The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk

by Samuel McCormick (2020)

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Synopsis

Samuel McCormick's The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk (2020) traces a genealogy of learned anxiety about ordinary language use from Søren Kierkegaard's theory of "chatter" (snak) through Martin Heidegger's phenomenological account of "idle talk" (Gerede) to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic treatment of "empty speech" (parole vide), arguing that these three thinkers form a coherent if underappreciated intellectual tradition in the philosophy of communication. The book's central argument is that everyday talk — habitual, recursive, automated, often vacuous — was not merely a sociological nuisance for its three protagonists but the very proving ground of genuine subjectivity: each thinker insists, against simpler readings, that chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are condition-of-possibility structures for their authentic or therapeutic counterparts (existential inwardness, authentic Dasein, full speech). McCormick excavates this common line through close reading of marginal passages, early lecture courses, private correspondence, and literary texts, deploying methods from Begriffsgeschichte, Cambridge-School intellectual history, and close rhetorical analysis. The book's distinctive methodological move is to show that each concept is not merely theoretical but biographically and institutionally embedded: Kierkegaard's snak emerges from a newspaper polemic and a career-long battle with Hegelian parrots; Heidegger's Gerede and Geschwätz crystallize during a decade of professional marginalization in the publish-or-perish university; and Lacan's parole vide is worked out through his re-reading of Freud's dream of Irma's injection. The book culminates in a sustained, chapter-by-chapter analysis of that dream — arguably the richest section — showing how the metonymic, repetitive, and finally symbolic structure of the dream moves from empty speech through tuché and automaton to full speech, and closes by projecting the entire conceptual history forward into digital culture, suggesting that the algorithmic era reproduces the same anxieties of aggregation, averageness, and alterity that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan each theorized.

Distinctive contribution

The Chattering Mind is, to McCormick's own knowledge, the first book-length study to argue that Kierkegaard's snak, Heidegger's Gerede/Geschwätz, and Lacan's parole vide constitute a single, progressive conceptual tradition in the philosophy of communication rather than independent philosophical moments. Most scholarship on each thinker addresses "everyday talk" only in passing — as a foil for authenticity, the unconscious, or religious inwardness — while McCormick treats it as the central object of inquiry, excavating its "secret systematicity" across three national intellectual traditions, three different methodological frameworks (existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis), and nearly a century of European thought. The result is a genealogy unavailable elsewhere in the Lacanian or communication-theory corpus: no existing text reconstructs the chain from the Danish comic figure of the talkative barber (Holberg's Gert Westphaler) through the adoleschia of Plutarch and Aristophanes, through Heidegger's early Freiburg lecture courses, to Lacan's re-analysis of Freud's dream specimen.

Within Lacanian studies specifically, the book's most distinctive contribution is its sustained engagement with empty speech not as a mere preliminary to full speech but as a structurally complex communicative phenomenon in its own right, analyzed through the overlapping lenses of Aristotelian rhetoric, Heideggerian phenomenology, and Freudian dream-work. The three chapters on Lacan (Part Three) read Seminar I, Seminar II, Seminar XI, and the Écrits in conjunction with a forensic close reading of Freud's Irma dream — tracking the movement from imaginary ego-decomposition through tuché, fort-da guessing games, metonymic displacement (propyl...propyls...propionic acid), and the graphic inscription of the trimethylamine formula — to show how empty speech simultaneously enacts and structurally conditions full speech. This reading integrates concepts (tuché, automaton, fort-da, inmixing of subjects, tessera/symbolon) that are usually treated separately in the secondary literature and shows their convergence in a single dream-text.

A third contribution, less common in Lacanian secondary literature, is McCormick's insistence on contextualization: he reads Lacan's conceptual apparatus alongside Kierkegaard's social arithmetic of the "gallery-public," Heidegger's career anxieties in the Weimar university, and, in the Conclusion, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, Gabriel Tarde's sociology of publics, and contemporary discourse on algorithmic culture and big data. This gives the book an unusually wide orbit for a Lacan-adjacent text and positions it as a resource for communication scholars, historians of philosophy, and digital media theorists, not only for specialists in psychoanalytic theory.

Main themes

• Chatter, idle talk, and empty speech as a single genealogical line in the philosophy of communication
• Everyday talk as condition of possibility for authentic existence, full speech, and genuine subjectivity
• Repetition as the structural engine of all three forms of everyday talk (the 'repeating machine')
• The biographical and institutional embeddedness of philosophical concepts (university politics, newspaper polemics, sermonic failure)
• The public as a 'calculating machine': sorites reasoning, social arithmetic, and the fuzzy math of modernity
• The Freudian dream of Irma's injection as the paradigmatic case of empty speech moving toward full speech
• Tuché, automaton, and the fort-da structure of analytic repetition
• The communicative spectrum from babble (Geschwätz) through idle talk (Gerede) to authentic discourse (Rede, echte Sprechen, Schweigen)
• The digital age as continuation and intensification of modernity's anxieties of aggregation, averageness, and alterity
• Irony, the eiron/alazon distinction, and the self-knowledge that genuine speech requires

Chapter outline

• Introduction — p.1-12
• Chapter 1: Barbers and Philosophers — p.15-48
• Chapter 2: Fuzzy Math — p.49-84
• Chapter 3: Preacher-Prattle — p.85-120
• Chapter 4: Beginning More than Halfway There — p.123-156
• Chapter 5: Ancient Figures of Speech — p.157-190
• Chapter 6: The World Persuaded — p.191-216
• Chapter 7: The Writing on the Wall — p.219-252
• Chapter 8: First and Final Words — p.253-272
• Chapter 9: A Play of Props — p.273-300
• Conclusion — p.288-304

Chapter summaries

Introduction (p.1-12)

McCormick opens with the observation that modern life is characterized by a 'flight from conversation' — a phrase borrowed from Sherry Turkle — in which face-to-face talk has been displaced by digital chatter. This contemporary anxiety serves as the motivation for a 'usable past': a conceptual history of everyday talk as theorized by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan. The introduction argues that this tradition has been insufficiently traced, partly because 'chatter,' 'idle talk,' and 'empty speech' are marginal concepts even within the works where they appear, rarely receiving sustained conceptual development.

Methodologically, McCormick positions the book at the intersection of German Begriffsgeschichte (the diachronic history of fundamental terms), Cambridge-School linguistic contextualism, and the history and rhetoric of philosophy. The central methodological challenge is described as excavation, illumination, and integration: finding the scattered references, illuminating their hidden systematicity, and integrating this structure into a conceptual narrative with bearing on the digital present. The introduction also establishes the book's anti-reductive thesis: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all believed that chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are the 'proving ground, not the killing field' of genuine subjectivity — a position that prevailing interpretations have missed.

The introduction concludes by gesturing toward the book's organization — three parts corresponding to 'Chatter' (Kierkegaard), 'Idle Talk' (Heidegger), and 'Empty Speech' (Lacan) — and by noting that attunement to everyday talk in the digital age may require not logging off but learning to see the opportunity structures latent within overconnection itself.

Key concepts: Chatter (snak), Idle Talk (Gerede), Empty Speech (parole vide), Conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), Flight from conversation, Everyday talk as proving ground Notable examples: Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation; Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook (digital chatter); Screen-time reduction apps (Moment, Offtime, etc.)

Chapter 1: Barbers and Philosophers (p.15-48)

The first chapter traces Kierkegaard's theory of snak to its earliest formulation, locating its birth not in the famous works but in an 1836 newspaper polemic against the liberal press reformers Lehmann and Hage. Here Kierkegaard invokes Holberg's comic figure of Master Gert Westphaler — the talkative barber whose compulsive, uncontrollable monologues about his trip from Harslev to Kiel became a Danish cultural touchstone for chattering disease (Snakke-Syge). McCormick argues that this reference was more than decorative: over the next decade, Holberg's barber became Kierkegaard's central figure for the mechanical, automated, and disease-like quality of everyday talk. The image of Gert's 'runaway jaw' — a mouth that, if sewn shut, would merely double its output through the nostrils — is read as a figure of the repeating machine, and McCormick traces the mechanical metaphors (pantograph, double-barreled rifle, espringal) that Kierkegaard and his correspondents elaborated around this figure.

The chapter then follows the conceptual genealogy of snak through its Greek antecedents: adoleschia in Plutarch's essay 'On Talkativeness,' Aristophanes' ridicule of Socrates in Clouds, and Plato's effort to separate Socratic dialogue from the babbling sophists. Kierkegaard actively synthesizes this classical material, aligning sophistic adoleschia with snak and defending Socratic irony as its authentic counterpart. The chapter ends with the crucial distinction between the eiron (the ironist who acknowledges the limits of knowledge) and the alazon (the windbag who parades false claims), showing how Kierkegaard uses this ancient typology to indict the 'Hegelian Gert Westphalers' of Danish philosophy — disciples who parrot (eftersnakken) Hegel's system without understanding it, adding echoes to echoes in an iterative chain of intellectual mimicry.

McCormick demonstrates that snak is not simply conservative social critique but a communicative-ontological concept: it names a way of speaking that is simultaneously mechanical (automated, compulsive, disease-like), epistemic (self-deluding, displaced from genuine understanding), and social (spreading virally through imitation and parroting). The chapter establishes that the Holberg connection — largely overlooked in existing Kierkegaard scholarship — is the hidden origin point of the entire conceptual history the book traces.

Key concepts: Snak (chatter), Eftersnakken (parroting), Alazon / eiron, Adoleschia, Repeating machine, Snakke-Syge (chatter-disease) Notable examples: Holberg's Master Gert Westphaler; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plutarch's 'On Talkativeness'; Kierkegaard's 1836 newspaper polemic against Lehmann and Hage; Hegelian disciples in Denmark (Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Carl Weiss)

Chapter 2: Fuzzy Math (p.49-84)

Chapter 2 develops Kierkegaard's social-mathematical critique of the 'present age' as elaborated in his 1846 literary review of Two Ages. McCormick argues that behind Kierkegaard's well-known laments about 'leveling' and the 'gallery-public' lies a precise mathematical structure that has eluded scholarly comment. The chapter traces the opposition between the 'revolutionary age' (characterized by passionate inwardness, a 'unanimity of separation' analogous to the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres) and the 'present age' (defined by the 'mutual reflexive opposition' of leveling reciprocity and the quantitative arithmetic of crass society). In the present age, qualitative distinctions between good and evil dissolve into Tvetydighed (equivocation), producing not decision but endless chatter: 'the qualitative disjunction of these qualities is impaired by a gnawing reflection' (TA, 77–78).

The chapter's most original move is a mathematical re-reading of Kierkegaard's definition of the public as 'all and nothing.' McCormick argues that this formulation conceals a precise set-theoretic logic: the public is the proper superset P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}, in which the expansive subset {n+1} represents the running tally of 'everyone and everything' and the empty subset {Ø} represents the counting procedure itself — the operation of inclusion that is excluded from its own result. This anticipates, McCormick suggests, Badiou's set-theoretic ontology of the void. What defines chatter in this context is its identity with the counting procedure: a 'repeating machine' whose forming-into-one always begets another, structurally mirroring Gert Westphaler's runaway jaw.

McCormick also excavates Kierkegaard's use of the sorites paradox ('a quiet but busy sorites going on day and night') in Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety, showing that the dialectical fraud of modernity consists in applying probabilistic, common-sense reasoning (Forstandighed) to qualitative decisions — suicide, faith, moral action — thereby strangling them in calculation. The chapter connects this social arithmetic to the concept of 'primitive accumulation': genuine speech requires a 'primitivity' analogous to real coins, while chatter circulates only as paper money, eroded tesserae that have lost their faces.

Key concepts: Tvetydighed (equivocation), Gallery-public (P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}), Sorites reasoning, Forstandighed (common sense/calculation), Leveling, Dialectical fraud Notable examples: Kierkegaard's Two Ages; Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (Chrysippus/Carneades sorites exchange); Badiou's set-theoretic ontology (anticipated); Statistical democracy in mid-1840s Denmark

Chapter 3: Preacher-Prattle (p.85-120)

The third chapter extends Kierkegaard's theory of chatter into his religious writings, focusing on the concept of Præstesnak (preacher-prattle) and the case of Adolph Peter Adler — a Hegelian pastor who claimed to have received a direct revelation from Jesus and rushed it to print. McCormick argues that Adler's case fascinated Kierkegaard not for its religious spectacle but for what it revealed about a broader trend: 'bustling loquacity' (travl Snaksomhed), in which nervous preoccupation drives hasty expression, which in turn produces more busyness in a self-compounding cycle. Adler is neither an alazon nor a genuine apostle but a 'premise-author': one who writes in search of the perspective he lacks, expecting readers to supply the conclusions his arguments cannot reach.

The chapter connects preacher-prattle to the 'fuzzy math' of the previous chapter: preachers rely on numerical rhetoric ('more and more' converts, 'millions of Christians') to demonstrate the triumph of Christendom, thereby reducing faith to probabilistic common sense and historical gossip (historisk-snaksom Ihukommelse). McCormick traces this through the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Kierkegaard shows how the sensible person's dawdling, probabilistic pursuit of God ('It becomes probable... more probable... exceedingly probable') constitutes a form of babble dabble (Fuskerie) — religiously dabbling in aesthetic rhetoric without commitment.

McCormick uses Adler's case to complete Kierkegaard's typology of everyday talk: chatter (snak), parroting (eftersnakken), premise-authorship, bustling loquacity, and preacher-prattle all share the same communicative deficiency — they get ahead of themselves, seeking topics to fill their emptiness rather than speaking from a pre-established perspective. The chapter closes by connecting these forms to the Greek adoleschia and the German Geschwätz, noting that Haecker's 1914 translation of Kierkegaard's 'Critique of the Present Age' rendered snak as Geschwätz, creating the terminological bridge that allowed the young Heidegger to inherit Kierkegaard's communicative theory.

Key concepts: Preacher-prattle (Præstesnak), Premise-author, Bustling loquacity (travl Snaksomhed), Epistemic probability (Sandsynlighed), Babble dabble (Fuskerie), Historical-talkative remembrance Notable examples: Adolph Peter Adler and his 'revelation'; Kierkegaard's Book on Adler; Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments; Haecker's 1914 German translation of Kierkegaard

Chapter 4: Beginning More than Halfway There (p.123-156)

The first chapter of Part Two shifts to Heidegger, arguing that his key communicative concepts — Gerede (idle talk), Geschwätz (babble), and Geschreibe (scribbling) — were not abstract philosophical categories but emerged from a specific biographical-institutional context: his decade-long professional marginalization in the publish-or-perish culture of the Weimar research university. McCormick draws on Heidegger's correspondence with Jaspers, his letters to his wife, and unpublished lecture transcripts from 1919–1923 to show how the young Heidegger theorized idle talk simultaneously as communication theory and social critique of academic busyness (Betriebsamkeit). The refusal to publish — presented as principled philosophical silence — was also a careerist maneuver: he needed Husserl's recommendation while his research agenda was 'poles apart from Husserl.'

McCormick reads Heidegger's early Freiburg lecture courses (War Emergency Semester 1919, Winter 1921–22 on Aristotle, Summer 1923 on the hermeneutics of facticity) as successive refinements of the same conceptual cluster. In Geschwätz he found a state of garrulous distraction — the pursuit of novelty for novelty's sake; in Gerede and Geschreibe a more focused but equally vacant preoccupation. Together, these trained incapacities arrest the 'resoluteness of understanding' (Entschlossenheit) and produce 'ruinance' — an existential state of impatience in which factical life 'has no time' because ruinance itself takes time away. The Summer 1923 lectures introduce das Man as the pronominal subject constituted by Gerede: 'Everyone says that... everyone has heard that...'

The chapter also traces the conceptual debt to Kierkegaard, whom Heidegger credited with providing 'strong impulses' for his hermeneutical expression, and from whom the figure of bustling busyness (Travlhed → Betriebsamkeit) is directly inherited. The parallel between Kierkegaard's critique of premise-authorship and Heidegger's indictment of 'speeches and pamphlets' in the Weimar university is made explicit, establishing the biographical-institutional continuity between the two thinkers.

Key concepts: Gerede (idle talk), Geschwätz (babble), Geschreibe (scribbling), Ruinance (Ruinanz), Betriebsamkeit (busyness), Das Man Notable examples: Heidegger-Jaspers correspondence; Husserl's letters recommending Heidegger for professorships; Heidegger's War Emergency Semester lectures (1919); Heidegger's Winter 1921-22 Aristotle course; Heidegger's Summer 1923 hermeneutics of facticity lectures

Chapter 5: Ancient Figures of Speech (p.157-190)

Chapter 5 analyzes Heidegger's Summer 1924 lecture course on Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and Winter 1924–25 lectures on Plato's Sophist as the most sustained development of his philosophy of ordinary language use. The chapter opens with Heidegger's reformulation of the Greek definition of the human being: zoon logon echon is now translated as 'the living thing that reads the newspaper,' anchoring the ontological structure of human speech in the average, everyday discourse of being-with-one-another. From Aristotle's Rhetoric Heidegger extracts a 'rhetorical hermeneutics': rhetoric is not primarily persuasion but an 'ability to see' the available means of persuasion, a potentiality anchored in familiarity with the world. Doxa (opinion) is this familiarity made explicit; aletheia (unconcealment) is its authentic counterpart; pseudos is its basic potentiality for falsehood; and Gerede is the fallen form of logos in which dissimulation (Verstellung) prevails — not intentional deceit but a structural concealment in which repeated speech loses its ground.

The chapter introduces Heidegger's communicative typology in its most developed form: a hierarchical spectrum running from Geschwätz (babble/distraction) through Gerede (idle talk/dissimulation) to Rede (everyday discourse/rhetoric), Durchsprechen (dialectical speaking-through), echte Sprechen (genuine philosophical speech), and Schweigen (silence/pure perception). McCormick renders this as a table (Table 5.1) mapping linguistic practice, communicative effect, and representative figure. Most importantly, the chapter shows that Heidegger deploys the aletheutikos, eiron, and alazon figures — directly inherited from Kierkegaard — to map his own position vis-à-vis Husserl: Heidegger is the 'hidden king' (mock-modest eiron), while Husserl is cast as the alazon, the braggart-in-chief of academic phenomenology.

The Winter 1924–25 lectures on Plato's Sophist introduce der Schwätzer (the babbler), Heidegger's version of Plato's adoleschos, as the lowest point in the communicative spectrum: one who speaks constantly, seeks ever-new topics, but has no concern for the matter at hand — the very figure Kierkegaard had identified in Gert Westphaler and the Hegelian parrots. McCormick also reads the discussion of concealment in these lectures, distinguishing three forms: ignorance, Gerede, and sophistry, and showing how Durchsprechen (dialectical speaking-through) must traverse idle talk to arrive at genuine philosophical inquiry.

Key concepts: Aletheia / Pseudos, Aletheutikos / alazon / eiron, Doxa and rhetorical hermeneutics, Communicative spectrum (Geschwätz → Schweigen), Der Schwätzer / adoleschos, Durchsprechen Notable examples: Heidegger's SS 1924 Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy; Heidegger's WS 1924-25 Plato's Sophist; Aristotle's Rhetoric; Plato's Sophist; Theophrastus' Characters (adoleschia); Husserl as alazon

Chapter 6: The World Persuaded (p.191-216)

Chapter 6 traces the emergence of Gerede as a fully articulated concept in Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time (Summer 1925) and Being and Time (1927), focusing particularly on the distinction between besprechen (talking-things-over, genuine Rede) and bereden (talking-over-things, inauthentic Gerede) — a distinction Heidegger never formally coined but whose logic is demonstrably operative in his texts. McCormick names the world produced by the second practice 'der beredeten Welt' — 'the world persuaded' — showing how sophistic public discourse creates a form of collective false consciousness in which Dasein 'allows itself to be taken in' by the world being talked over.

The chapter provides a detailed comparative reading of History of the Concept of Time and Being and Time, identifying passages the latter omits. Most significant is Heidegger's revision of 'incomprehensibility' (Unverständlichkeit) into 'sham clarity — the incomprehensibility of the trivial' (Scheinklarheit, das heißt Unverständlichkeit der Trivialität) in the discussion of Geschwätz in Being and Time section 35. McCormick reads this revision as Heidegger's discovery that the most dangerous form of babble is not chaos but a bathos — a false clarity that dissolves authentic selfhood into the anonymous das Man-selbst.

The chapter closes by resolving a widely debated question in Heidegger scholarship: is authentic existence prior to or derived from average everydayness? McCormick, reading Being and Time against the lecture course transcripts, argues that Heidegger sees a continuum, not a contradiction: 'Authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject... it is rather an existentiell modification of the they' (BT, 168). This is directly analogous to Kierkegaard's position on chatter as the proving ground of genuine subjectivity and anticipates Lacan's treatment of empty speech as the condition of possibility for full speech. The discussion of anxiety (Angst) and being-towards-death as the existential triggers that convert the they-self into an individualized Dasein completes the structural parallel with the analytic function of empty speech.

Key concepts: Gerede as dissimulation, Das Man-selbst, Sham clarity (Scheinklarheit/Trivialität), Alltägliche Rede (everyday discourse), Fallenness (Verfallen), Anxiety and being-towards-death as individuating Notable examples: Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time (SS 1925); Being and Time sections 34-38, 40, 58; Heidegger's 'Concept of Time' address (July 1924); Academic jargon as idle talk (excluded passage from History of the Concept of Time)

Chapter 7: The Writing on the Wall (p.219-252)

The opening chapter of Part Three establishes the historical and theoretical convergence of Heidegger's Gerede and Freud's everyday discourse as illustrated in the dream of Irma's injection, arguing that Lacan's treatment of empty speech represents the fullest synthesis of both. The chapter opens with a brief account of the mutual incomprehension between Heidegger and Freud — both of whom dismissed each other's work despite sharing deep structural affinities in their accounts of ordinary language — and frames Lacan's project as a deliberate bridge between phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of speech. Lacan's 1955 visit to Heidegger and his translation of Heidegger's essay on 'Logos' are cited as evidence of this synthesis.

The main body of the chapter is a close reading of Freud's dream of Irma's injection and Lacan's 're-analysis' in Seminar II. McCormick follows Lacan in dividing the dream into two parts: the first part (Freud's exchange with Irma, culminating in the ghastly contents of her mouth) stages the imaginary encounter with the real — 'the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real' — while the second part (the nonsensical examination by Dr. M., Otto, and Leopold) stages the spectral decomposition of Freud's ego into identificatory fragments. The concept of l'immixtion des sujets (the inmixing of subjects) is introduced and given its two meanings: the imaginary decomposition of the ego into a polycephalic crowd, and the emergence of an acephalic speaking subject ('Nemo') at the symbolic level, whose voice exceeds and eventually displaces the ego's.

McCormick reads the culminating inscription — the chemical formula of trimethylamine, appearing 'printed in heavy type' — through the biblical figure of 'the writing on the wall' (Belshazzar's feast and the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin). As in that scene, an incorporeal, unconscious hand inscribes a cryptic text for all to see; Freud is both the author and the recipient of this writing, and Lacan claims the role of its exclusive interpreter. The formula's appearance marks the transition from empty speech (the ridiculous chatter of the colleagues) to the emergence of the signifier as such — the symbolic order's answer to the question of the meaning of the dream.

Key concepts: Empty speech (parole vide), L'immixtion des sujets, Imaginary ego-decomposition, Acephalic subject (Nemo), Symbolic Order as locus of the unconscious, Writing on the wall / trimethylamine formula Notable examples: Freud's dream of Irma's injection; Lacan's Seminar II re-analysis; Lacan's translation of Heidegger's 'Logos' essay; Biblical Belshazzar's feast (Daniel 5); Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars (mutual dismissal with Freud)

Chapter 8: First and Final Words (p.253-272)

Chapter 8 develops Lacan's positive theory of full speech (parole pleine) and its relationship to empty speech, reading it through the concept of psychoanalytic anamnesis and the future anterior tense. Where Platonic reminiscence returns to a timeless form, psychoanalytic anamnesis operates in the future anterior: full speech resubjectivizes the subject by reordering past contingencies as retrospective necessities, constituting the history of the subject in the here-and-now of present discourse. McCormick reads the concept of 'true speech' (parole vraie) as the mechanism by which this retrospective resubjectivization occurs — shown in the dream when the linguistic shift from 'propyl, propyls... propionic acid' to 'trimethylamin' allows Freud and Otto to become 'two very different subjects' from what they were prior to this speech.

The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the tessera as Lacan's figure for empty speech's minimal communicative function. Even eroded, effaced, and apparently meaningless speech retains the value of a tessera — the broken pottery shard of ancient mystery religions that, when brought together with its matching half, allows for mutual recognition. The tessera is also a symbolon, indexing the minimal symbolic function of language: 'the pure function of language, which is to assure us that we are, and nothing more' (S 1, 157). This figure simultaneously explains why empty speech is not mere noise and why it remains foundationally intersubjective.

McCormick also reads Lacan's account of the structural complicity of the analyst in the patient's resistance, showing how the analyst's search for 'a reality beyond speech' — something behind the patient's empty words — only redoubles the imaginary ego-other relation it seeks to dissolve. 'The patient's resistance is always your own,' Lacan insists (S 3, 48). The chapter concludes by distinguishing full speech from both Platonic reminiscence and imaginary transference: unlike the former, it does not return to timeless forms, and unlike the latter, it does not repeat the past as the misrecognized present but reorders it as future necessity.

Key concepts: Full speech (parole pleine), True speech (parole vraie), Psychoanalytic anamnesis vs. Platonic reminiscence, Tessera / symbolon, Future anterior, Imaginary transference vs. symbolic transference Notable examples: Lacan's Écrits ('Function and Field of Speech and Language'); Lacan's Seminar I; Lacan's Seminar III; Freud's dream analysis (trimethylamine shift); Ancient Greek tessera in mystery religions

Chapter 9: A Play of Props (p.273-300)

The final chapter of Part Three provides the book's most sustained analytic reading of the Irma dream, developing an interpretation of 'propyl, propyls... propionic acid' as a structurally complex signifying chain that enacts the transition from empty speech through the three registers of analytic repetition — tuché, fort-da, and automaton — toward the threshold of full speech. McCormick begins by reading 'prop' to the letter, in both its English and German senses (Pfropf = stopper, cork, clot, thrombus), and showing how the network of Pfropfen implicit in the dream — from the fetid bottle stoppered by Otto's gift, to the blood clot (Venenstauungen) in Freud's wife, to the pus and gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity — constitutes a condensed, olfactory-semantic chain connecting Otto's malpractice to Fliess' responsibility.

The chapter introduces three registers of analytic repetition. First, tuché (Aristotle's term borrowed by Lacan in Seminar XI): the traumatic real encounter, here the phantasmatic representation of Eckstein's near-fatal surgery in the image of Irma's infected throat. Second, a fort-da guessing game: the polycephalic self's metonymic escape from the ghastly real, substituting chemical signifiers for the traumatic encounter — a symbolic mastery analogous to Ernst's reel game. Third, automaton: the insistent return of signs governed by the pleasure principle, here the chemical formula of trimethylamine as the dream's repressive desublimation of the real, at once indexing and further forgetting the traumatic kernel.

McCormick then reads Freud's own metaphor of 'propyl, propyls... propionic acid' as a 'parallelogram of forces' (from his 1901 addition to the dream analysis), arguing that this metaphor, taken seriously as a geometric proof, reveals a continuum rather than a contrast between the 'Otto group' and the 'Wilhelm group' of ideational content. Trimethylamine is not the opposite but the terminal point of the chain beginning with amyl; to acknowledge this would have been to acknowledge Fliess' responsibility for Eckstein's suffering. The chapter concludes by identifying the 'jam' — Lacan's term for the tendency of communication to cease communicating — as the precise threshold where empty speech stutters, the repressed stages its return, and the analytic threshold between repetition and remembering becomes apparent: 'Repetition with a difference... is the condition of possibility for recollecting ourselves.'

Key concepts: Tuché (traumatic real encounter), Automaton (insistent return of the signifier), Fort-da structure of analytic repetition, Condensation and metonymy in dream-work, The jam (communication breakdown), Parallelogram of forces / signifying chain Notable examples: Freud's 'propyl, propyls... propionic acid'; Freud's 1901 addition to Irma dream analysis; Ernst's fort-da reel game (Beyond the Pleasure Principle); Eckstein's surgery and Fliess' malpractice; Lacan's Seminar XI on tuché and automaton

Conclusion (p.288-304)

The Conclusion projects the conceptual history of everyday talk forward into the digital age, arguing that the algorithmic era reproduces and intensifies the same three anxieties — of aggregation, averageness, and alterity — that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan each theorized. Kierkegaard's gallery-public anticipates anxieties about Google News and collective algorithms; Heidegger's they-self illuminates concerns about Wikipedia's crowd-sourced 'collective intelligence'; and Lacan's Freudian crowd maps onto debates about Facebook's 'filter bubbles' and echo-chamber effects. McCormick is careful to frame this not as historical influence but as structural homology.

The Conclusion then engages Gabriel Tarde's turn-of-the-century shift from crowd culture to public culture (the reading public as 'purely spiritual collectivity'), Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, and Ulrich Beck's theory of individualization to argue that digital communication does not destroy individuality but extends, networks, and complicates it. The modern dichotomy between self and society becomes inadequate; in its place McCormick proposes a 'non-individualistic grasp of the individual' in which persons are long and complex profiles assembled from networks of associations. Drawing on Latour's neo-Leibnizian monadology, the Conclusion suggests that the verb of the digital age is not 'to be' but 'to have' — identity gives way to association as the primary mode of selfhood.

The final pages identify the self-cultivating potential latent in chatter, idle talk, and empty speech as a resource for thinking about digital life, and warn against both techno-phobia (logging off) and algorithmic submission (behavioral data as big data). The 'calculating machines' of Kierkegaard's gallery-public, Heidegger's they-self, and Lacan's Freudian crowd remain structurally operative in the age of pointcast newsfeeds and proprietary datasets — and the conceptual history traced in this book is offered as a 'usable past' for navigating them.

Key concepts: Aggregation / averageness / alterity, Algorithmic culture and big data, Crowd vs. public (Tarde), Actor-network theory (Latour), Individualization (Beck), Calculating machines Notable examples: Gabriel Tarde's 'The Public and the Crowd'; Bruno Latour's actor-network theory; Ulrich Beck's individualization; Google News, Wikipedia, Facebook (algorithmic anxieties); Stanford Humanities Lab's crowd history project

Main interlocutors

• Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
• Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler
• Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
• Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
• Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (SS 1924)
• Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist (WS 1924-25)
• Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (SS 1923)
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar I (Freud's Papers on Technique)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar II (The Ego in Freud's Theory)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar III (The Psychoses)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts)
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Aristotle, Rhetoric
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• Plato, Sophist
• Aristophanes, Clouds
• Plutarch, On Talkativeness
• Ludvig Holberg, Master Gert Westphaler
• Alain Badiou, Being and Event
• Gabriel Tarde, The Public and the Crowd
• Bruno Latour, actor-network theory
• Ulrich Beck, individualization theory
• Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation

Position in the corpus

The Chattering Mind occupies a distinctive niche in Lacanian and post-Lacanian secondary literature: it is neither a systematic introduction to Lacan nor a focused study of a single concept (like gaze, objet a, or jouissance) but a genealogical work that situates Lacanian empty speech within a much longer history of communication theory reaching back through Heidegger and Kierkegaard to classical antiquity. Readers coming from Lacanian studies will find Part Three (chapters 7–9) the most directly relevant, and they should ideally approach it having read Bruce Fink's introductory and clinical Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy's work on presence, and — most importantly — Lacan's Seminar I, Seminar II, and the 'Function and Field of Speech and Language' in the Écrits. The sustained close reading of the Irma dream in dialogue with Freud's own text makes it useful alongside Patrick Mahony's work on dream narration. For those approaching from phenomenology, the book's reconstruction of Heidegger's early lecture courses on Gerede and Geschwätz (chapters 4–6) is among the most accessible accounts of this under-read material in English, and it usefully complements Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time. Readers primarily interested in Kierkegaard will find Part One an unusually mathematical and rhetorically attentive reading of Two Ages and the Book on Adler.

Within the broader Lacanian corpus, The Chattering Mind is closest kin to works that treat Lacan's debts to continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel) in their full intellectual-historical specificity — texts like Bowie's Lacan or Roudinesco's biography — while going further than any of them in its communication-theoretical orientation. It diverges from film-theoretical and cultural-studies applications of Lacan (Žižek, Copjec) by staying close to the textual and clinical sources and by refusing to treat empty speech as simply the negative term in a dialectic with full speech. The book should be read before (or alongside) studies of Lacan's concept of the Other and the symbolic order as linguistic structure (Fink, The Lacanian Subject; Leader and Groves, Lacan for Beginners) but is probably best positioned as a companion volume after familiarity with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Heidegger's Being and Time sections 34–38 has been established, since McCormick assumes considerable fluency with these source texts while illuminating their less-read margins.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Gerede (idle talk)
• Empty Speech (parole vide)
• Full Speech (parole pleine)
• Repetition
• Unconscious
• Tuché
• Automaton
• Signifier
• Imaginary / Symbolic / Real
• Das Man
• Anxiety
• Subjectivity / Subject
• Identification (ego-decomposition, l'immixtion des sujets)
• Alienation
• Metonymy / Condensation (displacement in dream-work)
• Language as structure of the unconscious
• Ideology (social arithmetic / leveling)
• Phenomenology (hermeneutics of facticity)
• Ego vs. je/moi
• Singularity vs. universality (eiron/alazon, den Enkelte)