Utterance occupies a charged intersection in the depth-psychology corpus, pulling simultaneously toward linguistics, phenomenology, and the philosophy of action. The dominant tension runs between utterance as act — the event of speaking, the mobilisation of language by a subject in a moment — and utterance as product, the text or énoncé that persists after the speaking has ceased. Benveniste’s enunciative linguistics insists on the primacy of the act: enunciation is ‘the fact of the speaker who mobilises the language on his or her own behalf,’ and the utterance has meaning only in the situation to which it refers and which it simultaneously configures. Ricoeur deepens this by linking utterance to the self: the reflexivity implicit in acts of utterance cannot be fully analysed without a theory of the speaking subject as an irreplaceable centre of perspective on the world. For Ricoeur the illocutionary force of an utterance is precisely what marks the implication of doing in saying — the utterance ‘counts as’ a promise, a command, a statement. Derrida complicates matters by distinguishing the constative utterance, whose referent is outside language, from the performative, which produces or transforms a situation. Across these positions, utterance emerges not as simple vocalization but as the event-structure through which subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and world are constituted — making it indispensable for any depth account of language, self, and meaning.
the act itself of producing an utterance, and not the text of the utterance, that is our object. This act is the fact of the speaker who mobilises the language on his or her own behalf.
Benveniste establishes the foundational distinction between utterance-as-act and utterance-as-product, centering enunciative linguistics on the former as its proper object.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
the complete analysis of the reflexivity implied in acts of utterance can be carried through only if a particular kind of referential value can be attributed to this reflexivity.
Ricoeur argues that the reflexivity intrinsic to utterance requires a theory of referential value, linking the act of speaking to a philosophy of the self.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the illocutionary act consists in what the speaker does in speaking. This doing marks the ‘force’ in virtue of which the utterance ‘counts as’ a statement, a command, a piece of advice, a promise.
Ricoeur, drawing on Austin, defines the utterance through its illocutionary force — the constitutive doing embedded within the saying.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Malinowski’s 1923 paper contains thirty-five occurrences of ‘utterance’, most of them in the later-developing sense of what is uttered — this despite the fact that the paper’s main aim is to establish the central importance of ‘utterance’ in the earlier sense of the act of uttering.
The translator’s note traces the historical semantic ambiguity of ‘utterance’ between act and product, identifying how even Malinowski and Bloomfield vacillate between the two senses.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
the utterance shares the fate of all material bodies. As the expression of a sense intended by a speaking subject, the voice is the vehicle of the act of utterance insofar as it refers to an ‘I,’ the irreplaceable center of perspective on the world.
Ricoeur situates utterance at the meeting point of embodied vocality and subjective intentionality, grounding the act in the incarnate ‘I’ as its irreplaceable anchor.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Someone’s utterance of this sentence, the fact that someone says this, is an event that occurs, as do all events, at a certain time and in a certain place: this spatiotemporally determined event is the saying, or the utterance.
Ricoeur, citing Récanati, foregrounds the event-character of utterance — its spatiotemporal singularity — as a foundational problem for the philosophy of the speaking subject.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
an utterance has meaning only in a given situation, to which it refers. It makes sense only in relation to the situation, but at the same time it configures this situation.
Benveniste articulates the dual dependency of utterance: it is both conditioned by its situational context and actively constitutive of that context.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
Differing from the classical assertion, from the constative utterance, the performative’s referent is not outside it, or in any case preceding it or before it. It does not describe something which exists outside and before language — it produces or transforms a situation.
Derrida, reading Austin, opposes the constative utterance whose referent pre-exists language to the performative utterance that produces its own referential situation.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
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 insists that reference belongs not to utterances as objects but to speaking subjects, rescuing the intersubjective dimension of the utterance-event from reification.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the assimilation between the ‘I,’ subject of the utterance, and the person, the irreducible basic particular. The notion of sui-reference, whose coherence we questioned earlier, is in fact of a mixed nature, resulting from the interconnection of reflexivity and identifying reference.
Ricoeur analyses how the subject of utterance and the person as identifiable particular are linked through sui-reference, a hybrid of reflexivity and reference.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
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.
The ‘I’ of utterance resists ordinary identificatory procedures, marking the speaking subject as irreducible to any class or descriptive schema.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance (full utterance: erfülle Ausserung). The voice unites the anthropological naturalness of the natural sound to the psychic-semiotic ideality.
Derrida, reading Hegel, locates utterance as the privileged site where natural voice and psychic-semiotic ideality converge, articulating the philosophy of spirit with that of nature.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
The vak ‘utterance’ here is the sacral hymn itself.
Nagy identifies the Vedic vak as a form of sacred utterance — the hymn as a ritual speech-act — connecting the concept to archaic poetics and the sacral power of language.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
only sometimes in a strange archaic tongue and to initiate men or novices after long and arduous preparation, can the myth with safety be uttered from the mouth; such is its sanctity, its mana.
Harrison situates mythic utterance within a ritual economy of sanctity and danger, where the act of uttering carries mana and is governed by strict conditions of preparation and context.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
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 relocates meaning-production in the speaker’s enunciative act, establishing that utterance exceeds both communicative function and institutional convention.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Un verbe quelconque de parole, même le plus commun de tous, le verbe dire, est apte à former un énoncé performatif si la formule : je dis que … crée une situation nouvelle.
Benveniste demonstrates that any verb of speech, including the most common, can generate a performative utterance provided the formal and contextual conditions are satisfied.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Ritual is not an eventuality, but, as iterability, is a structural characteristic of every mark.
Derrida argues against Austin that iterability — the structural repeatability of the mark — is an essential, not accidental, feature of every utterance, including the performative.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside