Full and Empty Speech (5 of 5) : Five aspects of full speech

Taking up again the example of Nixon’s unexpected admissions in his interviews with David Frost, we offer five general aspects of full speech. Full speech involves, for a start, the prospect of the subject speaking beyond themselves, saying more than they intended, being surprised by their own words. It can, secondly, be differentiated from the more comforting terrain of ego-to-ego (empty) speech inasmuch as it is more a case of speech before the Other, with the anxiety and prospective destabilization that just such a speech situation entails. It involves, thirdly, a performative dimension, the declarative aspect of speech precisely as speech-act. It is as such speech which introduces a change into the symbolic world (like all the famous examples, ’I pronounce you man and wife...’, etc.) and is not merely a case of describing the world. Full speech also, fourthly, changes the subject’s relation to truth and represents as such a prospective ’coming undone’ of an ego-image. It involves a