Changes

Jump to: navigation, search

Subject of the Enunciated

1,473 bytes added, 08:28, 5 June 2006
no edit summary


The [[subject of enunciation]] is the "[[I]]" who speaks, the [[individual]] doing the speaking.
The [[subject of the enunciated]] is the "[[I]]" of the sentence.
"[[I]]" is not identical to itself - it is [[split]] between the [[individual]] "I" (the [[subject of enunciation]]) and the grammatical "[[I]]" (the [[subject of the enunciated]]).

Although we may experience them as unified, this is merely an Imaginary illusion, for the pronoun "I" is actually a substitute for the "I" of the subject.

It does not account for me in my full specificity; it is, rather, a general term I share with everyone else. In order to do so, my empirical reality must be annihilated or, as Lacan avers, "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing". The subject can only enter language by negating the Real, murdering or substituting the blood-and-sinew reality of self for the concept of self expressed in words.

The [[signifier]] marks the [[absence]] of the [[thing]] it [[representation|represents]] and standing in for it.


Lacan is able to refashion [[Descartes]]' "I think, therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not".

The "I think" here is the subject of the enunciated (the Symbolic subject) whereas the "I am" is the subject of the enunciation (the Real subject).

What Lacan aims to disclose by rewriting the Cartesian cogito in this way is that the subject is irrevocably split, torn asunder by language
Root Admin, Bots, Bureaucrats, flow-bot, oversight, Administrators, Widget editors
24,656
edits

Navigation menu