Enunciating Subject vs. Subject of the Enunciation

The concept of the "Enunciating Subject vs. Subject of the Enunciation" names the structural split within speech between two positions: the grammatical or predicating subject who says something (the enunciating subject, the "I" of the statement), and the subject who is constituted in and through the very act of speaking (the subject of the enunciation, the barred $). In Seminar XIII, Lacan approaches this distinction through the lens of personal pronouns: "I," "me," "you," and "it" each occupy different structural positions relative to subjectivity. The phrase "it speaks" — Lacan's "imaginary case" — is paradigmatically significant because here the predicating subject loses its very status as subject. There is no first-person anchor, no "I" to hold the position of enunciation; the third-person neuter ("it") predicates without a recognizable subject behind it, collapsing the distinction between speaker and spoken-about. This is the imaginary register of speech: the subject dissolves into a third-person positional void, unable to sustain the first-person punctuality that would mark genuine subjectivity.

This formulation thus maps onto the broader Lacanian axiom that the subject is always split between what it says and what it is in saying it. When "it speaks," neither moment of the split is properly held: the predicating function operates, but the subject who would underwrite the enunciation has vanished. Lacan's observation that "we do not have a name to designate the predicating subject" is not a lexical gap but a structural one — the imaginary register is precisely the register in which naming (and therefore symbolization) fails to secure subjective position, leaving only a floating, depersonalized predicative function.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-13 (p. 102) and operates as a micro-specification of the broader Lacanian theory of the split subject ($). It extends the canonical concept of the Subject — defined as a vanishing effect produced in the gap between signifiers — by grounding it concretely in the grammar of personal pronouns. Where the canonical definition of the subject emphasizes aphanisis (the subject's fading as it is represented by a signifier for another signifier), the enunciating subject/subject of the enunciation distinction dramatizes this fading at the level of grammatical person: "it speaks" is the extreme case where aphanisis is total and no first-person position survives to mark the site of subjective production.

The concept is equally linked to the canonical concept of the Imaginary and to Alienation. The imaginary register, defined as the domain of the specular dyad and méconnaissance, is here characterized as the register in which the predicating subject loses its status — mirroring the way imaginary identification produces ego-unity at the cost of borrowing from an external image. "It speaks" is the speech-level analogue of the mirror-stage dynamic: the subject is present as a function but absent as a first-person locus. This further resonates with Alienation's vel — the forced choice between being and meaning — since the "it speaks" construction is precisely where both are lost: the subject has neither the being of a first-person speaker nor the meaning that a properly symbolized "I" would anchor. The concept thus serves as a precise grammatical illustration of the structural conditions the canonical concepts describe at a more abstract level, and by connecting Splitting of the Subject to the surface of language itself, it makes the theoretical stakes of pronominal structure legible as a psychoanalytic concern.

Seminar XIII · The Object of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1965 (p.102)

the predicating subject loses here the status of subject … we do not have a name to designate the predicating subject for the good reason that this predicating subject loses here the status of subject.

The phrase "loses here the status of subject" is theoretically loaded because it identifies the imaginary register not merely as distortion but as the structural site where subjectivity itself is forfeited: the "predicating subject" performs a grammatical function (predication) while simultaneously failing to occupy the first-person position that would constitute it as a proper subject of enunciation — making the loss of "status" both a grammatical and an ontological event.