inary deformation. In everyday life, human beings communicate through empty
speech.^14
( 3 ) Lacan extends to every subject the Freudian concept of the Ich-Spaltung(confined
by Freud to the pathological sphere of fetishism and the psychoses) precisely by
referring to the linguistic distinction between the subject of the statement and the
subject of the enunciation. The subject undergoes a split (Spaltung) “by virtue of be-
ing a subject only insofar as he speaks.”^15 In speech and because of speech, the sub-
ject is never fully present to himself. That which is not present in the statement but
is presupposed and evoked by it (the enunciation) indicates the locus of “another
scene” in the subject: the subject of the unconscious which, as I have already indi-
cated, depends on specific linguistic laws, and sustains a particular “thought.”
( 4 ) The discovery of a structural split in/of the subject subverts the Cartesian
cogito while, at the same time, revealing its intimate relation to psychoanalysis.
As Lacan repeatedly states, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not
think.”^16 This is to say that the unconscious I, the subject of the enunciation,
really thinks at the unconscious level: it(ça) thinks where the Iqua ego andqua
subject of the statement is not (conscious). Conversely, the Iqua linguistic ego is
(conscious) where it,the unconscious subject, does not think. Most importantly,
the subversion of the Cartesian ego shows that its illusion of unity is possible
only because of its strict interdependence with the Spaltung.There is no self-
consciousness without the unconscious, and vice versa. Descartes’s formulation of
a fundamental principle of self-consciousness could be said contemporaneously to
decree, at the level of the history of thought, the formal birth of the unconscious
(although this birth will remain implicit until Freud). Consequently, it is strictly
speaking senseless to speak of a pre-Cartesian notion of the unconscious.^17
( 5 ) The strong interdependence between the Cartesian ego and the Freudian un-
conscious indicates, for Lacan, that the subject of the unconscious is not simply an
alternative ego,^18 concealed by repression. Neither does the subject of the uncon-
scious correspond to any sort of “unknowable substance”^19 that would represent
the buried core of one’s repressed desires, and would simply be awaiting libera-
tion from the constraints of Cartesian self-consciousness.
In “Function and Field,” Lacan affirms that the subject’s alienation in language—
empty speech as delineated above—can be superseded by full speech. The latter’s
emergence coincides with the subject’s assumption of his unconscious desire. It is
also clear that, in this article, Lacan superimposes truth upon unconscious desire.^20
How can this realization of the unconscious be achieved? Lacan opposes the spec-
ular dialectic of a desire based on the ego’s imaginary alienation to the symbolic