Subject and parlêtre: (dis)encounters between the late Lacan and discourse analysis

Abstract

Discourse analysis, particularly the approaches grounded in Pêcheux’s work, is based on the psychoanalytic proposal that challenges the idealist perspective of an autonomous subjectivity, since it introduces the problem of the subject into language. In Lacan’s later teachings, this conceptualization becomes more complex through the term parlêtre. However, this notion has not yet been reviewed from the perspective of discourse studies, nor have its implications been examined in light of its differences from the subject of the unconscious. This article therefore examines the notion of parlêtre that appears in Lacan’s developments during the 1970s and, as an academic essay, proposes an analytical examination of those textual zones in which the term appears. For some authors, this neologism, which subordinates being to speech, replaces Lacan’s conceptualization of the subject insofar as it modifies the way of understanding the unconscious. Based on this inquiry, the article concludes that both the term parlêtre and the subject coexist during this period. Spoken by lalangue, the parlêtre calls into question the uniqueness of meaning commonly associated with language and points toward a rethinking of the constitution of the subject beyond the symbolic field, by privileging equivocation and failure in language as conditions inherent to discursive operation.