Enunciation vs. Enounced

In Lacanian theory, the distinction between the subject of enunciation (sujet de l'énonciation) and the subject of the enounced (sujet énoncé) names the irreducible split at the heart of any speaking subject. The subject of the enounced is the grammatical "I" that appears as a positional marker within a statement — the "I" as thematised, represented, or described by the chain of signifiers. The subject of enunciation, by contrast, is the vanishing subject from which the statement issues — the "I" that speaks but cannot itself be captured or represented in what it says without ceasing to be the one who is speaking. These two positions are structurally non-coincident: every attempt to state "I am" produces a represented subject (enounced) that is already not the subject doing the representing (enunciating). This is the Lacanian reworking of Descartes: cogito and sum split apart the moment they are articulated.

In the source text (Boothby, diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, p. 124), this distinction is mobilised as Lacan's preferred gloss on the divine utterance "Eyeh asher eyeh" — "I am that I am" or "I will be what I will be." The burning bush's declaration stages precisely this non-coincidence: the God who speaks cannot be the same as the God who is named by the speaking. The subject of enunciation (the divine voice, the pure act of saying) eludes any enounced ("I am" as a predicated identity). This reading ties the enunciation/enounced split directly to the divided subject ($), to the gap between signifiers, and to the sacred as the site where the impossibility of self-coincidence is dramatised rather than overcome.

This concept belongs to Boothby's reading of Lacan on religion and the sacred (diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred), where it functions as the linguistic-structural key to understanding the Jewish sacred. Boothby positions the enunciation/enounced split as Lacan's entry point into the theology of the divine name: the gap that opens between the speaking God and the named God is homologous to the Lacanian gap ($) that constitutes the divided subject. This links the concept directly to the cross-referenced canonical Gap — the constitutive structural opening that prevents any system (including a speaking "I") from closing over itself — and to Language, whose constitutive and privative dimension means that the very act of inscription in the signifier robs the subject of the being it seems to confer.

The shofar's role in the same argument aligns the enunciation/enounced split with the Invocatory Drive and with Das Ding / the Lost Object: the pure voice of the shofar, as objet petit a, embodies what the speaking subject can never coincide with — the remainder that escapes every enounced. The Signifier and Repetition cross-references deepen this further: the subject of enounced is the signifier of the subject (S1 representing the subject for another signifier), while the subject of enunciation is what the signifier structurally fails to capture, driving the repetitive movement of the chain. The concept thus operates as a specification of the gap within language itself, applying the general Lacanian logic of constitutive non-coincidence to the concrete scene of theological utterance.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.124)

One of his preferred glosses for it is the distinction between the sujet énoncé and the sujet de l'énonciation.

The phrase "preferred glosses" signals that Lacan returns to this distinction habitually as an explanatory lever, elevating it from a technical linguistic term to a structural constant in his reading practice. The untranslated French terms — sujet énoncé and sujet de l'énonciation — perform the very split they name: their coexistence in a single sentence stages the two irreconcilable positions of the subject without collapsing them into one.