Enunciation - Enunciating Instance

The "enunciating instance" designates the structural position of the subject as enunciator — the "I" that speaks — which is irreducible to and in excess of any particular statement (énoncé) produced. In Lacanian linguistics, the distinction between énonciation (the act and position of utterance) and énoncé (the statement uttered) maps directly onto the split subject ($): the subject of the enunciation is never fully captured in, nor exhausted by, the subject of the statement. Copjec's theoretical move in this occurrence identifies this enunciating instance with objet petit a — not as a loose analogy but as a structural equivalence. The instance of enunciation is that which any "realist" operation — one that sacrifices the signified for the referent, treating language as transparent access to things-in-the-world — must necessarily bypass as the condition of its own possibility. By doing so, realism structurally renders itself incapable of threatening or touching the subject, because what is menaced in any effective interpellation or accusation is precisely this instance, not the propositional content of statements.

In the "Teflon President" phenomenon Copjec diagnoses, television's relentless attack on Reagan's statements left this enunciating instance not only intact but positively reinforced: by disregarding it, the media's realist-empiricist critique inadvertently preserved the very kernel of the subject that accusations cannot reach. Democratic ideology, on Copjec's account, is implicated here because it operates through a Cartesian universal subject whose innocence is located precisely in this enunciating instance — a structural locus that, like objet petit a, is non-specularizable, cannot be pinned by any particular statement, and therefore functions as a perpetually receding ground of invulnerability.

This concept appears in radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso (p. 143) as part of Copjec's broader polemic against historicist and empiricist approaches to political and cultural analysis. Its immediate home is her critique of what she calls "realist imbecility" — a structural disposition that collapses representation onto reference and thereby blinds itself to the signifying remainder. The enunciating instance is explicitly identified with objet petit a: it is the non-specularizable, non-stateable residue that the realist operation must discard as its founding gesture. This makes the concept a specification and application of objet petit a to the domain of political discourse and media, extending the canonical definition of a (as the structural cause of desire, irreducible to any positive object or statement) into an account of why ideological critique that operates only at the level of content — attacking statements — is structurally disarmed.

The concept also bears directly on ideology and hysteria as cross-referenced canonicals. Ideologically, the enunciating instance names the libidinal anchor of the subject that ideology cannot simply falsify or correct, because it is not a belief but a structural position — consistent with the corpus's insistence that ideology operates below the level of conscious assent. The Cartesian universality of the democratic subject, whose innocence resides in this instance, parallels the hysterical subject's constitutive refusal to be fully captured by any symbolic mandate: just as the hysteric's desire exceeds what any master-signifier can name, the enunciating instance exceeds any particular statement that would pin the subject down. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Copjec's anti-historicism, her theory of ideology, and Lacan's account of the subject's irreducibility to its own statements.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (p.143)

What television attacked was the president's statements; what it left intact was the object a, the instance of enunciation—that very thing which the 'realist imbecility' always and necessarily (as the condition of its possibility) disregards.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it explicitly equates "object a" with "the instance of enunciation," collapsing two Lacanian registers — the economy of desire and the linguistics of the subject's split — into a single structural locus; the parenthetical "as the condition of its possibility" then makes disregarding this instance not a contingent failure but a constitutive necessity of realist discourse, turning an empirical media observation into a claim about the structural limits of referential epistemology.