It is important, however, not to oversimplify Lacan’s notion of full speech (as
subjective unconscious truth). In “Function and Field,” as well as in the first two
Seminars, full speech as truth is a retroactivecreation which did not exist prior to psy-
choanalytic treatment. As Lacan puts it, full speech corresponds to a secondary his-
toricizationthat actualizes the symbolic meaning (sens) of repressed signifiers, not to
the banal recovery of a preexistent imaginary forgotten signification (signification)
already organized in the form of a conscious sentence.^34 Nevertheless, truth is in-
stituted only insofar as repressed signifiers are recovered. Truth, which is the real-
ization of the subject’s desire, merely depends, for Lacan, on the elimination of
repression, on the analyst’s recognition of full speech through interpretation. If
this is the case, then we are again dealing here with the paradox I mentioned above:
the complete overcoming of repression, the subject’s complete assumption of his
own unconscious full speech, entails the disappearance of the individual uncon-
scious and, in parallel, the disappearance of individual self-consciousness. To the
best of my knowledge, Lacan never openly problematized this serious impasse in
his work from the early 195 0s. He does not point out the way in which the recov-
ery of repressed signifiers and the consequent psychoanalytic articulation of truth
via retroactive historicization has a meaning, both theoretical and therapeutic, only
if we assume that something has to remain repressed; without repression, fully symbolized
individual speech would transform itself into transindividual language.
In his concise and generally accurate description of full speech, Evans seems to
propose a way out of this impasse: according to him, Lacan is aware that “full
speech is not the articulation in speech of the whole truth about the subject’s
desire, but the speech which articulates this truth as fully as possibleat a particular
time.”^35 On that basis, one could easily infer a viable explanation of how full speech
differs from psychotic “being spoken by language.” In psychotic “speech,” the un-
conscious turns out to be fully“out in the open,”^36 which means, strictly speaking,
that the psychotic has no unconscious, given that, by definition, the unconscious
is constituted by a gap between what is repressed and what is “out in the open.”^37
On the other hand, in full speech the truth about unconscious desire can only
partiallybe assumed, and in no way can this assumption ever be fully completed.
This would coincide with the asymptotic point at which full speech becomes psy-
chotic delusion.
Evans’s isolated statement is substantially correct, but a chronological problem
persists; his argument cannot properly be applied to “Function and Field.” This is
irrefutably demonstrated by the terminology of the notions that the article adopts
and promotes: if Evans’s argument could be applied to “Function and Field,” the
very notion of “fullspeech” would prove to be self-refuting. In fact one would be
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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