Founding speech
The term 'founding speech' (Fr.parole fondant) is used by Jacques Lacan in his work during the early 1950s.
Lacan is concerned with the way that speech can radically transform both the speaker and the addressee in the act of utterance. The crucial aspect of founding speech is that it not only transforms the other but also transforms the subject.[1]
"Founding speech, which envelops the subject, is everything that has constituted him, his parnts, his neighbours, the whole structure of his community, and not only constituted him as symboli, but constituted him in his being."[2]
Lacan refers to the same function of speech as 'elective speech' in the seminar of 1955-6 and as 'votive speech' in the seminar of 1956-7.
Lacan plays on the homophony between tu es ma mère )'you are my mother') and tuer ma mère ('to kill my mother') to illustrate the way that the founding speech addressed to the other may reveal a repressed murderous desire.[3]
