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Summary: It is not by chance that in Seminar Encore Lacan criticizes the reduction of the mystical jouissance to a substitute of the phallic relation. Indeed, what is aimed at in mysticism, in Lacan’s reading, is not the reduction of the Other to the One. It is rather a matter of knotting the phallic One to the real Other, which is outside the symbolic, but in such a way that the Other of language finds itself barred.

In showing us (rather than demonstrating it to us) that, beyond all that is, there is an ex- sistence, without name and without attributes, an ex-sistence in the face of which all that is, is devaluated, even erased, and which the mystics call God, mystical writing compel us to take up, with Lacan, the question of knowing to what kind of the real this relation to a being that cannot be known opens access.