ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the mechanism whereby a supposedly social being appears and fleshes out in discourse. Once cleared from the unspeakable real being of the speaking subject, the locus of speech is invaded by 'speech-beings' whose symbolic 'beings' come from 'speech'. In the corporeal speech-being, 'the being and speech are tied and reciprocally corrupted'. By 'affecting the body of the being that makes itself a being of speech', the 'wisdom' of language creates the literal support of the signifier, the speech-being, which functions as a speaking-spoken being in which the speaking real act and the spoken symbolic fact cannot be easily differentiated. In Jacques Lacan the symbolic nonbeing of the real being is described with an ambiguous expression, manque-a-etre, that may simultaneously mean 'lacking-of-being' and 'lacking-to-be'. This lacking of the real being enables it to be the 'complementary' symbolic being, a 'being of lacking', of 'lacking-of-being'.
