In addition to this, it is important to indicate how the formula “The sender receives
his ownmessage back from the receiver in an inverted form” is also valid outside the
psychoanalytic setting. If, on the one hand, it is only at the end of psychoanalytic
treatment that the subject is able to assume his message after it has been intention-
ally sent back to him by the Other (quaanalyst), on the other, in everyday life he
continuously receives his message back from the Other, but is unable to assume it.
Whois this Other who (unintentionally) sends the message of the subject back to
the subject, without the latter’s being aware of it? This question is only apparently
banal; it actually deserves particular consideration, since it lets us grasp how, ac-
cording to Lacan, the unconscious message exists independently of any clear-cut
distinction between sender and receiver (subject 1 and subject 2 ).
Ultimately, for Lacan, beyond the imaginary dimension, one can never be said
transitively to communicate a meaning. Communication (of a message) and mean-
ing are superimposed on one another: there is no meaning as an independent
object circulating in the communication (of a message) established between two
subjects.^28 Conversely, there is no communication (of a message) which is not
always-already inscribed in meaning. In other words, we are dealing here with a
transindividualunconscious that differs from both intrasubjectivity, the unconscious
as the “Other who is within me,” and intersubjectivity, the unconscious of the
Other subject. As Lacan points out in Seminar III, “the unconscious... this sentence,
this symbolic construction, covers all human lived experience like a web... it’s al-
ways there, more or less latent.”^29 The idea of an “individual” unconscious—on
which both intra- and intersubjective accounts of the unconscious are based—
makes sense only if the Symbolic is associated with the Imaginary. More impor-
tantly, we should emphasize that what is finally at stake in the notion of message is
the passage from an unconscious understood as the Other of speech(which always
presupposes the individual subject) to an unconscious understood as the univer-
sal, nonindividuated Other of language(which, as we shall see in the next section, re-
lies on the linguistic notion of the signifier and the structural laws that govern it).
As Zˇizˇek has noted: “It is the decentered Other [language as such] that decides the
true meaning of what we have said.”^30
I suggest that the gradual imposition of a transindividual notion of the uncon-
scious has important repercussions for another well-known Lacanian dictum of the
195 0s, according to which “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other”:^31
( 1 ) When the Other still refers to the (unconscious of the) Other individual sub-
ject, the formula means that the subject’s unconscious is the product of the speech
that individual subjects, including the subject in question, have addressed to him.