Ah, parlêtre—one of Lacan’s most enigmatic and powerful late concepts. Introduced explicitly in Seminar XX (Encore, 1972–73), and elaborated further in his final years, parlêtre (speaking-being) marks a profound shift in how Lacan conceives of the subject.
It is not merely a replacement for the earlier “split subject” ($), but a deepening, a radicalization, a return to Freud through a new topology of being and language.
Let’s unfold it slowly.
1. The Word Itself: Parlêtre = parler + être
Parlêtre is a neologism Lacan coined by fusing:
parler (to speak) + être (being)
So: parlêtre = the being who speaks, or more precisely,
the being who is inhabited, cut, and transformed by speech.
2. From Split Subject to Parlêtre
In Lacan’s earlier teaching, the subject ($) is:
• Split by language
• Alienated in the signifier
• Structured by lack
But in his later work, Lacan moves beyond the symbolic order toward the body, jouissance, and what resists signification.
Thus emerges parlêtre—a concept that includes:
• The speaking subject
• The flesh, the Real, the body marked by jouissance
• And the impossibility of fully speaking one’s being
Where the “subject” is a position in discourse, parlêtre is the being that suffers language.
3. Key Features of the Parlêtre
a. Marked by Language
Parlêtre is not a speaking machine. It is wounded by language.
Language is not a neutral tool—it cuts, fragments, enjoys, invades.
The parlêtre is:
Not the one who speaks language, but the one whom language speaks—and scars.
b. Suffers from Jouissance
Jouissance is not pleasure—it is the painful excess, the bodily intensity that language fails to tame.
Parlêtre is the being who:
• Finds the body invaded by language
• And experiences that invasion as jouissance—sometimes erotic, sometimes traumatic
c. Has a Body That Speaks
In Lacan’s late work, the unconscious is no longer structured like a language, but emerges as what resists being said, yet insists through the body.
The parlêtre’s body:
• Is not organic, but symbolically and libidinally marked
• Carries symptoms, repetitions, and formations of the Real
The symptom is the way the parlêtre’s body “speaks” its truth, in spite of itself.
d. Tied by the Sinthome
The parlêtre is knotted together—not unified, but held—by what Lacan calls the sinthome.
• The sinthome is not a pathology to be cured, but a personal mode of stabilization.
• It’s how the speaking being knots together the symbolic, imaginary, and real.
• For the parlêtre, the sinthome is a creative way to live with division, not resolve it.
4. Why Parlêtre Matters
Lacan was responding to:
• The limits of structuralism: language is not just a system—it wounds and marks the body.
• The limits of ego psychology: there is no autonomous self, only a being spoken and suffering.
• The limits of interpretation: not everything can be said or deciphered—some things must be lived, endured, knotted.
Thus, the parlêtre is the subject of the Real, not just of the signifier.
5. The Ethics of the Parlêtre
The parlêtre cannot be cured of being spoken, of lacking, of desiring.
The ethics is:
• Not to overcome the symptom
• But to assume it, to knot it, to live with the unresolvable dimension of one’s being
Lacan said:
“The unconscious is real.”
And the parlêtre is its dwelling place.
In Summary: What Is the Parlêtre?
The parlêtre is the speaking-being:
a creature of language, marked by lack, cut by speech, invaded by jouissance, and bound together by a sinthome.
It is not a person, not a soul, not an ego.
It is what remains when language happens to a body—and the body begins, impossibly, to respond.
Would you like to compare parlêtre to posthuman subjectivity, or map it against Buddhist concepts of non-self? Or develop this into a poetic manifesto?
