acceptance that some symptoms are “ordinary” and will not vanish, yet the patient can come to know how to live with them. For instance, symptoms like anxieties or bodily tics might persist, but analysis can strip them of their persecutory, puzzling quality and integrate them as part of one’s singular existence. Lacan famously stated that the end of analysis is reached when the analysand can “identify with their sinthome” – effectively, when they no longer see their symptom as an Other’s intrusiveness but rather as their own creative (if painful) solution. At this point, the symptom is subjectivized as a style of life, a unique knoting of enjoyment and meaning for which the subject accepts responsibility. This has altered the tone of Lacanian clinical work: rather than aiming for an ideal of normalcy, the clinician aims to guide the patient toward singularity and invention.
The later Lacan also led to a rethinking of diagnostic categories. If the Name-of-the-Father is not singular or absolute, one can conceive of diverse “sinthomatic” solutions that people employ. For example, Lacan’s study of Joyce suggested a form of “compensated psychosis” – Joyce arguably had a psychotic structure (foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father) but did not break down; his sinthome (writing) compensated for it. This insight opened the door for clinicians to recognize ordinary psychoses or borderline cases where a person without a solid symbolic network manages to function via a personal sinthome (art, work, a bodily ritual, etc.). The treatment in such cases might not involve classic free association (which presupposes a neurotic structure and transference to the big Other), but rather stabilizing and supporting the sinthome the subject has crafted. Thus, late Lacanian practice can be more flexible and creative, sometimes even outside the strict psychoanalytic setting – for example, working with psychotic subjects by respecting their invented solutions instead of imposing our reality.
Finally, Lacan’s later emphasis on the analyst as “semblant of object a” and on the pass means that the analyst’s own relationship to jouissance is foregrounded. The analyst should have traversed their fantasy and identified with their sinthome, so as not to impose their own desire or meaning on the patient. They operate as a sort of void or extimate presence that allows the analysand’s speech to circulate around a lack – much like the rings of the Borromean knot encircle a hole. By embodying that lack (object a), the analyst lets the analysand confront the truth of their enjoyment. In sum, Lacan’s late teaching shifted clinical practice from decoding the content of the unconscious to manipulating the structure of the unconscious-as-real. Interpretation became less about explaining and more about “jolts” or cuts in the Imaginary-Symbolic fabric that make the Real felt. And the goal became not a return to normative order, but a reconciliation with one’s incurable core – achieving a vivifying equilibrium with one’s sinthome.
Literature, Philosophy, and Politics in the Later Lacan
Lacan’s later work cannot be separated from his engagement with fields outside strict psychoanalysis. In this period he dialogues intensely with literature, art, philosophy, and the political zeitgeist, using them as both inspiration and foil for his ideas.
Foremost is his engagement with literature through James Joyce. Lacan had always drawn on literature (Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, etc.), but the Joyce case in Seminar XXIII is exceptional in depth. Lacan approaches Joyce almost like an analysand in absentia, reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for clues to Joyce’s symptom. Joyce’s revolutionary use of language – with its polyglot puns, portmanteau words, and dissolution of syntax – practically incarnates Lacan’s notion of lalangue. In Finnegans Wake, words are not serving the communication of stable meaning; they are enjoyed for their own sake, for the multiple echoes and jouissance they generate. Lacan saw this as Joyce “making the unconscious itself surface” in the writing. By studying Joyce, Lacan could refine his concept of the sinthome as something constructed through art. This reflects a broader point: Lacan acknowledged that creative artists often intuit psychoanalytic truths in advance. With Joyce, he effectively says: here is someone who found a way to jouir (enjoy) his unconscious outside of analysis, and we analysts have something to learn from that . This cross-pollination elevated the status of literature in psychoanalytic knowledge – not merely as illustrative examples, but as parallel routes to understanding the psyche. It also bolstered Lacan’s argument that the unconscious is not just the spoken (dit) but also the “written” (lituraterre, a play on literature as littering the earth with letters).
In philosophy, Lacan’s later period saw continued engagement with questions of Being, the One, and the limits of knowledge. He frequently alludes to philosophers: for instance, he references Parmenides’ One with his own twist “Y a d’l’Un” (there is something of the One) in 1973, and he tangles with Descartes and Kant in critiquing science (noting the hidden God in Cartesian certainty, and likening the scientific imperative to Kant’s moral imperative turned on its head: “You must enjoy!” – a kind of inverted superego command ). Lacan also conversed in seminars or interviews with contemporary thinkers. One example is his encounter with Michel Foucault (albeit indirect) on the notion of the author – Lacan’s theory of Joyce as having invented himself touches on issues of authorship and subjectivity that Foucault was exploring contemporaneously. Moreover, Lacan’s increasing use of formal logic and topology put him in dialogue with the foundations of mathematics and philosophy of science. He considered Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and set theory as important backdrops for understanding the barred Other and the not-all (pas-tout). In the late seminars, Lacan sometimes speaks almost like a Zen philosopher or mystic as well – making gnomic statements about the Real and nothingness. This resonates with a strain of negative theology or apophatic philosophy: since the Real is outside sense, one can only approach it via paradox and negation. In essence, Lacan positioned psychoanalysis by the late 1970s as a form of thought that challenges philosophy’s tradition, particularly wherever philosophy sought ultimate coherence. Psychoanalysis for Lacan was showing the hole in knowledge that philosophy from Plato to Hegel often tried to suture.
Regarding art, beyond literature, Lacan’s later years engaged visual and performative dimensions in a new way. While earlier (in Seminar XI) Lacan discussed painting (the gaze and artworks like Holbein’s The Ambassadors), later on his teaching itself took on artistic qualities. He drew complex knot diagrams on the blackboard, sometimes without many words, as a kind of demonstration-performance. In one famous incident in 1975, Lacan delivered a lecture at a university by silently drawing the Borromean knots on a chalkboard for an extended time – letting the image speak (or perplex) in lieu of didactic explanation. This act could be seen as a piece of conceptual art or a Duchampian gesture, underlining his point that some structure exceeds speech. It also echoes the Dada/Surrealist tradition (recall Lacan was acquainted with Surrealists in his youth) of using shock and nonsense to disrupt complacent sense. Additionally, Lacan engaged with music in a limited but notable way: in Television (1974) he mentions the song “They’re coming to take me away, ha-ha!” – a pop novelty song – linking its playful depiction of madness to the jouissance of lalangue. This shows Lacan’s attunement to popular culture and its handling of themes like madness and enjoyment.
In the realm of politics, Lacan’s later phase was colored by the aftermath of 1968 and the broader questioning of master-narratives. Lacan had addressed the student revolution in Seminar XVII (1969) with the blunt warning, “As revolutionaries, what you aspire to is a new Master. You will get one.” His cynicism about political utopias remained in the 70s. He introduced the concept of the “discourse of the capitalist” in the early 70s (a variant of his four discourses) to account for a new Master that doesn’t want anything to impede jouissance – essentially predicting the rise of what we now call consumerist or neoliberal culture. In late seminars, while not overtly political, the undertones are present: by calling psychoanalysis a “fraud” in need of renewal, Lacan was also commenting on institutional power and dogma. His dissolution of the EFP in 1980 had a political dimension within the psychoanalytic community – it was an act against entrenched bureaucracy and for the freedom of the analytical cause (he immediately founded a new, more open school after the dissolution). We also see Lacan’s political awareness in his relentless effort to prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a religion or ideology. The late Lacan distances himself from any promise of salvation (scientific or political), insisting on the not-all, incomplete nature of any structure. This stance implicitly critiques totalitarian or fundamentalist thought.
In sum, Lacan’s later work is in lively conversation with the intellectual and cultural currents of his time. Literature (Joyce’s modernism) provided a model for how language can operate beyond meaning. Philosophy and science were both sparring partners as Lacan sought to mark psychoanalysis’s unique territory (sometimes alongside them, sometimes against them). Art and the very style of Lacan’s teaching became tools to convey what ordinary scholarly prose could not. And political sensibilities – an acute skepticism towards masters and universals – informed Lacan’s final acts and his emphasis on singularity, which dovetails with the rise of postmodern thought. The “Later Lacan” is thus not an isolated guru on the couch, but a thinker absorbing and refracting the world of art and ideas around him, even as he pushed psychoanalysis to its conceptual limits.
Conclusion: From Structure to Sinthome – Departures from Early Lacan
Lacan’s later seminars represent both a deepening and a departure from his earlier, structuralist phase. In the 1950s and 60s, Lacan was famous for re-reading Freud through structural linguistics and anthropology – the unconscious as a chain of signifiers, the primacy of the symbolic law, the Name-of-the-Father as cornerstone of psychic structure. By the 1970s, Lacan had not abandoned these insights, but he certainly “twisted” them into new shapes. The orderly Saussurean signifier gives way to “lalangue,” a babble that produces jouissance . The singular paternal metaphor is supplanted by the possibility of multiple naming and a personalized sinthome. The structured unconscious (as in a language) is rethought as an unconscious that is “real” and ex-sists outside sense, only accessible via slips and nonsense . If early Lacan stressed the universal structures (like the Oedipus complex, the mirror stage, the big Other), late Lacan emphasizes the radical particular – each subject’s enjoyment is unique, each symptom is an invention. In this way, Later Lacan challenges any inclination to turn psychoanalysis into a dogma or a completed system. He himself isolated what in his own theory had been a “semblance” and pushed beyond it . For example, the big Other, once a central concept, is revealed to be lacking or even a fraud – “the Other doesn’t exist,” he had begun to say . Likewise the dream of a full scientific matheme of psychoanalysis is acknowledged as an impossible ideal – knowledge itself is split and incomplete, just like the subject .
Yet, there is continuity: Lacan’s lifelong concern was the interplay of law, desire, and jouissance, and later work takes that to the limit. The Real, which was always a category for Lacan (recall the early Real of trauma, the unsymbolizable), becomes ever more central, eventually defined as “without law, without meaning” – the bedrock of jouissance . Early Lacan used the phallus as the signifier of lack; later Lacan replaces that central signifier with a knot – a non-metaphorical, literal binding that has to be made. In a way, one could say the later Lacan is more faithful to Freud’s mystifying side (the *“navel of the dream” that resists interpretation, the death drive towards unpleasure, etc.) than the earlier “structural” Lacan was. By insisting on what is incurable, untranslatable, Real in the unconscious, Lacan returned psychoanalysis to Freud’s insight that not everything can be brought into full conscious light.
The departure is also methodological. Early Lacan often clarified with schemas and logical articulations (the Graph of Desire, the four discourses) – he was teaching, in a sense, through the big Other of the university discourse. Later Lacan deliberately estranged his audience, splitting them into those who earnestly tried to follow his every word and those who might revel in or even mock the confusion . This performative aspect was not gimmick for its own sake, but part of his message: psychoanalysis is not a mass teachings to be passively received; it’s an experience that each must traverse. In 1973, Lacan’s student Jacques-Alain Miller began to speak of a “late Lacan” precisely to isolate this new accent . Miller noted that Lacan’s later teaching “ex-sists” outside his earlier work, that it had to be constructed because it isn’t immediately obvious in Lacan’s own presentation . This later teaching treats psychoanalysis itself from an almost posthumous standpoint – as if asking, once Freud’s edifice has sunk, what remains? The answer is the sinthome: that little piece of enjoyment that won’t sink. And correspondingly, the later Lacan “cleansed” psychoanalytic thought by questioning all interpretation and sense-making, focusing instead on the “rigorous montage” of knots and the “exclusion of sense” as defining the real .
In conclusion, the Later Lacan marks a bold shift from a symbolic, structuralist paradigm to a real, topological paradigm. It departs from the earlier phase by refusing comforting universals (“Woman,” “The father,” “The sexual relationship”) and by doubting the guarantors of meaning (the big Other, scientific knowledge) . It deepens the earlier insights by seeing what lies beyond them: beyond the Oedipal father lies the plural sinthome; beyond desire lies jouissance; beyond structure lies the knot. In doing so, Lacan’s late work opened new pathways for psychoanalytic theory and practice – pathways that emphasize innovation, singular solutions, and the courage to face the nonsensical. It is a rich, if often bewildering, legacy. As Lacan “concluded,” he in fact initiated numerous debates – about the nature of the real unconscious, the end of analysis, the intersection of psychoanalysis with art and science – that continue to occupy Lacanians (and many beyond) to this day. The later Lacan leaves us Encore – something more, something to still say and elaborate, a sinthome for each to further knot.
Sources: Key ideas and quotes have been drawn from Lacan’s Seminars XX–XXV and commentaries on them , as detailed in the citations above. These reflect Lacan’s evolving concepts of jouissance, the sinthome, lalangue, sexuation, and the Real, and how they inform both his theoretical stance and clinical approach in the 1970s.
