ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a secondary distinction between full speech and empty speech. The connecting capacity of speech operates in a shared structural sphere of language, or wisdom, which amounts to the same thing. As a net of connections, this sphere deploys a signifying social structure that exerts its structuring power over the speaking individual subject. But this truth of the subject can only be revealed through full speech. Although the ego can be a desired imaginary object, it obviously cannot be a desiring real subject. Expressed by the subject, the ego's language constitutes the language of Jacques Lacan consciousness. In empty speech, there is only this language, which speaks about a retrospectively imagined ego. In a Lacanian perspective, language is the only true content of discourse. Speech may be regarded as a concrete implementation of language laws, conventions of tongue, and rules of discourse.
