Other (subject). A calibrated orthopedics of (mutual) recognition is thought to
suffice to dis-alienate desire. As I shall soon attempt to show, such an optimistic so-
lution seems, at least partially, to contradict Lacan’s continual warnings against in-
genuously conceiving of the unconscious as a “true” substance which should be
substituted for the ego.
2.3 The Notion of Message
Lacan relates the notions of full and empty speech to his well-known dictum ac-
cording to which “The sender receives his own message back from the receiver
in an inverted form.”^24 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 individualconception of the unconscious revolving
around the notion of speech to a transindividualone revolving around the notion of
language.
On an initial level, one could simply argue that the sender (subject 1 ) auto-
matically receives his message back insofar as, as a matter of fact, the sender always
hears himself speaking. As Lacan himself states, “the sender is always a receiver at
the same time,... one hears the sound of one’s own words.”^25 No doubt this is a
direct consequence of the subject’s linguistic Spaltung, his being split between the
subject of the statement—who “intentionally” sends the message to another sub-
ject—and the subject of the enunciation—who always hears and records the “full”
message expressed in the statement, even though “it’s possible [for the subject of
the statement] not to pay attention to it.”^26 Such an explanation of the formula,
however, fails to account for the “inversion” which, according to Lacan, is imposed
on the message when it is received back by the sender. What does “inversion,” a
term which in his early work Lacan normally applies to the imaginary phenome-
non of transitivism, stand for in this context?
According to a first intersubjectiveinterpretation of the formula of message, we
can suggest that inversion corresponds to the fact that the symbolic message of
the Other (quaOther unconscious subject 2 ) is necessarily received by subject 1
through the imaginary inversion of the ego-other relation. The symbolic relation
conveyed by full speech is interfered with by the “wall of language,” which derives
from the imaginary relation. To put it differently, the unconscious message of sub-
ject 2 is not normally assumed by subject 1 : it remains latent. In this sense, inver-
sion is negative.It corresponds to the alienation in language to which the subject is
relegated in everyday life. As Lacan writes: “The imaginary relation, which is an
essentially alienated relation, interrupts, slows down, inhibits and... inverts... the