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LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS SERIES (October 2016)
ON THE ETHICS OF SPEECH
Michel de Certeau (1983). ‘Lacan: An Ethics of Speech,’ translated by Marie-Rose
Logan, Representations, University of California Press, No. 3, Summer, pp. 21-39.
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘speech’ plays an important role in Lacanian theory and practice. It is even
possible to chart the development of Lacanian psychoanalysis by tracing the uses to
which Lacan puts this term. While doing that may be beyond the scope of this
review, reading Michel de Certeau’s paper on Lacan’s ‘ethics of speech’ will give
readers of Lacan a feel for what is at stake in this term. But, before summarizing the
main points in de Certeau’s paper, I want to point out that the term ‘speech’ is used
within specific philosophical contexts in Lacan. The thinkers relevant in this context
include Ferdinand de Saussure, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, St. Augustine,
and Martin Heidegger. In other words, the Lacanian notion of speech is related to a
genealogy that includes structural linguistics, anthropology, theology, and
philosophy. It is therefore important to know how this term is used in these areas.
The term ‘speech’ is used in linguistics in the context of the opposition between
langue and parole; in anthropology it occurs in the context of symbolic exchanges; in
theology it refers to the act of ‘symbolic invocation;’ and, finally, in philosophy, it
structures the opposition between full speech and empty speech.1 The Lacanian
ethics of speech builds on all these aspects of the term. In addition to these aspects,
Lacan points out that psychoanalysis is meant to be a ‘talking cure.’ What this means
is that the patient can be cured only if he puts his symptoms across to the analyst,
through acts of speech, in a clinical form that is known as ‘free association.’ It is
therefore important for him to situate his notion of speech within the genealogy of
1 See Dylan Evans (1996,1997). ‘Speech,’ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge), pp. 190-192.

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this term in the history of ideas. The difference between full and empty forms of
speech is important because it is used as an indicator of health and neurosis. The
main problem in a neurosis is that the patient appears to be speaking in vain about
somebody who resembles him without being able to become one with his speech.
The moment that he is able to do so, he is deemed to have been cured.
ON FREE ASSOCIATION
The term ‘speech’ then has both theoretical and practical consequences to what we
mean by an ‘analysis,’ or what we mean by ‘free association,’ in the clinic. An
analysis basically consists of attempts made by both the patient and the analyst to
make sense of what the patient says from the couch. The ‘basic rule’ involved in free-
association is that the patient must say whatever appears on the surface of his mind
without attempting to censor its contents. The term ‘free-association’ was an
incorrect translation of the German phrase ‘freier Einfall’ by A.A. Brill. What
Sigmund Freud had in mind was something akin to the emergence of ‘sudden ideas’
rather than systematic associations. Nonetheless, this term caught on. It is widely
misunderstood even by analysts who are not aware of the original Freudian term in
German. Freud was so excited when he stumbled upon this technique that he gave
up hypnosis in its favour. The basic assumption in this method is that if the patient is
willing to let go, his thoughts will lead invariably to the repressed content in his
unconscious.2 These free associations also demonstrate that the unconscious is not a
reservoir of instincts, but that they have a discursive structure that Lacan compared
to a language. The term ‘free’ does not mean that the sequences in which ideas occur
in the mind are devoid of psychic determinism. On the contrary, both the formal and
substantive elements of free association play a role in interpreting the discourse of
the patient.3 The main difference between the terms ‘free association’ and ‘speech’ is
that the former is used mainly as a clinical term whereas the latter is imbued with
philosophical associations that Lacan seeks to harness in his theory of the subject, the
symptom, and the unconscious. The reason that he qualifies the term ‘speech’ with
ethics relates to the fact that the unconscious does not lend itself to ontological
description. In other words, it is not possible to simply differentiate between
consciousness and the unconscious in ontological terms; that is because the
unconscious is characterized by the pulsative function. What this means is that any
attempt to inspect the contents of the unconscious leads to its sudden closure; hence
the Lacanian contention that the unconscious is ‘pre-ontological.’ If the unconscious
2 See, for instance, Charles Rycroft (1995). ‘Free Association,’ A Critical Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Books), pp. 59-60.
3 See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1973, 1988) ‘Free Association (Method or
Rule of),’ The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, introduction
by Daniel Lagache (London: Karnac Books), pp. 169-170.

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cannot be rendered theoretically through an ontological description, then, Lacan is
forced to describe it as an ‘ethical’ phenomenon. The term ethics is not used here in
the sense of conventional morality, but in the sense that the ‘gap’ which constitutes
the unconscious is pre-ontological; hence the term ‘ethics of speech’ in the title of
Michel de Certeau’s paper.4 Since the patient’s speech is the only way of accessing
the unconscious through acts of free-association, the term ‘ethics’ qualifies both
speech and the structure of the unconscious that it reveals during an analysis. Lacan
also uses the term ‘ethics’ in his theory of desire and the death instinct in his seminar
of 1959-60.5
POETICS OF THE FREUDIAN CORPUS
The first thing that Michel de Certeau notices about Lacan is that he is to be found
speaking in his seminars. Moreover the rhetoric that is associated with Lacan is that
of withdrawal. Lacan was also fond of founding and dissolving new schools of
psychoanalysis lest they ossify into new forms of analytic orthodoxy. That is why
there is something akin to a tragic comedy in his approach to his seminars. It will not
be possible to understand the doctrinal elements at stake in his work unless the
aesthetic and stylistic aspects of the seminar are taken into consideration. That is
why the Lacanian approach to reading psychoanalysis involves a return to ‘the
poetics of the Freudian corpus.’ In other words, the meaning of the analytic doctrine
will remain elusive unless the reader is willing to read Freud as a literary text.
Lacan’s commentaries on Freudian psychoanalysis are invariably accompanied by
readings of literary texts from different traditions; that is why students of not only
French but also comparative literature are fond of Lacan. Furthermore, the Lacanian
approach is not to interpret literary texts using psychoanalysis but to explicate
aspects of the analytic doctrine with the help of literary texts. Needless to say, this
must have been extremely flattering to literary critics who had reconciled themselves
to a subordinate relationship to analysts within the Freudian approach to literature
and psychoanalysis. Lacan’s interest and participation in the aesthetics of surrealism
is also relevant in this context. What the analysts and surrealists had in common was
the aesthetics of the dream work. In other words, what they shared in common was
4 See Jacques Lacan (1973, 1979). ‘Of the Subject of Certainty,’ The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI, translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
(London: Penguin Books), pp. 29-30. For an account of psychoanalysis in the context of
conventional morality and moral values, see Lewis Samuel Feuer (1955). Psychoanalysis and
Ethics (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher) and Heinz Hartmann (1960).
Psychoanalysis and Moral Values (New York: International Universities Press).
5 Jacques Lacan (1986, 1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book VII, translated by Dennis Porter, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London:
Routledge).

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a preoccupation with the formations of the unconscious. Furthermore, they agreed
that they must make whatever forays were required into the unconscious. An
important spur to their creativity was precisely the question of whether an
ontological description of the unconscious was possible. Both surrealist paintings
and films inspired by surrealism toyed with these oneiric descriptions.
THE OBSESSION WITH DREAMS
The obsession with dreams and dream work is related to the Freudian contention
that dreams represent the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’ Not everybody
understood that dreams only show us the way to the unconscious; they were often
conflated with the unconscious itself. The main theoretical problem was the need to
differentiate between the structure and the function of the unconscious; and account,
if possible, for both within the same theoretical description of the unconscious. A
recurrent problem in theory was whether the Freudian unconscious had anything to
do with the forms of creativity that characterize artists and writers; hence the
surrealist experiments with automatic writing. Another important dimension was
whether dreams constitute fiction or an alternate model of truth. Who was the
author of a dream? What was the dreamer’s intention in dreaming? Can the author
of a dream be compared to a writer in the empirical world? What were the
similarities and differences? The analysis of a dream in the analytic situation is
mediated by secondary representation. In other words, it is not the dream as
‘dreamt’ by the dreamer but the dream as ‘described’ by the dreamer that is subject
to interpretation by the analyst. The ontological difference between the dream and
its description through secondary representation then is what is at stake in the
analytic clinic.6 In other words, it was the structure, function, and representations of
the dream and the psychology of the dreamer that united the artist, the writer, and
the analyst in their explorations of the unconscious. The preoccupation with
Freudian poetics in the history of psychoanalysis then is not only a ‘return to Freud’
but a ‘return of Freud’ himself to the history of psychoanalysis from which he had
been excluded in his own life (after the theoretical controversies on the discovery of
the death instinct had split the analytic movement).
CONCLUSION
In addition to Freud, there is also the question of how psychoanalysis relates to
Christ; this is the question of ‘Christian archaeology’ in Lacan’s thought. Why did
Lacan dedicate his doctoral dissertation to his brother, Marc-François Lacan, who
became a Benedictine monk? De Certeau points out that there are a number of
6 See Sigmund Freud (1900, 1991). ‘The Dream Work,’ translated by James Strachey and
Angela Richards, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin Books), Vol. 4, Penguin
Freud Library, pp. 381-651.

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Benedictine elements in the Lacanian doctrine. These include Lacan’s definitions of
work, speech, desire, the monk, and truth. So while it is known that Lacan was
influenced by Catholicism, it is not necessarily the case that his readers are able to
appreciate the Benedictine elements in it. This is one of the most important points in
De Certeau’s interpretation of the Lacanian ‘ethics of speech’ in this paper. That is
why, as he puts it, ‘the West has for three centuries been concerned with the
question of what to do about the Other.’ Lacan’s attempt to deal with this question is
mediated by the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel in Paris (which
was to serve as a role model for his own) and in his readings of Aristotle, St. Paul,
Sade, Kant, and Sophocles. In other words, the ethics of speech culminates in the
theory of desire that is articulated in the seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis.
Another way of saying this is to point out that we cannot understand the ethics of
speech unless we come to terms with the conditions of possibility of the subject
acting on its desire.
Hence the culmination of the ethics seminar with the Last Day of Judgement in
which the subject is asked to justify whether or not he acted on his desire; and what
his excuse was for giving up on his desire. The ethics of speech as represented by
Michel de Certeau then is just another way of articulating the subject’s relationship
between speech, desire, and the unconscious in the work of Jacques Lacan.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN