The Purity of the Word

Lacan is here referring back to his first of several Rome discourses and arguably the most important one from the mid-50s, his essay on the field and function of speech. This is very much the manifesto of Lacanian psychoanalysis. What he's trying to work at is two different aspects of the living subject, one that is embodied and that speaks and another that is sociolinguistified, that is spoken,. That exists at the level of the utterance, if you will. Here then is the subject dispensed from sustaining what he states.