ABSTRACT
Lacan here refers to the subject’s access to language as being a second birth after biological birth. If the second birth involves being embedded within language, namely, taking ownership of the signifiers that come from the Other, it still implies something else. This is what Lacan indicates with the formulation: “what attaches each of us to a scrap of discourse that is more alive than one’s very life”. It emphasises that what we are most attached to in existence is already there. This “scrap of discourse”, posed as the equivalent of hieroglyphics in the desert, indicates that Lacan gives it another status than that of speech that is heard. The idea of a scrap of discourse to which one is more attached than to one’s very life suggests the existence of a fragment of discourse that founds the very essence of being that, by definition, would be outside discourse.
