ABSTRACT
The act of language called ‘illocutory’ possesses a force which, inherent in this act, is to be considered independently of the effects of force. Thus, the act of language is no longer reducible to its content, its meaning. ‘Man, by speaking, appropriates the formal apparatus of language and places the other opposite’. Consequently – indeed a reversal for our thought – language constitutes an act defined not only by its ‘content’, its ‘signification’, but also by its ‘force’, its ‘value’. If the subject who depends on the myth or the symbolic network of exchanges could appear passive, this is not the case with the subject who utters, anchored in the symbolic order of language. The subject, who constitutes himself in the symbolic field of language, conveys a vision of the world or an enunciation which transcends him, yet to whose constitution he contributes.
