The speaking subject occupies a pivotal position across several registers within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a linguistic, phenomenological, and psychological problem. Benveniste furnishes the foundational linguistic account: the speaking subject is constituted in and through the act of enunciation itself, with the first-person pronoun ‘je’ serving as the mobile index by which each locutor installs himself as subject in discourse. This is not a pre-given selfhood that then speaks, but a subjectivity produced in the very moment of utterance. Ricoeur substantially extends this insight by triangulating the speaking subject between referential semantics and reflexive pragmatics, arguing that it is ‘neither statements nor even utterances that refer but speaking subjects,’ who bring irreplaceable experiential perspectives into the situation of interlocution. Lacan, operating from a structuralist-psychoanalytic vantage, inflects the same problematic toward desire and the signifier, emphasizing that the subject constituted in speech is always split, never coinciding with itself. Merleau-Ponty, meanwhile, foregrounds the embodied, motile subject as the condition of intentional meaning-making, resisting any reduction of the speaking subject to a transcendental consciousness. Giegerich complicates matters from a depth-psychological angle by insisting that genuine psychological speech must itself undergo the logic it addresses, dissolving the comfortable boundary between speaker and spoken content. What unites these disparate positions is the shared conviction that the speaking subject is not a substance but a relational event.
it is neither statements nor even utterances that refer but, as was recalled earlier, speaking subjects, employing the resources of the sense and the reference of the statement in order to exchange their experiences in a situation of interlocution
Ricoeur argues that reference is not a property of statements but an act performed by speaking subjects who bring lived experience and perspectival situatedness into the interlocutory event.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
UTTERANCE AND THE SPEAKING SUBJECT — What will finally prove most fruitful for our investigation into the self are the mutual overlappings of the two disciplines.
Ricoeur situates the speaking subject at the intersection of referential semantics and reflexive pragmatics, arguing that neither discipline alone can account for the self that emerges in and through utterance.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
stressed that it is not statements that refer to something but the speakers themselves who refer in this way; nor do statements have a sense or signify something, but rather it is the speakers who mean to say this or that
Ricoeur, drawing on speech-act theory, relocates meaning and reference from the statement as an object to the speaking subject as the agent whose acts of doing-in-saying constitute illocutionary force.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
C’est en s’identifiant comme personne unique prononçant je que chacun des locuteurs se pose tour à tour comme « sujet ».
Benveniste establishes that subjectivity in language is not a pre-existing condition but is constituted in the act of self-designation through the pronoun ‘je,’ which converts language into discourse.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
By becoming the pivotal point of the system of indicators, the ‘I’ is revealed in all its strangeness in relation to every entity capable of being placed in a class, characterized, or described.
Ricoeur shows that the speaking subject designated by ‘I’ cannot be treated as an identifiable entity within the world but is the irreducible, non-substitutable locus from which all designation proceeds.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are not primarily objective; they belong to the speaker, whatever the speaker’s status; before being a social, political, scientific, etc. instance, the speaker is an enunciating instance.
Benveniste’s late lectures assert that truth and reality are anchored in the phenomenological priority of the enunciating speaker over any institutional or objective determination.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
if each of these constitutes a different event, capable of taking its place in the course of things in the world, is the subject common to these multiple events itself an event?
Ricoeur raises the aporia of whether the speaking subject, as the common locus of multiple distinct utterance-events, can itself be characterized as an event, pressing the limits of any eventive theory of enunciation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the act of signifying is irreducible to communication and institutions, and that it only transcends the ‘given meaning’ through the ‘activity of the speaker put at the centre’
Benveniste’s concept of signifiance requires that the speaker be placed at the centre of the linguistic act, making meaning irreducible to any impersonal code or social institution.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
there is no self alone at the start; the ascription to others is just as primitive as the ascription to oneself. I cannot speak meaningfully of my thoughts unless I am able at the same time to ascribe them potentially to someone else
Ricoeur argues that the speaking subject is constitutively intersubjective: self-ascription and other-ascription are co-original, so there is no solitary speaking subject prior to the dyad of interlocution.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
ces pronoms se distinguent de toutes les désignations que la langue articule, en ceci: ils ne renvoient ni à un concept ni à un individu
Benveniste distinguishes personal pronouns from all other designations in language precisely because they constitute the speaking subject rather than referring to a pre-given concept or individual.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Without the subject and its dismemberment, no Truth. This is why it is so alarming to have to witness in this century many attempts to find ‘ways out of the philosophy of the subject.’
Giegerich insists that genuine psychological truth requires not the elimination of the subject but its radical self-exposure and dismemberment, making the speaking subject indispensable to any authentic depth-psychological inquiry.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
En disant je crois (que … ), je convertis en une énonciation subjective le fait asserté impersonnellement
Benveniste demonstrates through the analysis of epistemic verbs that the first-person form converts impersonal propositional content into a subjective enunciation, foregrounding the role of the speaking subject in modulating assertion.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
only FREUD personally, but not his discourse itself was allowed to be ‘ein ergriffener.’ The moment of speaking (the speakable) and the moment of silence (the unspeakable, the secret, the numinous) were still kept apart
Giegerich argues that Freud’s speaking remained insufficiently psychological because the numinous was displaced into the speaker’s personal affect rather than inhabiting the logical form of the discourse itself.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The body’s motion can play a part in the perception of the world only if it is itself an original intentionality, a manner of relating itself to the distinct object of knowledge.
Merleau-Ponty grounds the speaking subject in bodily intentionality, arguing against any constituting consciousness that would reduce the body to a mere instrument, thereby providing the phenomenological substratum for embodied speech.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
l’analyste ne peut le connaître sans l’aide du patient, qui est seul à savoir ‘ce qui lui est arrivé’
Benveniste, in a psychoanalytic context, notes that the analyst’s access to biographical truth is conditioned entirely on the patient as speaking subject, whose sole authority over lived experience cannot be bypassed.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966aside
c’est à l’intersubjectivité du ‘nous’ qu’il assume, que se mesure en un langage sa valeur de parole.
Lacan situates the value of speech within the intersubjective dimension of the ‘we,’ implying that the speaking subject achieves recognition only through a shared symbolic register rather than solitary expression.
, Écrits, 1966aside
The soul and its life is invisible, intangible, and, as long as there is a positive (positivistic) conception of knowing, also unknowable, therefore unspeakable.
Giegerich frames the problem of psychological speaking in terms of the unspeakability of the soul under positivist epistemologies, posing the speaking subject’s task as negotiating the boundary between the speakable and the unspeakable.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside