Speaking Present - Present Speaking

The "speaking present / present speaking" distinction is a structural dyad Lacan introduces in Seminar V to mark two irreducible axes of the subject's relationship to discourse. The "speaking present" (le dire du present) designates the enunciating subject — the "I" who speaks in the present moment, anchored in the act of utterance itself. The "present speaking" (le present du dire) designates discourse as such — the autonomous movement of the signifying chain, the symbolic order in its self-propelling operation, which speaks "in" the present but is not reducible to the speaker's intention or presence. This is not a psychological distinction between speaker and speech; it is a structural one between the subject of enunciation (who disappears under the signifier in the act of speaking) and the enunciated order (the chain of signifiers that proceeds independently of any individual speaker). The duality maps onto the two axes of Lacan's structural linguistics: the metaphoric axis (where one signifier substitutes for another, producing new meaning — the dimension of the enunciating subject as a locus of creation) and the metonymic axis (where signifiers slide along the chain, the discourse carrying itself forward — the dimension of discourse's autonomous movement).

This dyad is further grounded by Lacan's reading of Freud's Signorelli forgetting. The forgotten name is not a mere absence; it is a positively constituted lack — an X — at exactly the point where a new metaphorical substitution should have been produced by the speaking subject. The gap between what the "speaking present" should have said and what the "present speaking" actually produced (a displacement, a substitute name) reveals the structural tension between these two axes. Wit (Witz) operates by exploiting this very gap: it mobilizes both the metaphoric creativity of the enunciating subject and the metonymic slide of discourse simultaneously, producing an effect of meaning that belongs to neither pole alone but arises from their collision.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-5 (p. 61) within Lacan's extended reading of Freudian dream-work mechanisms (condensation and displacement) as structural operations of the signifier. It is best understood as a specification — a sharpened structural formulation — of the canonical Metaphor/Metonymy dyad and of the mechanisms of Condensation and Displacement. Condensation is the paradigm of metaphoric substitution (multiple signified contents converge on one signifier), while Displacement is the paradigm of metonymic sliding (cathexis migrates along the associative chain). The "speaking present" maps onto the metaphoric/condensation axis: it is the locus of enunciatory creativity, where a subject could (or should) produce a new substitution. The "present speaking" maps onto the metonymic/displacement axis: it is the autonomous drift of discourse, the chain carrying itself forward past the subject's intention — precisely what happens in the Signorelli parapraxis, where a name is displaced along an associative chain before the speaking subject can install the intended metaphoric substitution.

The dyad also cross-references Lack and Desire structurally. The "X" — the positively constituted lack where the forgotten name should appear — is precisely the site where Lack enters the signifying chain and where Desire is set in motion. The gap between the "speaking present" and the "present speaking" is thus the structural slot that Desire occupies: the subject speaks, but discourse outstrips and displaces the subject's speech, leaving a remainder that fuels further wanting. The Point de capiton (quilting point) is implicitly relevant here as well: it is the operation by which metaphor arrests the metonymic slide, "pinning" meaning at a node — which is exactly what the "speaking present" attempts to do but fails in the parapraxis. The Imaginary register enters negatively: the illusion that the speaker fully controls and inhabits their discourse is an imaginary capture that the structural distinction between the two axes of the present dismantles.

Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.61)

It is the opposition between what I will call the speaking present [le dire du present] and the present speaking [le present du dire].

The theoretical load lies in the chiasmic inversion of the two French terms — le dire du present (the saying of the present, i.e., the subject's enunciating act) versus le present du dire (the present of saying, i.e., discourse's own temporal unfolding) — which forces a structural split between the subject of enunciation and the enunciated chain, directly instantiating the Lacanian axiom that the subject is constitutively divided by and from the signifier that represents it.