Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press. 2007
Lacan relates the notions of full and empty speech to his well-known dictum according to which “The sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form.”
Here I intend to demonstrate, through a close reading of this formula, that for Lacan what is really at stake in its varying significations is the gradual passage from an individual conception of the unconscious revolving around the notion of speech to a transindividual one revolving around the notion of language.
It would, however, be wrong to equate Lacan’s transindividual unconscious with any sort of quasi-Jungian archetypal unconscious—“collective” by definition. The former corresponds to a symbolic signifying structure; the latter coincides with the pregiven significationof a set of primordial images. For Lacan, the unconscious as signifying structure produces conscious signification. Jungian psychoanalysis reverses this Freudian principle: it is the unconscious as primordial signification that produces the linguistic structure.
In the final part of this section, I intend to argue that the emergence of the notion of a transindividual unconscious—as universal structure of language — renders explicit the covert paradox on which Lacan’s conception of the aim of analysis as the individual subject’s realization of his own true, unconscious desire through full speech was implicitly based.
In fact, if on the one hand Lacan repeatedly warns us against misinterpreting the unconscious as a subjective hidden substance, on the other, at this stage of his production, he does not seem to realize that the full realization of the subject’s substanceless unconscious would inevitably correspond to its utter desubjectivization into a substantial structure.
Adopting Lacan’s own contemporaneous definition of psychosis, we could argue that this would inevitably correspond to a “being passively spoken by language,” language to be understood as the transindividual locus of the unconscious.
In other words, Lacan’s notion of an individual unconscious that would be equated with full speech seems to give rise to a vicious circle: the aim of analysis is to overcome empty speech and the imaginary wall of language, but, in parallel, the more one’s individual speech is symbolized, the more it is integrated into the transindividual symbolic dimension of language.
Language is never imaginary per se: the wall is erected solely by the individual subject’s own imaginary identifications. Once these are fully revoked, the subject is absorbed by language, the transindividual unconscious.
I do not believe it is possible to reconcile this dis-identifying de-subjectivization with the optimism evoked by the pseudo-Hegelian “humanist” leitmotiv of dis-alienation as presented by Lacan in “Function and Field.” 44
The second part of Seminar III—and, above all, the article “The Agency of the Letter”—suggests that by 1956 Lacan’s return to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious no longer revolved primarily around the pseudo-Hegelian dialectical function of speech, but instead became increasingly dependent on the structuralist notion of language as initially formulated by Saussure. As Lacan states: “Firstly there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse.” 46-47