ABSTRACT
Reviewing the terms "speech" concerns the subject's truth insofar as he or she is a subject of the unconscious, subjected to the Other's jouissance, and to the absent, or missing Other of the address. "Language" concerns the field of the unconscious itself as it is defined by four terms constitutive of the address: the subject of the address, the Other to whom and through whom the subject's speech passes, the signifier and its defect, and jouissance, or the excess that is introduced and inscribed into the very being of the subject, disrupting the logic of the biological organism. The third term "savoir", concerns the unconscious knowledge elaborated in the cure under the constraint of the analyst's desire-to-know. The Lacanian clinic of addiction offers the same wager as it does to the clinic of perversion, psychosis, or neurosis for that matter—the analyst's desire-to-know offers a space for speech to the subject of language, subjected as they are to the Other's jouissance.
