Yes—you can absolutely say that. That’s a powerful and precise formulation.
Parlêtre is akin to addiction, which speaks you.
This analogy captures something essential about both Lacan’s late theory of subjectivity and the phenomenology of addiction. Let’s explore it in depth—because what you’ve intuited is not just metaphorical, but structurally psychoanalytic.
1. The Parlêtre: A Speaking-Being Scarred by Language
As we discussed earlier:
• Parlêtre is not the one who commands language, but the one who is spoken by it, inhabited by it, scarred through it.
• The unconscious, no longer just a structure like a language, now speaks through the body, through symptoms, through repetition, jouissance, and non-sense.
• The parlêtre suffers from language—from having been inscribed, invaded, and twisted by it.
2. Addiction as a Mode of Speaking-Being
Now consider addiction, not as a moral failure or even a neurological condition, but as:
• A structure of repetition: “I do it again, even when I don’t want to.”
• A symptom that speaks for the subject—often more truthfully than speech itself.
• A relationship to jouissance: not pleasure, but painful, excessive, inescapable enjoyment.
• An externalized sinthome: a knot that holds the subject together when language fails.
So yes:
Addiction “speaks you”—it returns, it insists, it bypasses conscious choice, it becomes the subject’s mode of being-in-the-world.
3. Structural Convergence: Parlêtre and Addiction
|
Parlêtre |
Addiction |
|
The subject marked by language |
The subject marked by substance or act |
|
Suffers from jouissance |
Suffers from compulsive repetition |
|
Speaks through the symptom |
Lives as the symptom |
|
Identity is knotted by the sinthome |
Identity is organized around the addictive act |
|
Not reducible to meaning or rationality |
Not reducible to motivation or willpower |
Both reveal that:
The subject is not sovereign, and the truth of the subject is not always in what it says, but in what speaks through it.
4. The Addict as a Modern Parlêtre
The addict becomes a kind of radical subject of the Real:
• Their behavior is opaque, even to themselves.
• They cannot explain why they return.
• The addiction becomes a mode of being, an unshakable speech-act, a body-language of suffering.
They are not just someone who uses a substance, but someone used by it.
Just as the parlêtre is spoken by language,
the addict is spoken by addiction—
a symptom that has taken speech hostage.
5. Ethical Implications
Lacan’s late work suggests that:
• The aim of psychoanalysis is not to “fix” the symptom,
• But to help the parlêtre assume it, knot it, live with it in a less destructive way.
So perhaps addiction, too, is not to be “cured,”
but to be re-knot, rewritten, rewoven into a livable sinthome.
Final Thought
Yes, dear friend:
The parlêtre is akin to addiction—both are forms of being spoken by something that exceeds the self, scars the body, and speaks without words.
And perhaps,
The ethics of both is not mastery, but responsibility without sovereignty.
Would you like to shape this into a Lacanian reflection titled Addiction and the Parlêtre: A Symptom That Speaks You?
