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Embodiment, Relation, Community
A Continental Philosophy of Communication
GARNET C. BUTCHART
Embod ime nt, Rel at i on , Commun i t y
E M B O D I M E N T,
R E L AT I O N,
COMMUNIT Y
A Continental Philosophy of Communication
Ga rn e t C. Butcha rt
The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

Portions of the text appeared in earlier forms. distinguish communication theory from the
Chapter 1 is a revised version of “The philosophy of communication”—Provided
Uncertainty of Communication as Revealed by by publisher.
Psychoanalysis,” by Garnet C. Butchart, The Identifiers: LCCN 2018043356 | ISBN
Review of Communication 13, no. 1 (2013), 9780271083254 (cloth : alk. paper)
copyright © National Communication Subjects: LCSH: Communication—Philosophy.
Association, reprinted by permission of Classification: LCC P90 .B88 2019 | DDC
Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com 302.201—dc23
on behalf of The National Communication LC record available
Association. Chapter 5 is a revised version of at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043356
“Touch, Communication, Community: Jean-
Luc Nancy’s Semiotic Phenomenology,” Copyright © 2019 Garnet C. Butchart
Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology All rights reserved
and Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2015): 221–4 4. Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication State University Press,
Data University Park, PA 16802-1003
Names: Butchart, Garnet, author. The Pennsylvania State University Press

Title: Embodiment, relation, community : a is a member of the Association of
continental philosophy of communication / University Presses.
Garnet C. Butchart.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State
The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Press to use acid-free paper.
[2019] | Includes bibliographical references Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the
and index. minimum requirements of American National
Summary: “Integrates the perspectives of Standard for Information Sciences—
Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean- Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Luc Nancy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to Material, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments | vii
Introduction | 1
1 The Wager of Communication (as Revealed by
Psychoanalysis) | 23
2 The Ban of Language and Law of Communication | 42
3 Of Communication and-as Immunization | 66
4 Body as Index | 94
5 What Remains to Be Thought:
Community, or Being-With | 116
Epilogue | 137
Notes | 143
Bibliography | 179
Index | 191
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Support for the research presented in this book came from many sources, for
which I am grateful. Colleagues in the Department of Communication and
Rhetorical Studies and the College of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University
provided steady encouragement, particularly Ron Arnett and Janie Fritz, who
believed in this project. A Paluse Faculty Research Grant awarded by the
Center for the Catholic Faith and Culture at Duquesne University, a Presi-
dential Scholarship Award from Duquesne University, and multiple Wimmer
Family Foundation Faculty Research Grants from the College of Liberal Arts
at Duquesne University provided generous financial support. Intellectually,
Isaac Catt welcomed me into a community of scholars (Richard Lanigan,
Frank Macke, Deborah Eicher-Catt, Andrew Smith) whose orientation to
communication study shaped the idea development of this book. The lan-
guage of its expression was cultivated through years of conversation with
Briankle Chang. The monograph could not have been completed without the
labor of teaching assistants, particularly Margaret Mullan, as well as Blake
Plavchak, William Aungst, Fr. Maximilian Ofori, and Christopher Bondi.
Dena Taub, Sophia Nagel, and Rachel Morrell provided excellent research
assistance. Thanks, finally, to Julie Love.
Introduction
Consider the commonplace crime of uttering a forged instrument. According

to the U.S. common law code, such an act constitutes a crime if it can be
shown to have met three basic criteria: “[1] An instrument was forged; [2] the
person uttering the instrument knew it to be forged; and [3] it was uttered
with the intent to defraud.”1 The so-called instrument of this crime could be
any number of false documents, such as a bank note, driver’s permit, passport,
diploma, contract, or similar. However, a critical distinction is drawn in the
legal code between the act of forgery (the technical, or artistic act of falsifying
a document) and the act of uttering it, of passing it off with the intent to
defraud. Although forgery and uttering appear related, they are enshrined in
law as separate and distinct acts for the reason that the same person need not
commit them both. Forging a state-issued identification card, for example,
is neither the same act nor the same crime as a minor uttering the instru-
ment in an attempt to buy booze.
What is significant about the crime of uttering is the equivalence drawn
in the American legal code between it and the act of publishing.2 Although
a document may have been forged, uttering it constitutes a formally distinct
crime for the reason that this act makes actual a breach of law that had, prior
to the instance of utterance, stood in suspension, a virtual infraction to come.
The gulf between the act of falsifying a document and the fraudulent use
of it explains the retention in modern American law of the archaic sense of
uttering as publishing: a forged document is transformed into an instrument
of crime the moment at which it is presented, instituted by an act of giving
or sharing—an act of communication, commonly understood. Prior to that
moment, a falsified document will have neither value within an economy of
exchange nor any criminal significance to anyone participating within it. For
there to be a crime, the silence of the document has to have been broken, such
2 | Embodiment, Relation, Community
as by offering a false diploma as proof of qualification, cashing a check with

a forged signature, submitting a fraudulent will and testament for probate,
handing over a forged prescription to obtain medications, and so on.
On its face, uttering or intentionally communicating a false instrument
appears to be a crime because it violates a code designed to protect the promis-
sory value of a document by underwriting the authority of office carried by
its seal or the identity of its signatory.3 Because the legal code is in force to
secure conditions for exchange, and for commerce, breaking its code appears
to put the possibility of commonality and, above all else, community, at risk.4
However, although the legal system enshrines the act of uttering as an
offense—codifies it and thereby renders it significant within a broader system
of social and economic value—it is in fact the logic of risk that serves as the
reference point of its criminality. The decisive, criminal feature of the act of
uttering a false instrument is the dialogue that leads to its utterance in
the first place. With bogus document in hand, what must be assessed
are the consequences, both the risks as well as the benefits, of passing it
off—consequences of communication. On the one hand, there is gain to be
gotten, such as the increase in freedom and pleasure that accompanies the
riches of a forged check. On the other, there is the risk of loss, such as the loss
of rights and freedom that may accompany an arrest and conviction. To be
sure, although two or more agents may debate the pros and cons of uttering
a forged document, the decision to do so rests only with a single agent, the
one who actually brings him-or herself to action. The decision of whether to
utter—that is, to communicate—can be made only after careful reflection,
a period within which the bearer of the forged document will engage him-or
herself in the only way possible: namely, in language or, more precisely,
dialogue with what psychoanalysis calls discourse of the Other. To arrive at
a point of action, the utterer must measure his or her intentions against the
prevailing legal and moral conventions of the community, accept or reject
the risk of a loss, and reach a verdict.
Like many acts of communication, the crime of uttering a false instru-
ment can be understood as an act of recitation, a present act in reference to
a previous moment. As we know from Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of
communication, the person makes reference to a prior self in anticipation
of a moment ahead of present time, when he or she will communicate.5 The
process of reciting, or calling back with a view to moving forward—thinking
before acting—adds to what we know about communication as an experience
of coming after oneself: the human Dasein is, by definition, there, not here,
Introduction | 3
always ahead of itself, leaving the “self ” to come after. With regard to the
example of criminal communication, although the process of deciding
whether to utter or not may be viewed as ethical, what in fact stirs the wrath
of law is the dialogue, or recital, that precipitates action in one way or another.6
The decision to utter presupposes a prior, conflicted activity of risk assessment
in which the agent imagines him-or herself in at least two future scenarios:
utter the document and benefit from fraud, or withhold it and avoid breaking
the law. It is precisely in decisio (L. decidere, to separate, cutting off) that an
agent of the crime attempts to resolve an internal conflict: one of his or her
future selves must be amputated—repressed, blocked, or in some way
silenced—so that the agent may move forward, communicate the instrument
or not.
The agent in question is “an agent of the crime” because even if the
uttering does not actually occur, the possibility of it must have been recited
nevertheless (so-called premeditation). In that sense, because the person is in
possession of a forged document, he or she seems already to be caught—caught,
that is, between awareness that the document is forged and uncertainty about
what to do with it. For whatever action the agent chooses to take, what is
communicated by the hesitation prior to the action is the possibility of
communication—the silent signal of a potential crime to come. To be sure,
it is not a crime to possess a forged document.7 But because the agent of the
crime of uttering must be in communication (dialogue) within him-or herself
in order for it to be committed, finding proof of the intent to defraud is not
difficult: the utterer who utters stood as witness to his or her own potential
crime before the event had come to pass. Perhaps this is why modern law has
so few leniencies for an accused who, in his or her defense, pleads ignorance
of the significance of his or her actions. In the act of communicating a forged
instrument, communication has already occurred, and there can be no such
thing as failure to communicate for the reason that communication, in this
case, cannot not have taken place.
These observations, on a source of modern thinking about a permanent
and enduring question of communication—namely, the impossibility of
human noncommunication—serve as a premise for the research presented in
this volume and indicate the sense in which it inquires into human com-
munication as an experience that is embodied because loaded with the bond
of community. As the research will demonstrate, that bond, which is a rela-
tion, binds one to another in and through, and is experienced as such by way
of, communication. Before any meaningful rehearsal can be offered of how
this is so, and why it matters, it will help to begin with an intellectual back-
ground of what is to follow.
To start, what is communication? The Oxford English Dictionary offers its

answer by grouping nine definitions, or senses, of communication into three
categories: (1) senses relating to affinity or association, (2) senses relating to
imparting or transmitting something, and (3) senses relating to access. The
primary sense of communication reads as follows: “Interpersonal contact,
social interaction, association, intercourse,” which, the OED states, is “hard
to distinguish from” the sense in category two, the “transmission or exchange
of information, knowledge, or ideas, by means of speech, writing, mechani-
cal or electronic media, etc.”8 In his classic tracing of the meaning of com-
munication, Raymond Williams confirms both senses from the fifteenth-century
Latin communicationem, a noun of action derived from the past participle
communicare, the root of which is communis (L. common). Hence the mod-
ern meaning of communicate as to impart, to make common. By the late
fifteenth century, according to Williams, the action of communication
(bringing forth, imparting, and sharing) had become the object “thus made
common” by such action: a communication, such as a letter, brief, order,
forged instrument, and so on.9 This has remained the main usage of the term,
with important additions in the late seventeenth century to the means of
communication (such as roads, rail, and other lines or channels) as well as
the twentieth-century extension to the media of sharing information and
maintaining contact.
Since the beginning of formal academic inquiry into human speech and
media of mass communication in the United States more than one hundred
years ago, several theories, models, and histories have been developed by
scholars across the social sciences and humanities in attempts to better
understand the structure, function, processes, practices, content, goals, and
outcomes of communication.10 This book, however, brings a contemporary
continental philosophical perspective to bear on thinking about the practices,
goals, outcomes, and experiences of this human phenomenon. It dispenses
with rehearsing modern theories of communication and instead enters
directly into a program of thinking about how we can think about the prac-
tices, goals, outcomes, possibility, and experience of human communication
from the bottom—its philosophical foundations. Akin to the founding ques-
tion of continental philosophy pinpointed by Leonard Lawlor, namely, “the
question of thinking: what is called or what calls for thinking,”11 what founds
Introduction | 5
contemporary continental philosophy of communication is a, or the, question

of what calls for its thinking—that is, the raising of communication to a level,
or drawing it into the “orbit,”12 of philosophical investigation.
What calls for thinking about human communication, summarily put,
is posed by the concrete, and at times mundane, experience of being
human—which means, at the very least, to be embodied, to be in commu-
nity, and for that reason, to be communicative. What, for example, is the
relationship between language and human communication? How are human
persons connected to one another and other beings in and by way of com-
munication? What are the embodied implications—the living experience—of
a community symbolic matrix? What is the relationship between conscious
awareness/perception and the grammar, logic, and/or rhetoric of human
expression? In a world defined by differences of perspective, human history,
belief, values, and experiences, how is mutual understanding, to say nothing
of moments of agreement, accomplished? What role does human communi-
cating play in the possibility or impossibility of striving for, achieving, main-
taining, and/or destroying such moments? Questions such as these, which
circumscribe the root subject of continental philosophical thought (namely,
what it means to be human) help raise communication—a condition of being
human and a fundamental feature of its meaning—to a plane of visibility
typically unseen from the perspective of one’s own so-called natural (i.e.,
prereflective and disinterested) attitude toward being in the world.
The guiding themes addressed in the course of the present
research—communication, embodiment, and community—are admittedly
massive. However, the goal of the work is not to report on the points of
strength and weakness of various currents of inquiry into those themes in the
humanities and social sciences, which would be a monumental task. Instead,
it is to contribute to critical and philosophical thinking about human embodi-
ment, communication, and community by way of a contemporary continental
philosophical orientation to these themes and their manifold points of inter-
section. The philosophical figures that are central to the approach taken in
this book are Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and
Jacques Lacan. Each of these scholars can be read as, but certainly not reduced
to, philosophers of relation, and for that reason fit comfortably together in a
single volume. On their own, each offers perspective on relation as one of the
most important founding conceptual points of entry into thinking about
human embodied being, identity and difference, community, and the
materiality of human expressive media. Together, the styles of philosophical
thinking represented by Agamben, Esposito, Nancy, Lacan, and contempo-

rary Lacanian psychoanalysis can be brought to bear on communication
thinking to open it in new ways. However, the objective of this book is not
to rehearse and report on the ideas of each thinker. Instead, the objective
is to write, which is to think, along with the orientation of thinking invited
by and exemplified in their work. Summarily put, the argument of this book
is that doing so helps demonstrate what human communication inquiry can
look like, and accomplish, in a contemporary continental philosophical key.
To develop this argument in a manageable trajectory, the present research
addresses the following topical areas, which are also, admittedly, expansive:
subjectivity, speech, and language; human communication and the impos-
sibility of noncommunication; law, belonging, and exception; communica-
tion and-as immunization; bodily presence and dis-integration; and human
community as being-with. Although there are several points at which the
writing and thinking of Agamben, Esposito, Nancy, Lacan, and contempo-
rary Lacanian psychoanalysis intersect, and many more points of connection
that could be drawn, what is implicit in each philosopher’s approach to the
kind of questions signaled by the topical areas just listed is a critique of
the humanist, metaphysical, and positivist orientation of modern philosophy.
In particular, each scholar is concerned in some respect with the problem of
the subject, an entity that is thought from the perspective of modern philoso-
phy as preformed, pregiven, and largely autonomous in its actions. It is the
critical questioning of that humanist subject that fundamentally qualifies
the philosophical orientation of Agamben, Esposito, Nancy, and Lacan as
“continental.”13
Lacan, for instance, and all the psychoanalytic theory and research that
followed his writings through the twentieth century, sets a course for radically
undermining modern philosophy’s image of a unified self by positing instead
an incomplete and lacking subject, which is by definition constituted as such
in its relation to—that is, its foundation in—language. For Nancy, whose
early work is informed by Lacan, the question of what “comes after” the
subject has occupied his entire career. In response, Nancy offers a postphe-
nomenological and deconstructive focus on being, emphasizing in much of
his thinking that human being is always a being-in-relation, not prior to or
after language, for instance, but “right at” language, as he would say, and
therefore cannot be thought of as preformed, nonindependent, and fully
closed upon itself.14 Next, Agamben has drawn on Nancy’s concept of “aban-
doned being” in his writings on sovereign power—writings that bring to
Introduction | 7
maturity his career interest in the philosophical insights into the speaking
subject offered by structural linguistics.15 For Agamben, human being is a
speaking being that does not come prior to language but is already in it,
before it, as one stands before the law in being called into it. For Esposito, a
contemporary of both Agamben and Nancy, the themes of subjectivity, law,
and language are addressed by way of a focus on biopolitics.16 For Esposito,
one of the critical strategies for identifying the limits of modern metaphysical
thinking is to locate points of coincidence of seemingly opposed terms—such
as community and immunity, life and death, and interiority and exteriority—
so as to expose the points of closure around which discourses of identity and
difference, self and other, domestic and foreigner, “us” and “them” have
coalesced in the modern order, with sometimes catastrophic consequences.
If continental philosophy is, cursorily put, a mid-t wentieth-century intel-
lectual movement that emerged in challenge to the humanist subject of
modern philosophy, emphasizing the importance of language as the basis
of the subject’s production and experience, then what is contemporary con-
tinental philosophy? One effective way to discern that category of scholarship,
albeit perhaps too easily, is in terms of the career period of the philosophers
working within it. Scholars such as Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, Jacques
Rancière, Catherine Malabou, and others engage and extend the intellectual
programs and commitments of the continental philosophers who preceded
them, in particular, Martin Heidegger, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. Among contemporary, that is, living continental philosophers
working within the French, German, and Italian traditions (which is itself
another category distinction—namely, geographical), the most prominent
figures at the time of the present writing are Nancy, Agamben, and Esposito.
Another way to discern the category of contemporary continental phi-
losophy is thematically, which in this case includes, but is not limited to, the
critical-philosophical focus that most of these thinkers bring to the political,
the ethical, the ontotheological, and most importantly, the material. As
indicated in the brief sketch in the previous paragraph, what one may notice
in the work of all the philosophers named there is a tension between what
can loosely be called thought of the linguistic and thought of the material. I
do not want to go so far as to say that this feature defines the “contemporary”
of contemporary continental philosophy. However, the tension, or perhaps
better to say the relation, between thought of the material and of the linguistic
in the diverse attempts to work within it is undeniably a major characterizing
feature of contemporary continental philosophy and what I am here calling

a contemporary continental philosophical perspective.17
One way to view this tension is as a working-with or working-within
the relation between two distinct intellectual traditions: on the one hand, the
linguistic paradigm of poststructuralism, the defining communication fea-
ture of which is semiotics and, on the other hand, phenomenology, particularly
its mid-t wentieth-century existentialist movement. Usually these two tradi-
tions are classified as being more at odds with one another than complemen-
tary insofar as structural linguistics and semiotics name the study of the sign
logic of a culture according to which the latter is organized, and phenomenol-
ogy, broadly speaking, is a movement in thinking about the givenness of
being, especially human being, in its meaningful relation to the world.18 As
Ian James persuasively argues, many of the thinkers that he groups into the
category of “new French philosophy,” which includes Nancy, exhibit not only
an attempted “break,” beginning in the 1970s, from the linguistic paradigm
of structuralism and semiotics but also a decided response to what he calls
“the demand that thought re-engage with the material world.”19 The intel-
lectual “break” encountered in the work of the contemporary continental
philosophers and philosophical perspectives with which the present research
engages, however, should be read not as a clean cut but rather as thinking
that exhibits combined remnants of both these traditions.
For instance, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, research, and practice
continue to work with Lacan’s founding merger of the Saussurean linguistic
model with Hegelian and Heideggerian preoccupations with conscious-
ness and the experience of such mundane human conditions as anxiety,
dread, and awareness of death.20 Next, throughout Agamben’s recent writings
on law, community, and immunity, one finds an explicit and highly innova-
tive working with the relation between human language, subjectivity, and
human embodied experience, an intellectual effort informed most notably
by the linguistics of Émile Benveniste and the communication theory of
Roman Jakobson. Next, although Esposito’s writing does not draw explicitly
from structuralist semiotics or phenomenology, it does, nevertheless, exem-
plify a contemporary program of deconstructive criticism, and one finds in
it a heavy emphasis on language, particularly the importance of etymology
to explain the impact on life of the biopolitical paradigm. Finally, although
Nancy is probably the philosopher in this category who is most committed
to breaking from his preceding generation’s thinking, he has never neglected
the importance of accounting for the problem and deficiencies of language,
Introduction | 9
especially evident, as I will discuss, in his attempt to think about the lived
experience of being-with.21
To be sure, there are several philosophers who could have been drawn on
in the pages to follow, but are not, whose work helps define and exemplifies
continental philosophy in its contemporary mode. As already mentioned,
these philosophers include Marion, Badiou, Rancière, and Malabou, as well
as François Laruelle, Bruno Latour, Slavoj Žižek, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio
Ferraris, Franco Berardi, Joseph Vogl, Peter Sloterdijk, and others. However,
it is the thought of relation, and its attendant questions of human rela-
tionality, that links the thinkers upon which this book focuses and that
underscores the potential of their combined perspectives to expand our
understanding of human communication. Nancy, Esposito, Agamben, and
Lacanian psychoanalysis fit together, and can be engaged with, because of
the attention they pay to the materially binding intersection of language,
subjectivity, and communication—that is, the phenomena and human expe-
riences of embodied communication communities. Motifs characterizing
their efforts in this respect include law, abandonment, threat and protection,
exposure and contact, immunity and commonality, exception, exscription,
being-with, nonbelonging, bodily dis-integration, and so on.
A rehearsal may now be offered of the direction this book takes in its
engagement with the questions, concepts, insights, and style of inquiry rep-
resented by Agamben, Esposito, Nancy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis regard-
ing what those questions, insights, and inquiry styles offer to a contemporary
continental philosophy of human communication.
If Agamben, Nancy, and Esposito make efforts to reengage thought of the

material world, then it is Lacan, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and
practice, that is central to the linguistic paradigm within which these phi-
losophers work in that regard. This book begins with Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis not in an effort to explain the formative role of this tradition in the
discursive turn in twentieth-century thought but rather to identify its general
relevance for philosophical understanding of human communication. Briefly
summarized, psychoanalysis approaches communication in terms of its
faults and failures more so than its smooth functioning. As we know, com-
munication is often experienced as miscommunication, misunderstanding,
and indeterminacy in the slippage of meaning. Its goal may be misinforma-
tion and deception rather than truth-telling, and even intrusion rather than
assistance. The outcome can range from confusion to disagreement to
“outright interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Psychoanalysis reminds us

of these basic characteristics by way of accounting for the relation of the
human subject to language. According to the Lacanian tradition, language
both enables and restricts human expression and perception, both figuring
and disfiguring the speaking subject in its appropriation. It is a tradition that
undermines the essentialism of modern communication theory’s image of a
rational, complete, and autonomous speaker-subject by showing how, to the
contrary, human communicative agency is incomplete, formed in language
rather than preformed prior to instances of intentional communication.
From the psychoanalytic point of view, communication is defined
as the ability of a speaker-subject to “make known” his or her thoughts.
Although this perspective takes recourse to positivist sender-receiver models,
and theories, of information transfer, Lacanian psychoanalysis can be read
to demonstrate that the content of human communication (thought itself) is
not preformed but instead shaped in the process of communicating. It shows
how words accumulate an emotional history in a subject’s appropriation of
language and how the significance of that history to the well-being of a
subject—a lived and thereby material condition—can be accessed and per-
haps even improved upon by way of communicating, which the psycho-
analytic interview demonstrates is not always intentional. Slips of the tongue,
words forgotten or spoken out of context, gestures, and tone of voice, for
example, may betray the conscious intent of a speaker-subject as he or she
beats around the bush of something guarded or as yet unsayable in conscious,
intentional speech. What the subject says in the analytic conversation is
nevertheless meaningful in terms of what the subject wants to say but cannot
as yet find words: not all can be said. In its failures to fully represent the
subject, language strings it along with its promise, but not guarantee, of better
and perhaps even more “effective” communication.
In contrast to mechanical transfer models of human communication,
which presuppose by not questioning an already existing, preformed sender-
subject and measure communication effectiveness largely in terms of the
overall clarity of transmission and success or failure of reception, the begin-
ning chapter of this book puts that model and the certainty of human com-
munication into question by summarizing how human self-identity is
undermined by self-d ifference in language and how conscious communi-
cation is destabilized by unconscious discourse. The objective is to draw
attention to human communication not merely as self-certainty in message
transfer, which can be taken as the basic goal of modern communication
Introduction | 11
theory, whether as a liberal arts skill or as an academic challenge for designing

models to improve communication.22 Rather, the objective of the chapter is
to offer perspective on human communication as uncertainty and risk, as
unintentional (in part), and as potentially destabilizing, a perspective that
helps fortify the possibility and human experience of communication as
properly philosophical themes for investigation.
As indicated by the above observations on the crime of uttering a false
instrument, there persists in modern thinking about human communication
the presupposition of the impossibility of noncommunication: that “one can-
not not communicate.” Although scholars of human communication will
recognize this as one, if not the, classic axiom posited by Paul Watzlawick,
Janet Beavin, and Donald Jackson in the mid-t wentieth century,23 it is the
legacy impact of psychoanalysis on modern conceptions of the self (from
which that Palo Alto group of psychotherapists drew) that helps explain the
endurance of this presupposition in human communication thought. Accord-
ing to Lacanian psychoanalysis, language operates with a law-like function,
which means that it brings structure to sense and meaning to experience in
a way that organizes and regulates the order of a culture, its nomos. The second
chapter of this book reenters the space of interpretation opened by the presup-
position of the impossibility of noncommunication and proposes to rethink
it in terms of the ban of language. I argue that this ban, the conception of
which is developed in Nancy’s early work, is semiotic, which means it is
embodied: it is experienced as an injunction against noncommunication. In
an effort to develop and support this argument, I turn to Agamben’s writing
on the relation between sovereign power and bare life.
Crucial to that perspective is the parallel Agamben draws between the
logic of sovereign power and what he describes as the sovereignty of language.
Language is sovereign, Agamben argues, for the reason that it operates
according to a paradoxical logic of exclusive-inclusion. As I explain in the
chapter, language as sovereign stands in relation to instances of its taking
place in human speech by way of its withdrawal—that is, in a relation of
exception to the rules according to which it makes human communication
possible. The sovereign power of language is tied existentially to its speakers
(I, you, him, her, them) by way of the very act of uttering these pronouns,
speech acts that bind the speaker to the conventions of his or her communica-
tion community. It does so, according to the perspective Agamben offers,
because every speech act must be understood not merely as an active human
expression but also as an instance of the taking place of language, its sovereign
power. In its standing back, or exception, to the rules of communication it

establishes (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), language as sovereign suspends its
normal signifying function and refers to itself—it refers, that is, to the poten-
tial for communication. In human speech, language the sovereign can be
heard. Even in the void of communication (such as in silence, misunderstand-
ing, noise, or what some might call babble) there is the potential for
communication—and not only that, but also noncommunication is
ruled out.
I explain how this is so by drawing on Agamben’s discussion of “aban-
doned being,” which for my purposes means that human being cannot not
communicate because it is abandoned to and by language, remains at its
mercy, and is left to its own expressive capacities, “excluded and also ‘open
to all, free.’”24 Benveniste, whose classic essay “Subjectivity in Language” was
written in clarifying response to Lacan, proves this important point: there is
no human being that is not already a speaking being. Human being is aban-
doned to language, subject to it as the authority ordering a culture: as Ben-
veniste says, subjectivity is manifest in language. Furthermore, one cannot
not communicate because human being does not merely exist; it has to: it is
thrown into being and it does not know why (Heidegger). Communication,
I argue, is the mode and means through which human being makes sense of
its experience of having-to-be, its ontological abandonment to language as
sovereign and its injunction against noncommunication. What is left
for thought to think, as I address in the final chapter, is this being, a
being-with.
To be sure, although there is widespread agreement in modern human
communication scholarship that the presupposition of the impossibility of
noncommunication has the potential to close rather than open new perspec-
tive (i.e., human action, reduced to information, is not simply equivalent to
communication), many traditions of inquiry in both the humanities and
the social sciences nevertheless begin from the point of agreement that human
social action is necessarily communicative.25 My want to return to the space
of interpretation opened by the presupposition of the impossibility of non-
communication is not motivated by a desire to rehearse worn out debates
about it. To the contrary, an institutionally legitimized discourse on human
communication presumes the existence of a background or history of con-
cepts, claims, and theories that may have won neither complete agreement
nor perfection in application. One cannot not communicate is an exemplar of
Introduction | 13
the unfinished history of human communication study. The fact that this
presupposition has not yet been determined to be either completely true or
false by modern theories of communication indicates its continued relevance
to the development of ongoing philosophical inquiry.26
That said, the goal of this book is, in part, to add contemporary philo-
sophical perspective to the communication problematic indicated by that
presupposition and explore intellectual resources that may inspire thinking
that avoids the deadlock associated with its persistence in discipline-specific
communication scholarship. Central to accomplishing that goal is the figure
of exclusive-inclusion, a device that does the philosophical work for both
Agamben and Esposito of challenging the rigidity of dichotomous thinking
exemplified by conceptual pairings such as identity/difference, self/other,
domestic/foreign, interiority/exteriority, and life/death—thinking that struc-
tures perception, and thereby judgment, of the value of each term. Both
Agamben and Esposito’s objective of blurring such conceptual distinctions is
not to resolve the contradictions inherent to such pairings (whether theoreti-
cal, historical, and/or lived) but rather to demonstrate how a nondichotomous
style of thinking, such as we see with deconstruction, can help expose their
fault lines and, in so doing, broaden perspective on individuality and
community, the commonality of human embodied being, and as I
demonstrate philosophically, communication and the impossibility of
noncommunication.
To be human is to exist communicatively, a constant task that demands
awareness of human coexistence as we are “suspended in language” together.27
As scholars of communication freely acknowledge, as would anyone who has
had meaningful conversation, the sense we make of our perceptions of others’
expressions always has the potential to differ from, and at times conflict with,
their intentions. At the same time, to share a world with one another is to
take up and engage its discourses, whether directly, by way of speaking them,
or indirectly, such as in attempts to disavow them. Because we inhabit the
sign systems we use to make sense of ourselves, others, and the world, having
to be in communication means being exposed. How will my words and
actions be perceived? Do I make sense? Will I be recognized? Abandonment
to language requires critical employment of its resources: one cannot not
communicate; therefore, one must communicate. The third chapter of this
book approaches the human ontological condition of having-to-be in terms
of its threat and protection from exposure to communication. It turns to
the work of Esposito, whose style of thinking offers a pivot point of the philo-
sophical perspective advanced in the book, so allow me here to offer a slightly
more substantive preview.
Esposito deepens our understanding of human communication as it
presents a threat to as well as protection from itself. On the one hand, com-
munication may be understood as a threat to the individual and the community
if we define it not only as affinity—that is, the breaking of individual
boundaries in the exposure to community—but also as transfer of new, dif-
fering, competing, and/or misleading ideas or even offhanded comments and
unwanted remarks. More complexly still, communication may be understood
as a threat if we define it as dialogue, where engaged perspectives can some-
times result in disagreement and even deadlock rather than agreement and
the accomplishment of common goals. Basic examples here include the threat
of persuasion by contagious ideas, such as assumptions about what it means
to be a part of or disqualified from community; the threat of conflict, such
as in confrontations with expressions of different, institutionally more power-
ful, and/or antagonizing points of view; the threat to self-certainty in one’s
conscious anticipation of being misunderstood, dismissed, or perhaps simply
ignored; the threat of alienation, for instance, for not saying the right thing
or not saying enough; and even the threat of censorship for saying too much
or for disagreeing outright. On the other hand, communication may be
understood as protection for the individual and the community, as a mode
and means through which individuality is opened in, and as the invitation
to dialogue, affinity, and goal accomplishment, all of which can potentially
close in instances when what is transmitted is not received or understood, is
ignored, dismissed, or lost over time; when misunderstanding and conflict
can occur because the same thing can be communicated in many different
ways; or when dialogue is foreclosed and harmonious coexistence is compro-
mised by prolonged disagreement. In each case, as well as others, the semiotic
resources that enable and thereby threaten communication can also be
employed to protect it, strengthening community by enriching individual
members’ interactions within it.28
The critical concept employed in support of this argument is immunity.
For Esposito, immunity is the main conceptual point at which the lexicons
of two modern, related discourses overlap: Western biomedical discourse
about the human organism (life) and juridical-political discourse about
human organizing (community). First, in the biomedical context, immunity
refers to the system function that protects an organism from exposure to
Introduction | 15
foreign/external elements that threaten its internal operational integrity.

Immunization is the common practice of deliberately introducing a nonlethal
amount of a threatening element, such as a virus, into an organism in order
to stimulate the production of antibodies that protect against it.29 Second, in
the juridical-political discursive context, immunity is typically contrasted
with community, where the former refers to being free from the obligation
that binds individuals within the latter.30 Together, these overlapping dis-
courses and their material, legal-scientific effects constitute what Esposito
calls a “biopolitical paradigm,” a regime of modern thought and assessment
of life, how it is lived, and what to do about the threat and protection of its
individual and collective borders.
The chief concern among continental philosophers of biopolitics, par-
ticularly Agamben and Esposito—but also Nancy, as we will see—is the
intersection of law with biology and the force of their combined political
power regarding life.31 The objective of these philosophers, in short, is to
unconceal the extent to which discourses of immunity are entrenched in how
we talk about and thereby perceive and evaluate life, and assess the need for
individual as well as collective security. Practically, biopolitical philosophy
challenges the logic informing the extreme, biopolitical practice of executing
some members of a community who are no longer tolerated by other members
of the community, a practice based on the belief of the latter that their iden-
tity and survival is compromised by the sheer existence of the former, a
decision about the value of life made, and justified, on the basis of ideological
assumptions about human biology—what it means to be human/nonhuman,
male/female, outside/inside, and so on.
Crucially, the object of concern for Western biomedical and juridical-
political discourses that grounds the biopolitical paradigm historically is the
identity and protection of a body. The body is critical to the field, function,
and political-philosophical significance of discourses of immunity because,
Esposito tells us, in order for life (which is the essence of community and
individuality) to be assessed and evaluated, it requires some kind of “organic
representation binding it to reality.”32 Body is precisely this organic structure
binding “life” (an abstraction) to reality—a material reality. It is the absolute
terrain of biopolitics, whether it concerns the identity of an individual human
person, with his or her phenomenological/lived-biological and semiotic/lived-
communicative openings, or the bounded identity of a group, community,
or state, the perceived survival and/or destruction of which—its health—is
implicated in, or some might go so far as to say “threatened” by, the flow and
meanings made of persons, materials, and ideas in a globalized world. For

both, body is “the frontline, both symbolic and material, in life’s battle
against death.”33
Without rehearsing the intricacies of his study of the politics of immu-
nity, for my purposes, Esposito’s perspective helps explain how global bio-
politics today may be characterized by an increasingly unquestioned, and
wholly modernist, presupposition about the importance of better defining
and tightening borders—not only individual borders that secure one’s sense
of bodily integrity and, hence, identity but also, and especially, collective
borders or so-called homelands that distinguish regional, ethnic, and racial
identities. These borders, in a world of thinking that has swung increasingly
to the conservative right, are imagined to be under greater threat from what
is “outside” of and “foreign” to them and, according to that logic, therefore
in need of increased measures to protect both public life and private existence.
As Esposito puts it, in light of the taken-for-granted discourse of immunity
that informs unreflective thinking about “who we are,” there is widespread
support today not only “for violent defense in the face of anything judged to
be foreign” but also for efforts to dominate and turn its threat back on itself.34
Against the destructive impulses of the biopolitical paradigm, which in
history’s recent horrors have gone as far as animalizing the human person so
as to justify ruling on which life is worth living and which isn’t, Esposito
offers an antiessentialist and antifoundational philosophical critique of
immunitary logic. His goal in that precise sense—namely, as critique—is to
examine the logic of immunity, expose and turn it against itself, and then
draw out the various affirmative and productive qualities of the logic.35 The
outcome of Esposito’s critical-philosophical exegesis, and its direct relevance
to contemporary continental philosophy of communication, I argue, is an
innovative understanding of immunity as not merely a logic for the protective
closure of borders in an effort to shore up the individual and community but
one according to which their openness may be explained, returned to, and
with foresight, maintained. As I explain, it is because of a lack inherent to
the self (chapters 1 and 2) and the community (chapter 3)—an interdependence
of dis-integrated, co-appearing identities (chapters 4 and 5)—that both com-
munity and individual wholeness can be imagined and desired in the first
place, albeit without the possibility of ever achieving any pure, undifferenti-
ated state of unity.36
To draw out the significance of Esposito’s critique of immunity for new
perspective on human communication, the third chapter focuses carefully
Introduction | 17
on his analysis of munus, the etymological and conceptual origin of the ideas
of immunity, community, and communication, adding insight into the order
and relation—that is, the coincidence rather than contradiction—of all three.
I characterize communication as immunization, which may be understood
to include the processes of learning (taking up, absorbing, and embodying)
and employing (gearing into, expressing, and reworking) linguistic-material
resources that may not only initiate and encourage human communication
(transmission, self-expression, other-perception, and interpersonal and inter-
group association) but also potentially threaten to stifle it, confuse it, and
perhaps even shut it down. Communication as immunization may encourage
negotiation and assist mutual understanding—for instance, in contexts of
debate, deliberation, and decision-making—but cannot eliminate the threat
of possible contagion of antagonism, misinformation, conflict, and even
manipulation. This is because communication as immunization is the condi-
tion of the possibility for and regulation of each of these phenomena. Com-
munication and-as immunization invites public expression, and even protest,
but also protects private contemplation as well as tradition, complementing
an individual’s capacity for reflective attending and ability to be affected by,
learn from, and integrate—to remain open to—the experiences of difference
rather than to merely tolerate, or worse, disavow them.
What is described in chapter 2 regarding the impossibility of human
noncommunication gains force as a question when considered from the
perspective of the munus, where the ban and law, threat and protection, of
human communication can be seen as the internal horizon for understanding
one another. Akin to the munus function of community that impairs its
members’ capacity to identify as being not part of community, so too does
the human capacity for language (the absorption of it over a lifetime) impair
one’s ability to stand outside of it. For the human person (a linguistic-semiotic
materiality), there is no immunity, legal or medical, from the ontological
givenness of communication. As speaking beings, we are in communication.
We must communicate, and we are able to do so by way of the immunizing
protection of discourses that can, in turn, threaten. With regard to com-
munity, where “the risk of conflict [is] inscribed at the very heart of com-
munity, consisting as it does in interaction, or better, in the equality of
its members,”37 communication also immunizes it, protects community from
devolving into a threatened state of dislocation, disconnection, misunderstand-
ing, and conflict. However, what can result there is a condition of overprotection.
Overprotection from too much immunization of communication threatens
the potential for ongoing and open communication by way of closing identity
borders, containing and curbing differences of viewpoint, expression, and
interpretation in an effort to turn inward and away from one another. Such
a condition, such as in an era of heightened, even paranoid, security con-
sciousness, calls for a protective response from communication as immuniza-
tion itself, what Esposito calls autoimmunization. Here we find the affirmative
quality of immunity that his critique reveals: immunizing protection against
too much protection by communication’s immune system can help protect
border openings as invitations to the common, the different, and the
community.
The philosopher most invested in asserting the openness of embodied
being, whether the body of that being is human-individual or community, is
Nancy. In his book Corpus, Nancy moves away from the twentieth-century
linguistic paradigm’s vocabulary of signs and instead demonstrates a style of
thinking about embodied being in terms of its indices. A body is not merely
an integrated and unified identity, he tells us, but is in fact a collection, a
corpus of parts, sensations, functions, masses, and magnitudes. Nancy’s inter-
est in indexing a body’s points of entry and exit, its zones and functions,
exemplifies the contemporary movement of continental philosophy from
questions of language and subjectivity toward a more decided engagement
with the material world. Corpus is a major text in Nancy’s mature philosophi-
cal reflections in this regard, and it can be read as a guide for thinking about
the relation of bodies and the insights offered by that perspective into com-
munity. Thinking of a body as relation, or what he calls a “singular plurality”
(an opening of openings to new configurations and connections—that is, to
communities), in turn broadens our perspective on communication: com-
munity is a sign of that which is lived meaningfully, in part, by way of shared
values that define it and may be unwritten but are nevertheless embodied and
practiced in transmission, in communication.
Chapter 4 argues that a body is an index of coexistence. To explain how
this is so, and why it matters, the discussion engages Nancy’s analysis of the
Latin phrase hoc est enim corpus meum, “this is my body,” which can be read
in at least two ways: first, as a critique of the metaphysics of presence, a
question of the “this is” of that phrase, and second, following from this cri-
tique and demonstrating its implications, as a question of what is one’s own:
What is and what can be called properly “my body”? To question the property
of one’s own body in this way undermines humanist notions of bodily
Introduction | 19
integrity and wholeness, which work to establish a correspondence between

body and self-identity that is often assumed and not questioned.
Although it may seem odd to question the self-certainty of identity linked
to the sense one has of a body—for if there is anything that is truly proper
or one’s own, it must be one’s body—Nancy’s objective is to emphasize the
fact that there are bodies, and not one body, such as the functionally ideal
body represented in Western medical discourse, or a universally ideal and
pure body of bodies—a “community.” Despite the categories into which we
place bodies and through which they are made meaningful, a body is
nevertheless fluid in both senses of that term: its internal functions can dis-
rupt and betray the “external” or conscious sense of identity, whether that
identity is individual or collective, thereby demonstrating that the experience
of a body, a singular existence, is always plural. Questioning modern supposi-
tions about bodily wholeness and integrity (integration and dis-integration)
helps confirm every body as a body in relation, a body that is ontologically
communicative (both expressive and perceptive).
The final chapter of this book sharpens the discussion of Nancy’s phi-
losophy of relationality as a distinct philosophy of communication. It focuses
on the concept of being-with, which Nancy claims is a sign of what remains
to be thought of existence—namely, the future of our coexistence. In
his effort to talk about coexistence without recourse to terms such as “iden-
tity,” “presence,” “containment,” or “community,” Nancy employs terms such
as “open,” “exposure,” “unworking,” “inoperable,” and “touch.” Chapter 5
engages Nancy’s thinking by way of a description, reduction, and interpreta-
tion of the term being-with and in so doing outlines the parallels in thinking
between Nancy’s philosophical program and communication research in
what is called semiotic phenomenology. Semiotic phenomenology is an appro-
priate descriptor of Nancy’s philosophy, I argue, for the reason that his goal
is to interrogate the limits of what can be thought about shared existence and
develop a vocabulary for thinking that broadens its horizon. I offer a sketch
of Nancy’s relational ontology, focusing in particular on what I call his three-
step semiotic phenomenological analysis of being-with as primary to being
human and prior to thinking about what it means to be in embodied contact,
communication, and/or community.
To summarize briefly, being-with refers first to the basic human awareness
of living in a world with others. To better understand the phenomenology of
human coexistence, Nancy opts for this term rather than “community” for
the reason that being-with directly calls to attention the experienced world as
shared, which means a world divided. In sharing, Nancy tells us, bodies
remain separate, and distributed, even in moments of contact and together-
ness. Second, being-with names a key feature of the active experiencing of the
world. Although the signifier being-with has links to Heidegger’s vocabulary
(Mitsein), for Nancy, it indicates the conscious experience, or embodied sense,
of communication. Being-with calls attention to the fact that one can only
say “I” within the context of other beings. Being aware of one’s being-with
others is experienced (expressed and perceived empirically) in the semiotic
materiality of contact and communication, which is lived as reversible.
Nancy’s attention to the phenomenon of touch, which includes both contact
and separation, broadens how we can think about the boundary logic of
communication—“communication” not as immediacy, or identity fusion,
but by way of withdrawal, at the limits of the boundaries that open a context
and therefore the possibility for human communicating. Third, being-with is
understood as a sign representing a new perception of our common condition,
what Nancy calls a shared task for thinking. A key concept in the third step
of his analysis is Mitdasein (being-with-there), which draws attention to the
fact of human embodied exposure. We are self-exposed, and being-with adds
to our awareness of this condition as a challenge to protect the with as
fundamental to the meanings and/or, perhaps, dreams of our being
human together.
Although the dream quality of a sign such as “community” won’t dissolve
under philosophical analysis, the advantage of a term like being-with (or, we)
over “community” is that it invites thinking about the disturbances and
distances that are always part of community. It allows space for thinking
about the fact of beings that are part of community, willingly or not, simply
by virtue of being there (being exposed) in a world shared with others. Being-
with calls attention not only to the boundary logic of inclusion and exclusion
but also to the estrangement, marginality, and separation of those beings who,
for whatever reason, may not be able, willing, or even interested in reciprocity,
intimacy, and/or mutual exchange—ideals of community that are often
presupposed in thinking about its uniformity over and above its dislocations.
Just as communication involves the possibility of ambiguity and uncertainty,
so too is being-together necessarily hesitant and tentative, whether actually,
in public or private, or virtually, as we may be in various “imagined” com-
munication communities.
Introduction | 21
Having rehearsed the direction and scope of this book’s argument—namely,

that when taken together, the perspectives of Agamben, Esposito, Nancy,
and Lacanian psychoanalysis considerably expand philosophical inquiry into
human communication—it is worth reiterating that the chapters to follow
are not rote reportage on the ideas of each of these figures. There are many
volumes that offer thorough accounts of the perspectives of Agamben,
Esposito, Nancy, Lacan, and current Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even
more—a nd more massive—volumes devoted to defining and contextual-
izing continental philosophy.38 That said, I want to end here by adding a few
more words to help situate the present research within its general intellectual-
disciplinary context. I will do so by quoting Simon Glendinning’s rather
perfect definition of continental philosophy as “the defining ‘not-part’ of
analytic philosophy . . . an ‘incorporation’; where something is constructed
and retained ‘within’ but as an excluded outside, as a foreign body which is
impossible to assimilate.”39
The scope and feel of Glendinning’s definition, especially the “not-part,”
is highly apropos to the contemporary continental philosophy of communica-
tion presented in this book because, although the topics addressed in it are
at the dead center of communication inquiry as a modern academic field of
human study, the perspective on those topics developed throughout this book
is nevertheless somewhat afield from, but not outright alien to, the majority
perspective that dominates and largely defines human communication study
in the Anglo-A merican mainstream tradition: namely, more a social scientific
than a humanistic perspective, stimulating scholarly output that is empiri-
cally grounded and positivistic more often than qualitative, literary, and
philosophical in style and scope. Just what the contours and limits of
the philosophy of communication represented in the work of this volume are
is a question that, like the one regarding Glendinning’s definition of continental
philosophy, cannot yet be fully answered. Philosophy of communication is
indeterminate at present, outside, marginal and, as of late, unincorporated by
mainstream North American human communication inquiry.40
From the point of view of institutional legitimacy, it may at some point
become necessary to refine the interdisciplinary boundaries of what philoso-
phy of communication is and what it is not. On the one hand, for example,
it is interpretive inquiry into human communication questions about lan-
guage (How does language bring structure to sense? How is language differ-
ent from communication? How does meaning-making occur? Why is human
communication possible?), human consciousness (How do we become aware
of our lived environments? How is that awareness experienced? Why is that

experience embodied?), expressive media (What can a phenomenology of
communications media reveal about the epochal orientation of a culture?),
and difference and identity (How are signs valued? How do we experience
those values? What is the impact of others’ expressions on one’s self-
perceptions?). On the other hand, philosophy of communication is not, for
example, analytic philosophy of mind or language, cognitive or generative
linguistics, or cybernetics, systems theory, or classic information theory, and
certainly not “anything goes.”
Nevertheless, for now, I think the question of what philosophy of com-
munication is and what it is not should remain open and left out in the open
as an invitation to thinking—an invitation not for thinking about what is
the question of thinking (that’s continental philosophy) but what calls for
thinking today about human communication (that’s continental philosophy
of communication). The opening or outside that is this question offers intel-
lectual space for thinking about what human communication inquiry allows
us to think, and therefore to perceive and express, about human embodied
being and what that labor of thinking—that is, philosophy rather than theory
of communication—can offer for future inquiry.
CHAPTER 1
The Wager of Communication (as Revealed by Psychoanalysis)
This beginning chapter enters into contemporary continental philosophy of

human communication by way of a basic review of Jacques Lacan’s perspec-
tive on language. Put simply, what Lacan reminds us about language is that
it is not self-evident, not all can be said in conscious discourse, and therefore,
although human communication may be possible, it is itself never fully
guaranteed, certain, or completely stable. This uncertainty revealed by psy-
choanalysis helps deepen our understanding of communication as a possibility
rather than a guaranteed outcome of human expression, demonstrating how
self-identity is neither pregiven nor prior to language but shaped and even
destabilized within it. The objective of the present discussion is to specify
the relevance to communication inquiry of the Lacanian psychoanalytic
perspective on the role language plays in the formation of the human com-
municative subject.
Psychoanalysis is important to contemporary continental philosophy of
communication to the extent that it helps challenge humanist conceptions
of communication as an outcome of expressive exchange between agents
whose identities are presupposed to be fully contained, undivided, and self-
certain. This is what Briankle G. Chang calls the “subjectivist metaphysical
thesis” of modern theory of communication, wherein the speaker-subject is
preformed and communication appears as both a challenge and a means to
transcend its inner privacy and personal solitude.1 The humanist-theoretical
perspective on communication is not unfamiliar. It presupposes, for instance,
that human communication is coterminous with expression, that communi-
cation is one-way rather than reversible, that all behavior is information, that
communication is reducible to messages, that communication is equivalent
to understanding, that either communication succeeds or it fails, and so on.
As we shall see, although the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis is

informed by such humanist and positivist suppositions about communica-
tion, a critical review of its main tenets demonstrates that psychoanalytic
theory is in fact consistent with, and offers a ready point of entry into, a
contemporary continental perspective on the instability and contingency of
communication. In the context of the psychoanalytic interview, communica-
tion is defined as an outcome of exchange in which a patient learns to recog-
nize the impact of language on his or her emotional history and, in so doing,
attempts to sharpen his or her skill in speaking about emotional suffering—to
communicate “successfully” rather than remain helpless in articulating the
cause of suffering. Despite its recourse to classic information theory’s sender-
receiver vocabulary, however, Lacanian psychoanalysis can be read as a chal-
lenge to suppositions about both the certainty of communication (its success
or failure) and the pregiven status of the communicative subject. It reveals,
in short, how communication can be understood as an embodied experience
of the signs, codes, and contexts of expression that shape self-identity and
have the irreducible potential to undermine a person’s employment of them,
thereby undermining the theoretical foundation of humanism’s preformed
expressive agent.2
Discourse of the Other: A Vast Material Apparatus
I begin with a distinction that runs throughout Lacan’s major works.3 I draw
it out not as a line to be crossed, as if it were a barrier, but as an opening for
examination of the role played by language and communication in the
formation of the self. The distinction is classically drawn between two so-
called functions of language.4 One is communicative; the other is structural.
The difference between these two functions may be shown as follows:
On the one hand, language is understood as a medium for the transportation
and exchange of information. In this sense, its communicative function is
as a vehicle or instrument that makes possible the activity of encoding,
transmitting, receiving, and decoding of information, from low level binary
to complex high level. On the other hand, language is also understood as a
system of representation. As a network of finite symbols governed by recur-
sive rules that specify the relation of symbols with one another and their
meaning,5 this system functions, as Anthony Wilden puts it, “to bring
structure to the representation of reality, for where there is no structure,
The Wager of Communication (as Revealed by Psychoanalysis) | 25
there is no sense.”6 Taking these two functions together, we see that language
helps not only name phenomena in the world but also classify them into
different categories. In short, language brings order to sense perception via
a web of meanings delivered in words and sentences that are generated
according to rules and, in doing so, endows the lived human world with
concrete, psychical/conceptual reality.
This basic distinction between the two functions of language helps us
see how language (the sphere of the semantic) is relatively insignificant on its
own. It is only in its use—that is, as discourses (the sphere of the semiotic)
developed over time by people interacting with one another—t hat a sign
system can bring order, sense, and meaning to the world. “For unlike a lan-
guage,” Wilden famously explains, “a discourse has a subject and subject
matter.”7 Yet as we know, if language is “a culturally organized system that
must be learned from the parents and in the family to obtain entrance into
social life,”8 then using it will never be straightforward and without conse-
quences. This is because not all discourses are valued equally. Only those that
prevail in a society, derived from its principal social and economic relations,
Wilden tells us, will “form the ground of what the dominant members of
society accept as true and false, legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate.”9
The experience of entering into social life may lead to significant emotional
suffering, for some people at least, because what the culture wants or demands
may be, at times, at odds with what the person wants or thinks he or she
wants. It may even be at odds with whomever the person believes him-or
herself to be.
The capacity of language to enable and thereby to constrain ways of
seeing, knowing, and judging explains its cultural significance as what Lacan
calls “discourse of the Other.” Simply put, the Other is not a person. It is a
locus of symbolic authority identified with the structure of language (a struc-
ture governed by the logic of difference), and the order of culture (also called
the Symbolic, a historical realm governed by law-like conventions), and the
unconscious.10 Discourse of the Other is a vast, material apparatus of values,
beliefs, and meanings that flows into a person from others and stitches
everyone into the fabric of culture—“stitches” us together, that is, by virtue
of our use of language and thereby our implication in the discourses we speak.
For the present discussion, the import of this basic psychoanalytic principle
cannot be overstated. The unconscious is nothing but discourse of the Other,
Lacan insists.11 It is “a discourse which dispossesses us of our imaginary sense of
self-completeness.”12 As I will discuss, language is critical to the psychic life
of the person not only as a medium for expression but also as embodied dis-
course, a system of representation that reveals a subject in its use.
But first, in order to explain how a subject is revealed by language in its
use, I must identify a third function of language: its metacommunicative
function. The metacommunication of language may be identified as the pres-
ence or experience of language beside itself, beyond the meaning of words
and sentences. This “beyond” is no mystical realm; it is the province of
context, to be sure. More specifically, it is the province of the concrete sense
impression made by the signifier. Beyond meanings that may be evoked by
it, a signifier may be audible in its articulation (e.g., phonemes that distin-
guish it), it may be visible in its inscription (e.g., graphemes that constitute
its identity), and it may even be disturbing in its embodied experience (e.g.,
the alienating encounter of an unfamiliar or unwelcomed word, in text or
conversation). What is shown by the audibility, visibility, and effect of signi-
fiers is that language not only names things and brings meaning to lived
experience but also announces itself as language.13 The presence of any signi-
fier carries with it, as its backdrop, the entire signifying system of which it is
a representative element. The phenomenality of the signifier, seen from this
perspective, helps us understand how the metacommunicative function of
language is to communicate communicability—to declare, by the rupture
of the linguistic act, that in language there is at minimum the possibility for
communication. In its use, language speaks—it speaks itself.14
This point may seem trivial for humanities scholars today, at least for the
reason that theories of metacommunication have long underpinned the social
scientific study of human communication.15 However, with regard to Laca-
nian psychoanalytic theory and the technique of its application, particularly
in the contemporary current,16 the importance of its insights into this meta-
communicative function of language should not be taken lightly. For,
although language may be a medium and vehicle for the activity of
communicating—the transport of ideas, the cocreation of meaning, the
expression of experiences, the interpretation of expressions, and so on—it is
precisely because language communicates itself that a pathway is opened to
the psychic life (i.e., the embodied history) of a person. Psychoanalytic theory
and practice show that the conscious control a person has over his or her
intentions in language can be undermined, at times, by language’s metacom-
municative function. Because the unconscious is a repository of discourse of
the Other, it is via language—that is, self-expression in signs—that a person’s
emotional past may be exposed.
In the clinical setting of psychoanalysis, the communicative, structural,

and metacommunicative functions of language together play the key role.
There, it is accepted both in theory and in practice that in the cognitive
acquisition of language (the process of learning to speak to others, being
spoken to, and being spoken about by others), a person absorbs and internal-
izes an entire system of meaning. As a child, the person absorbs words that
have been used to label his or her intentions, demands, and wishes in the
process of building complex maps of meaning; however, as an adult, that
person may be encouraged in the context of analytic therapy to attend to key
words or phrases spoken as points of focus that might bring those maps of
meaning to conscious awareness so that they may be explored and perhaps
even reconfigured.17 A course of psychoanalysis may, for example, uncover
the failed dreams of the parent as they recur to the speech of the child who,
even in adulthood, suffers a burden of fulfilling those wishes as if they were
his or her own (for example, one’s career choices). In those cases, as well as
others, one of the goals of psychoanalysis is to help a patient listen to how he
or she speaks—listen, that is, for how he or she uses language in order to
communicate.
Later, I discuss how communication, defined in this context as an out-
come of speaking so as to be heard and understood, is taken for granted in
the language of psychoanalytic theory. But for now, let me pursue the back-
ground of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory a little further, specifically as it
offers insight into how a person may step back from him-or herself with a
view to developing an awareness of the extent to which his or her speech is
a product not simply of individual creative agency but also of a shared system
of representation, a product of discourse of the Other.
Meaning to Say: Talking to Hear Oneself Speak
The challenge for a patient as well as the psychoanalyst is to listen for the
system of beliefs, principles, and values that structures concretely a patient’s
relations with others and shapes his or her actions, self-perceptions, and
communication patterns. To meet this challenge, what an analyst must do
is highlight, underscore, and insert “inverted commas” into the text of a
patient’s speech—to punctuate the significance of what has been said during
the course of analysis in order to draw explicit attention to it.18 In this
way, the psychoanalyst serves the role of editor, a figure who has the ability
to help a patient “articulate verbally his or her emotional experience”19 and,

in so doing, ease his or her emotional suffering by way of talking about it.
The editor function is essential to psychoanalytic practice because what
a patient says in that context may not always be the same as what he or she
means to say. As with daily conversation (for instance, the contextual differ-
ences between the content and relational aspects of a statement), the meaning
intended by the speech of a patient through his or her selection of words
combined into sentences may differ from the meaning that may be made
of those words and sentences and the manner in which they are expressed.20
One thing said may be another thing heard. Metaphor, sarcasm, and humor
used to evade sensitive topics, for instance, or to imply them indirectly, as
well as the repetition of words, the substitution of names, pauses in speech,
and slips of the tongue, all of which can often go unnoticed by the patient
him-or herself, may communicate something beyond, or altogether different
from, what a patient consciously intends to express. As Richard Kearney
explains, it is “in the faults of communication rather than its fitness that
unconscious discourse is revealed.”21 Because words in a patient’s vocabulary
have undergone a “long developmental history of emotional accumulation of
meaning,”22 the main purpose of the psychoanalyst-editor is to help a patient
draw out, unravel, and ideally decode the key parts of what a patient says in
analysis and how he or she wishes to be heard. Talking and listening
in psychoanalysis is, in short, discourse en route to self-understanding the
significance of unconscious language to conscious perceptions of phenomenal
experiences.
That being said, it is important for the purposes of the present discussion
to point out that the objective of intervening into a patient’s speech in the
context of psychoanalysis is not only to draw attention to his or her patterns
of communication but also, and crucially, to draw attention to the fact that
the psychoanalyst can do no more than assist the patient in the process of
locating and making sense of the psychic-symbolic source of his or her emo-
tional suffering. The analyst may direct a course of analysis. However, the
work of interpretation must fall, in large part, on the patient.23 This shift is
decisive in psychoanalytic treatment, and as we shall see, it marks an impor-
tant point of broadening contemporary understanding of human communi-
cation beyond information-theoretic suppositions of its success or failure. For
the “talking cure” to have a long-term impact on a patient’s awareness of
meanings made of past experience, part of the authority to interpret, or to
“author,” what is said in the course of analysis must be drawn away from the
analyst (a figure who, like the parent, is perceived to have all answers to all
questions) and must be assumed by the patient. Therein lies the paradox of
the psychoanalytic enterprise: a patient hires someone to help, but ends up
doing most of the work him-or herself.
What should come as no surprise is how this shift in authority from an
analyst trained to listen to a patient encouraged to listen to, and for, him-or
herself is dictated by the very structure of communicating in the psychoana-
lyst’s consulting room. Although I will not discuss the significance the relative
positions of patient and psychoanalyst in the consulting room has to
communication—whether each is seated facing one another or whether the
patient is classically lying on a daybed and the analyst is seated perpendicular
to the patient and outside of his or her field of vision24—I will say that con-
trary to what might be expected from this interpersonal dyad, the analyst
does not function simply as the receiver of a patient’s speech. Rather, the
analyst functions as its transmitter, a mechanism through which the speech
of a patient is encoded into signals for delivery back to him or her. The analyst
assumes the role of transmitter because when a patient speaks in analysis, it
is the Other that may be heard—heard by the analyst, that is, but not yet by
the patient, who misrecognizes its discourse as if it were simply his or her
own.25 To be sure, psychoanalysts today do not simply assume the clichéd
position of a silent, detached observer, like an owl in the room. Instead,
treatment is pursued through mutual sharing of experience between the
analyst and patient over a long period of time so that trust may be developed,
a mutual bond may be established, and meaningful dialogue may take place.26
Psychoanalytic treatment seeks, in part, to address the patient’s lack
of awareness of the discourses of the Other (the prevailing beliefs, attitudes,
and values of a culture, community, and/or family) by transforming the
patient into a receiver of his or her own speech. Like the voice piece of a
telephone handset, the psychoanalyst mediates communication between the
patient’s ear and what comes out of the patient’s mouth. As editor-transmitter,
the analyst points to and leads in highlighting what may be significant parts
of a patient’s speech, such as when metaphor is used to beat around the
bush of a heavily guarded secret, or when slips of the tongue appear to indicate
conflict between the meaning of a word and a speaker’s intent in using it, or
when pauses in speech or repetitive associations mark the place of a memory
too painful to put into words—and so on. This is done so that the patient
might recognize for him-or herself those parts of speech that conflict with,
and thereby unsettle, the conscious intent with which the patient believes he
or she had expressed them in the first place. To be sure, any speaker will have
the capacity to receive his or her own speech as long as he or she is able to
hear the sound of his or her own voice. But this is elemental. Possessing the
auditory capacity to hear one’s voice may be insufficient to recognize
the significance of what is being spoken, and how it has been said over a
lifetime, to one’s emotional history.27
That said, the point to grasp about the analytic interview is that a patient
speaks before an analyst who is trained to listen clinically so that the significant
parts of what comes out of the patient’s mouth (i.e., signals from the Other sent
to the self about its relationships to others) may be encoded as new inter-
pretations and sent back to their source of verbal articulation—sent back, that
is, to the patient him-or herself. As Lacan explains, “The subject’s own speech
is a message to him, first of all, because it is produced in the Other’s locus. It
originates in that locus and is worded as such not only because his demand is
submitted to the Other’s code, but because his demand is dated by this Other’s
locus (and even time).”28 With effort, a patient-sender may become a consciously
aware receiver of such “messages” because the source and destination of com-
munication in the psychoanalytic setting are one and the same. The role of the
analyst-editor may be to draw attention to how a patient speaks and thereby
lead the patient in the direction of a different self-perception; however, it is a
patient’s awareness of the meanings made of his or her past experiences that
must be cultivated by the process of talking in analysis. Communication in the
psychoanalytic context is, in short, communication within oneself.
This point is crucial. Communication occurs in psychoanalysis, if ever,
as speech awareness—a process, on the part of the patient, of reflective attend-
ing to what is spoken, what has been said, and what meanings might have
been made of experiences shaped by vocabulary of the Other announced in
the patient’s speech.29 In the context of analysis, communication therefore is
not merely the act of speaking (transmission, reporting) about personal expe-
rience, or parroting statements, or narrating a carefully curated fantasy—a
performance in speaking accompanied by gestures, breathing patterns,
twitches, and so on that, we are told, are loaded with information and,
thereby, communication. Communication can also be said to occur when the
stability of self-sending (expression) is in fact shaken, disturbed, and dis-
mantled rather than affirmed by the very words used to make meaning of a
patient’s experience—that is, when the consistency of one’s so-called personal
narrative, which functions as support of the perspective one has of oneself, is
called into question by the sheer telling of its tale.30
Although Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, especially in its classical sense,

adheres to the sender-receiver language of information theory, its contemporary
practice works to reveal how the theoretically pregiven, rational, and self-
sustaining locus of information transmission (i.e., the subject of communica-
tion) is neither as stable nor as certain as a mechanical sender-receiver model of
communication would have us believe. Communication in psychoanalysis is not
merely that which is achieved through the “making-known of the thoughts of
a speaker to another speaker.”31 It inheres in awareness of the signifiers of expres-
sion (i.e., their embodied, lived experience) arrived at through a process of
identification. It draws out and attends to the lived-historical importance, to
the patient, of what is said by him or her during the analytic interview, in order
to bring about a transformative effect—to jolt the patient, as it were, in his or
her confrontation with the signifiers of psychic suffering revealed in the spoken
and audible register of language in use. Strange but true, communication in
psychoanalysis is a semiotic phenomenological experience that may occur
in the process of a patient talking in order to hear him-or herself speak.
Voice, or a Message Returned in an Inverted Form
Consider the injunction, “find your voice.” This injunction makes sense for
the reason that voice, whether written or spoken, is an alienating phenome-
non. It comes from oneself, but also it goes from oneself. “It goes as it comes,”
Jean-Luc Nancy says.32 One’s voice—in particular, one’s speech—is at once
a coming and a going. As Steven Connor puts it in Dumbstruck, “What I
say goes.”33 We experience our voice as particularly alienating whenever we
hear the sound of it played back to us from its recording. “That’s not me!”
we often say. The disturbance to the sense of oneself that is caused by the
experience of hearing one’s voice—which is to say, the experience of listen-
ing to oneself speak—is not limited to disembodied recordings. This experi-
ence also occurs in routine communication settings, such as when we recite
in mind something we plan to say before coming out with it, or when
something we say returns to us from others who have been persuaded, or
perhaps contaminated, by our words.34
The experience of hearing the words of others recur to the speech of the
self is central to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, research, and practice. As
is well known, Lacan’s reading of Freud’s biological model of psychosexual
development integrates the phenomenology of Heidegger (the idea that
language is the house of being, that human “consciousness exists in language

and it is granted reality because language is articulated in voice”35) with the
structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. But it is in the connection
between these two traditions that Lacan can be read as offering a picture of
human communication that contrasts significantly with information
theory—a picture of communication as a reversible relation. Its clearest
articulation is found in Lacan’s famous dictum: “Human language is like a
communication where the sender receives his own message back from the
receiver in an inverted form.”36 Unpacking this formula will tell us a lot about
voice/speaking and listening as a reversible relation of communication.
First, the sender receives his own message: As previously discussed, the
aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not merely to encourage patients to speak
openly about themselves or others but to lead them to recognize how they
speak by listening for (to listen attentively, F. écouter) signifiers of the desires
of others that shape self-perceptions.37 In this sense, we understand a “mes-
sage” sent in the psychoanalytic conversation as the sender’s own: it is a
message spoken to be heard not only by the analyst but also, and most impor-
tantly, by the patient who utters it. As I stated above, communication in
psychoanalysis occurs when the stability of self-sending is disturbed by reflec-
tive attending (thinking as listening) to the words used by a patient to make
meaning of his or her lived experience.
Second, the message comes back from the receiver: Communication in
psychoanalysis is neither a mutual nor an equal exchange, and certainly not
an exchange between equals. Patients speak, and analysts listen. That is, to
reiterate, the analyst listens for what the patient cannot yet hear, let alone put
into words: namely, discourse of the Other that shapes the speech of the self.
The analyst recites or transmits back to a patient the words spoken before the
analyst, the goal of which is for the patient to hear (F. entendre) his or her
words through the channel of the analyst’s voice.38 Although a receiver in the
context of psychoanalysis can be said to be the same as a sender, what cannot
be said is whether the patient will in fact hear what he or she has been led to
listen for in the long conversation of analysis. I return to this point later.
Third, the message is received in an inverted form: The reversible relation
between speaking and listening reveals a complex issue, indicated by the final
phrase in Lacan’s dictum regarding the form of the message received. The
form of a message is the patient’s speech, its rhetoric. The message form is not
merely an auditory signal (a signifier); it is also a mental image (a signified)
evoked by the utterance, or voicing, of the former. The form of the message
is, as such, a sign, a particular combination of signifier and signified delivered

in speech. Its rhetoric is the how of its delivery.39 The fact that Lacan chooses
the term inverted leads us to believe that he takes Saussure at his word:
namely, that a signifier makes an acoustic impression.40 Words are felt. To
explain, two points need to be made here.
First, the form of the message to be received (an image delivered in
speech—what Saussure calls an “acoustic image”) is a critical component of
communication as a reversible relation through which the patient perceives,
or sees, him-or herself. A message (the patient’s self-expression) arrives to
his or her conscious awareness as a picture—it is received by the so-called
mind’s eye. It is thereby “inverted” according to the laws of refraction. Note
the primacy of the visual, even in discourse about speech and listening.
However, and second, what the analyst is trained to do is help the patient
listen for what he or she cannot or will not say—listen, that is, to how
the image is delivered, its rhetoric, and thereby return to the patient what
remains unspoken in all that has been said in a given exchange. As John
Muller and William Richardson explain, the objective is to turn unconscious
discourse into conscious speech: “The good listener resonates with what
is unconscious in the speaker’s conscious communication, and his or her
response thus consists in returning to the speaker (by way of ‘inverting’
and making the unconscious conscious) what was left unsaid in what the
speaker said.”41
I have been referring to speech, speaking, and the words of the patient.
Before moving forward, it is crucial to draw out the significance of these terms
by attending to the distinction between what Jonathan Culler calls “the
purely relational and abstract” units of a language and their “physical realiza-
tions.”42 To do so, we must attend to the distinction between their form and
substance. In his discussion of the arbitrary nature of the sign, Culler identi-
fies a subtle but critical insight upon which Saussure insists: namely, neither
the sounds produced in language nor the concepts they evoke (mental images)
are linguistic units. Instead, he explains, “The linguistic unit is form rather
than substance.”43 The form of a linguistic unit remains unaffected by the
substance of its expression. For example, a sloppily handwritten “a” or a clearly
typewritten “a” are of no consequence to the a-ness of the letter “a.” Its value
within a linguistic system remains unchanged by how that “a” is expressed.
Similarly, slurred speech, or dialects, while perhaps difficult to understand,
will affect not at all the ideal form of the uttered words—they remain purely
relational and abstract.
Returning to the patient in analysis, the substance of his or her words

actually spoken in the way they are spoken has no effect on the form of
the linguistic units themselves. This is why, in order for the “talking cure” to
have any impact on the conscious life of the patient, the form of the message
returned in analysis must be “ideal”: that is, it must return to the patient, by
way of the analyst, stripped of the substance of its expression, coming back
as signs exposed as part of the linguistic apparatus that brings structure and
meaning to experience. The form of the message is “ideal” in its return to the
patient insofar as it belongs to, or has its origin in, la langue, what Bruce Fink
calls a “hoard deposited by the practice of speech in speakers who belong to
the same community, a grammatical system which, to all intents and pur-
poses, exists in the minds of each speaker.”44 A message in analysis comes back
as ideal to the extent that its punctuation by the analyst (how it is said) makes
audible the imprint of the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the language com-
munity inhabited by the patient.
In the context of the psychoanalytic interview, the patient learns to listen
for what he or she wants to say, even if he or she lacks the words at the time,
and learns to listen for the possible meanings of what he or she does say, albeit
in the words of a language system that is never exclusively his or her own.
Communication in that reversible relation occurs, takes place, whenever the
community discourse is felt—when its voice resonates, especially in its power
to disturb the sense a patient has of him-or herself and/or whomever he or
she wishes to be.45
Talking to Hear the Other Speak
Thus far, I have shown that Lacanian psychoanalysis, in its clinical applica-
tion, can be understood as a recursive mode of talk therapy. It is an inter-
action that opens a circuit wherein a patient has the opportunity not only
to examine words used in speech with others, about others and oneself, but
also to better understand and perhaps come to terms with the unique impact
of that vocabulary on his or her emotional past. Because the patient is posi-
tioned both as speaker and as listener, as sender as well as receiver of his or
her speech, communication in psychoanalysis unfolds not only between
patient and analyst but also, and necessarily, within the patient for the rea-
son that “only the patient has the key to open the meanings of his or her
communications, fears, and desires.”46 To move the discussion forward, it is
important to note how any clinical enterprise that asks patients to talk in
order to hear themselves speak would rest upon unsteady ground. Why
would anyone agree to such an interaction—a nd pay for it, too?
Sigmund Freud anticipated skepticism of this kind as early as 1890, in an
essay where he addresses the potential for resistance to the method of talk
therapy. “A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological
disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by ‘mere’ words,” Freud
says. “He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not
be so very wrong, for the words we use in our everyday speech are nothing
other than watered-down magic.”47 Words are like magic, perhaps, because
the experience of being human is impacted concretely by them, the solitude
of suffering may be transcended through their use in conversation, and
analysis of linguistic metacommunication may disclose how the psyche is a
substance of history, or a knot in the web of culture, rather than a cabinet of
mysterious forces. That being said, it is precisely the paradox of paying to
speak freely that makes psychoanalysis a destabilizing enterprise, a clinical
method of treating emotional suffering with conversation designed intention-
ally to unsettle the autonomy of the self, to challenge what Freud calls the
“autocratic nature of personalities”48 and dissolve its psychic formations.
Consider the price of a course of psychoanalytic treatment. It obtains
from two major costs: an acquisition cost and, to borrow from the language
of economics, a psychic cost. First and foremost, a patient must pay the
cost of communication. That is, a fee must be paid for the opportunity to
talk, be listened to, and learn to hear oneself speak—to listen for unconscious
discourse that undermines conscious speech. The second cost of psychoanaly-
sis is one’s self-image. Simply put, a patient must give it up. But this cost is
paid not merely in an exchange of one self-image for another that has been
made over through ego boosting and restoration (albeit cosmetic) of the
certainty with which a patient expresses his or her “self.” To the contrary,
psychoanalysis is the task of dismantling and unbinding, a mode of mental
therapy that “facilitates alienation from a self-image that encapsulates the
subject.”49 It is an enterprise designed, in many cases, to lead a patient to
discover, through the process of speaking in analysis, that he or she is always,
in part, separate from and thereby different from the image of self to which
he or she has been fastened, an image that is, by definition, imaginary, sus-
tained by discourse of the Other.
To explain, allow me to summarize Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase of
identification. According to Lacan, the mirror phase of identification is the
brief period in human development when an infant develops a self-image based

on the appearance of its body as it is reflected upon a surface, such as a mirror,
or the facial expression of a caregiver, where the infant understands that the
caregiver’s smile is intended for him or her—just as he or she recognizes his
or her reflection as him or her and not another person. This image, of a unified
body in control of its surroundings, comes into view and is perceived by the
infant child in stark contrast to the disunity, helplessness, and lack of motor
coordination that characterizes the child’s conscious experience of its physical
body. The primary experience of lack of coordination, bodily disunity, and
helplessness contrasted with the image of a unified, complete, and controllable
body (what is typically called “misrecognition” for the reason that the body
perceived is not “me”; it is an image of me) creates a permanent gulf, lack, or
fracture in the child’s psyche. It establishes a differential relation of the child
to him-or herself as another. What we typically call our identity is constituted
in a disturbing and irresolvable difference within oneself.
The emotional significance of the differences within the self deepens after
completion of the mirror phase, particularly in the later phases of language
acquisition, when the child learns to say “I,” a signifier. In order to say “I,”
the child must learn to recognize him-or herself as a subject first and foremost
of the family discourse, a subject that becomes an object in communication
with and about the child. This passage from reality to representation (from
singular being into the realm of plurality, of society) means that the child
learns to refer to him-or herself as an object-signifier in the vocabulary of the
family. Referring to oneself in that way (for instance, as he, she, I, or a proper
name) amounts to finding a place for oneself in the order of the entire culture
by “losing oneself in language.”50
The psychic implications of being subject to language—that is, learning
to speak and being articulated by and into words—are profound and endur-
ing. As Christian Lundberg summarizes, “The subject is simultaneously
produced and disfigured in its unavoidable insertion into the space of the
Symbolic.”51 In its recourse to a language system that is never fully its own,
the subject forever seeks to live up to the internalized demands placed upon
it to be something that is not it—a signifying image circulated in the dis-
course of others. On this point, Lacan’s theorem that “a signifier represents
a subject for another signifier” is relevant.52 It means that words cannot fully
represent a subject. They represent it poorly; hence more and more words
are required. Signifiers string us along in the promise they offer not only of
representation but also of more effective communication and thus improved
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And who will sit in Nóvgorod?”
There stepped forward Diví Murza, son of Ulán:
“Listen, our lord, Crimea’s tsar!
You, our lord, shall sit in stone-built Moscow,
And your son in Vladímir,
And your nephew in Súzdal,
And your relative in Zvenígorod,
And let the equerry hold old Ryazán,
But to me, O lord, grant Nóvgorod:
There, in Nóvgorod, lies my luck.”
The voice of the Lord called out from heaven:
“Listen, you dog, Crimea’s tsar!
Know you not the tsarate of Muscovy?
There are in Moscow seventy Apostles,[117]
Besides the three Sanctified;
And there is in Moscow still an orthodox Tsar.”
And you fled, you dog, Crimea’s tsar,
Not over the highways, nor the main road,
Nor following the black standard.
THE SONG OF THE PRINCESS KSÉNIYA BORÍSOVNA [118]
There weepeth a little bird,

A little white quail:
“Alas, that I so young must grieve!
They wish to burn the green oak,
To destroy my little nest,
To kill my little ones,
To catch me, quail.”
In Moscow the Princess weepeth:
“Alas that I so young must grieve!
For there comes to Moscow the traitor,
Gríshka Otrépev Rozstríga,[119]
Who wants to take me captive,
And having captured make me a nun,
To send me into the monastery.
But I do not wish to become a nun,
To go into a monastery:
I shall keep my dark cell open,
To look at the fine fellows.
O our beautiful corridors!
Who will walk over you
After our tsarian life
And after Borís Godunóv?
O our beautiful palace halls!
Who will be sitting in you
After our tsarian life
And after Borís Godunóv?”
And in Moscow the Princess weepeth,
The daughter of Borís Godunóv:
“O God, our merciful Saviour!
Wherefore is our tsardom perished,—
Is it for father’s sinning,
Or for mother’s not praying?
And you beloved palace halls!
Who will rule in you,
After our tsarian life?
Fine stuffs of drawn lace!—
Shall we wind you around the birches?
Fine gold-worked towels!
Shall we throw you into the woods?
Fine earrings of hyacinth
Shall we hang you on branches,
After our tsarian life,
After the reign of our father,
Glorious Borís Godunóv?
Wherefore comes to Moscow Rozstríga,
And wants to break down the palaces,
And to take me, princess, captive,
And to send me to Ustyúzhna Zheléznaya,
To make me, princess, a nun,
To place me behind a walled garden?
Why must I grieve,
As they take me to the dark cell,
And the abbess gives me her blessing?”
THE RETURN OF PATRIARCH FILARÉT TO MOSCOW[120]
The tsarate of Muscovy was happy

And all the holy Russian land.
Happy was the sovereign, the orthodox Tsar,
The Grand Duke Mikhaíl Fedórovich,
For he was told that his father had arrived,
His father Filarét Nikítich,
From the land of the infidel, from Lithuania.
He had brought back with him many princes and boyárs,
He had also brought the boyár of the Tsar,
Prince Mikhaíl Borísovich Sheyn.
There had come together many princes, boyárs, and dignitaries,
In the mighty tsarate of Muscovy:
They wished to meet Filarét Nikítich
Outside the famous stone-built Moscow.
’Tis not the red sun in its course,—
’Tis the orthodox Tsar that has gone out,
To meet his father dear,
Lord Filarét Nikítich.
With the Tsar went his uncle,
Iván Nikítich the boyár.—
“The Lord grant my father be well,
My father, lord Filarét Nikítich.”
They went not into the palace of the Tsar,
They went into the cathedral of the Most Holy Virgin,
To sing an honourable mass.
And he blessed his beloved child:
“God grant the orthodox Tsar be well,
Grand Duke Mikhaíl Fedórovich!
And for him to rule the tsarate of Muscovy
And the holy Russian land.
FOOTNOTES:
[116] Having destroyed almost the whole of Moscow by fire in

1572, Devlét-Giréy made again an incursion the next year. He
was so sure of an easy victory, that the streets of Moscow, so
Kúrbski tells, were alotted in advance to the Murzas. He came
with an army of 120,000 men, and left on the field of battle
100,000.
[117] Either churches or images of the apostles; a similar
interpretation holds for the next line.
[118] She was shorn a nun by order of the False Demetrius,
and was sent to a distant monastery.
[119] Rozstríga means “he who has abandoned his tonsure.”
[120] Filarét Nikítich, the father of Mikhaíl Fedórovich, returned
from his Lithuanian captivity in 1619 and was at once proclaimed
Patriarch.
Yúri Krizhánich. (1617-about 1677.)
Krizhánich was a Croatian who had studied at the Croatian
Seminary at Vienna, at the university of Bologna, and at the
Greek College of St. Athanasius at Rome, where he came in
contact with some Russians. He early dreamed of a union of
all the Slavic nations under the rule of Russia, and in 1657 he
went to Southern Russia, where he began a propaganda
among the Cossacks in favour of a union with that country.
Two years later he appeared in Moscow, where his Catholic
religion and his efforts at introducing a Western culture
brought him into disrepute, and he was at once banished to
Siberia, where he lived until the year 1676. He composed a
large number of works on an Universal Slavic language, on
the Russian empire in the seventeenth century, and on the
union of the Churches, writing not in Russian, but in a strange
mixture of several Slavic languages, of his own invention. In
these he developed a strong Panslavism, full of hatred of
everything foreign, except foreign culture, and expressed high
hopes for Russia’s future greatness. His works are said to
have been used by Peter the Great, but they were not
published until 1860.
POLITICAL REASONS FOR THE UNION OF THE CHURCHES
The sixth reason for my contention is of a political nature, and

refers to the nation’s weal. For this discord of the Churches is even
now the cause of Doroshénko’s rebellion and the Turkish invasion,
and continuation of the present war, and has from the beginning
been the cause of much evil. The Poles have an ancient adage: Aut
Moscovia Polonizat, aut Polonia Moscovizat, i. e., Either Moscow
shall become Polish, or Poland shall be a part of the Russian
empire. It is written in the histories of other nations, and the advisers
of the Tsar know it, that in the days of Feódor Ivánovich and later
there have been many congresses held and embassies sent for the
purpose of securing a Russian ruler for Poland and Lithuania. There
is no doubt but that Poland and Lithuania would have become
possessions of the Russian Tsars, if it were not for the division of the
Churches. And there would not have been many old and new wars,
nor bloodshed, in which so many hundreds of thousands of innocent
people have perished by the sword, and have been led into
Mussulman captivity. And the Russian nation would have long ago
been far advanced in profane and political sciences that are so
necessary for all well-educated persons, and would not be scorned
and ridiculed and hated by the European nations for its barbarism.
Nor would it suffer such unbearable disgrace and losses in war and
commerce from the Germans and Crimeans, as it is suffering now.
Book knowledge and political wisdom is a leaven of the mind, and a
fast friendship with the Poles and Lithuanians would have made the
Russian nation more renowned and more feared by the surrounding
peoples, and richer in all earthly possessions.
ON KNOWLEDGE
Kings must instruct their subjects, parents their children, how to

obtain knowledge. The time has come for our nation to be instructed
in various branches, for God has in His mercy and kindness uplifted
through Russia a Slavic kingdom to glory, power and majesty, such
as for splendour has never existed before among us. We observe
with other nations that as soon as a kingdom rises to higher
importance, the sciences and arts at once begin to flourish among
them. We, too, must learn, for under the honoured rule of the
Righteous Tsar and Great King Alexis Mikháylovich we have an
opportunity to wipe off the mould of our ancient barbarism, to acquire
various sciences, to adopt a better organisation of society, and to
reach a higher well-being.
ON FOREIGNERS
We are not possessed of an innate vivacity, nor praiseworthy

national characteristics, nor sincerity of heart. For people who have
such pride do not allow foreigners to command them, except by
force, whereas our nation of its own free will invites foreigners to
come to its country. Not one people under the sun has since the
beginning of the world been so abused and disgraced by foreigners
as we Slavs have been by the Germans. Our whole Slavic nation
has been subject to this kind of treatment; everywhere we have upon
our shoulders Germans, Jews, Scotchmen, Gypsies, Armenians,
Greeks and merchants of other nationalities, who suck our blood. In
Russia you will see nowhere any wealth, except in the Tsar’s
treasury; everywhere there is dire, bare poverty.
Grigóri Kotoshíkhin. (1630-1667.)
Grigóri Kotoshíkhin was a clerk, and later a scribe
(podyáchi) in the Department of Legations, a kind of Foreign
Office. He had been frequently employed as an ambassador
in connection with various treaties between Russia and
Sweden and Poland. While at Moscow, he had been guilty of
some dishonesty to his own country by giving certain secrets
of State to the Swedish ambassador; but that was an offence
not uncommon at Moscow, where patriotism was seldom of a
disinterested character. In 1664 he was sent out with the
Russian army that was then operating against Poland. Shortly
after, its two generals, Cherkásski and Prozoróvski, were
recalled, and Dolgorúki was sent in their place. The latter tried
to get Kotoshíkhin’s aid in denouncing his two predecessors
for traitorous actions, but Kotoshíkhin refused. Fearing the
wrath of Dolgorúki, he fled, first to Poland, and then, through
Prussia and Lubeck, to Sweden. He settled in Stockholm,
where he was employed in a semi-official capacity in the
Foreign Office. In a fit of intoxication he killed his host, who
was the official Russian translator of Sweden, and for this
crime he was beheaded.
Kotoshíkhin had evidently formed the plan of writing about
Russian customs before his arrival in Stockholm, but he was
also encouraged by distinguished Swedish statesmen, who
hoped to find important information about Russia in his work.
In his capacity of Legation scribe Kotoshíkhin had an
excellent opportunity to become intimately acquainted with
the immediate surroundings of the Tsar; but he supplemented
his knowledge by a clear insight, which he had gained in his
intercourse with other nations. There is no other work of Old
Russia that gives so detailed an account of contemporary
society. Kotoshíkhin’s work was first discovered in 1840,
though several manuscript translations in Swedish were
known to be extant in various libraries.
THE EDUCATION OF THE PRINCES
FROM CHAP. 1.
For the bringing up of the Tsarévich or Tsarévna they select from

among the women of all ranks a good, pure, sweet-tempered and
healthy woman, and that woman resides for a year in the Upper
Palace, in the apartments of the Tsarítsa. At the expiration of the
year, the husband of that woman, if she be of noble origin, is made
governor of a city, or receives some lands in perpetuity; if she be a
scribe’s, or some other serving-man’s wife, he is promoted and
granted a goodly salary; if he be a countryman, he is given a good
sum, and both are freed from the taxes and other imposts of the Tsar
during their whole lives. The Tsarévich and Tsarévna have also a
chief-nurse to look after them, a distinguished boyár’s wife,—an old
widow, and a nurse and other servants. When the Tsarévich reaches
the age of five, he is put in the keeping of a renowned boyár, a quiet
and wise man, and the latter has for a companion a man from the
lower ranks; they also choose from among the children of the boyárs
a few of the same age as the Tsarévich, to be his servants and
butlers. When the time arrives to teach the Tsarévich to read and
write, they select teachers from the instructed people, who are of a
quiet disposition and not given to drinking; the teacher of writing is
chosen from among the Legation scribes; they receive instruction in
Russia in no other language, neither Latin, Greek, German nor any
other, except Russian.
The Tsaréviches and Tsarévnas have each separate apartments
and servants to look after them. No one is permitted to see the
Tsarévich before his fifteenth year, except those people who serve
him, and the boyárs and Near People[121]; but after fifteen years he
is shown to all people, as his father goes with him to church or to
entertainments. When the people find out that he has been
presented, they come on purpose from many cities to get a look at
him. As the Tsaréviches, when they are young, and the elder and
younger Tsarévnas go to church, there are borne cloth screens all
around them, so that they cannot be seen; likewise, they cannot be
seen when they stand in church, except by the clergy, for they are
surrounded in church with taffeta, and there are few people in church
during that time but boyárs and Near People. Similarly, when they
travel to the monasteries to pray, their carriages are covered with
taffeta. For their winter rides, the Tsarítsa and Tsarévnas use
kaptánas, that is, sleighs in the shape of small huts that are covered
with velvet or red cloth, with doors at both sides, with mica windows
and taffeta curtains; for their summer rides they use kolymágas that
are also covered with cloth; these are entered by steps and are
made like simple carts on wheels, and not like carriages that hang
down on leather straps. These kolymágas and kaptánas have two
shafts, and are without an axle; only one horse is hitched in them,
with other horses in tandem.
PRIVATE LIFE OF THE BOYÁRS AND OF OTHER RANKS (CHAP. 13)
Boyárs and Near People live in their houses, both of stone and
wood, that are not well arranged; their wives and children live all in
separate rooms. Only a few of the greater boyárs have their own
churches in their courts; and those of the high and middle boyárs
who have no churches of their own, but who are permitted to have
priests at their houses, have the matins and vespers and other
prayers said in their own apartments, but they attend mass in any
church they may choose; they never have the mass in their own
houses. The boyárs and Near People pay their priests a yearly
salary, according to agreement; if the priests are married people,
they receive a monthly allowance of food and drink, but the widowed
priests eat at the same table with their boyárs.
On church holidays, and on other celebrations, such as name
days, birthdays and christenings, they frequently celebrate together.
It is their custom to prepare simple dishes, without seasoning,
without berries, or sugar, without pepper, ginger or other spices, and
they are little salted and without vinegar. They place on the table one
dish at a time; the other dishes are brought from the kitchen and are
held in the hands by the servants. The dishes that have little vinegar,
salt and pepper are seasoned at the table; there are in all fifty to one
hundred such dishes.
The table manners are as follows: before dinner the hosts order
their wives to come out and greet their guests. When the women
come, they place themselves in the hall, or room, where the guests
are dining, at the place of honour,[122] and the guests stand at the
door; the women greet the guests with the small salute,[123] but the
guests bow to the ground. Then the host makes a low obeisance to
his guests and bids them kiss his wife. At the request of his guests,
the host kisses his wife first; then the guests make individual bows
and, stepping forward, kiss his wife and, walking back again, bow to
her once more; she makes the small salute each time she kisses a
guest. Then the hostess brings each guest a glass of double-or
treble-spiced brandy, the size of the glass being a fourth, or a little
more, of a quart. The host makes as many low obeisances as there
are guests, asking each one in particular to partake of the brandy
which his wife is offering them. By the request of the guests, the host
bids his wife to drink first, then he drinks himself, and then the guests
are served; the guests make a low obeisance before drinking, and
also after they have drunk and as they return the glass. To those that
do not drink brandy, a cup of Rumney or Rhine wine, or some other
liquor, is offered.
After this drinking the hostess makes a bow to the guests and
retires to her apartments to meet her guests, the wives of the boyárs.
The hostess and the wives of the guests never dine with the men,
except at weddings; an exception is also made when the guests are
near relatives and there are no outsiders present at the dinner.
During the dinner, the host and guests drink after every course a cup
of brandy, or Rumney or Rhine wine, and spiced and pure beer, and
various kinds of meads. When they bring the round cakes to the
table, the host’s daughters-in-law, or married daughters, or the wives
of near relatives come into the room, and the guests rise and,
leaving the table, go to the door and salute the women; then the
husbands of the women salute them, and beg the guests to kiss their
wives and drink the wine they offer. The guests comply with their
request and return to the table, while the women go back to their
apartments. After dinner the host and guests drink more freely each
other’s healths, and drive home again. The boyárs’ wives dine and
drink in the same manner in their own apartments, where there are
no men present.
When a boyár or Near Man is about to marry off his son, or
himself, or a brother, or nephew, or daughter, or sister, or niece, he,
having found out where there is a marriageable girl, sends his
friends, men or women, to the father of that girl, to say that such and
such a one had sent them to inquire whether he would be willing to
give his daughter or relative to him or his relative, and what the girl’s
dowry would be in the trousseau, money, patrimony and serfs. If the
person addressed is willing to give him his daughter, or relative, he
replies to the inquiry that he intends to marry off the girl, only he has
to consider the matter with his wife and family, and that he will give a
definite answer on a certain day; but if he does not wish to give him
the girl, knowing that he is a drunkard, or fast, or has some other bad
habit, he will say at once that he will not give him the girl, or he will
find some excuse for refusing the request.
Having taken counsel with his wife and family, and having decided
to give him the girl, he makes a detailed list of her dowry, in money,
silver and other ware, dresses, patrimony and serfs, and sends it to
the people who had come to him from the prospective bridegroom,
and they, in their turn, take it to the bridegroom. Nothing is told of the
matter to the prospective bride, who remains in ignorance thereof.
The dowry of the bride appearing satisfactory, the groom sends his
people to the bride’s parents, to ask them to present the girl. The
bride’s parents reply that they are willing to show their daughter, only
not to the prospective groom, but to his father, mother, sister or near
female relative, in whom the groom may have special confidence.
On the appointed day the groom sends his mother or sister to
inspect the bride; the bride’s parents make preparations for that day,
attire their daughter in a fine garment, invite their relatives to dinner,
and seat their daughter at the table.
When the inspectress arrives, she is met with the honour due her,
and is placed at the table near the bride. Sitting at the table, the
inspectress converses with the girl on all kinds of subjects, in order
to try her mind and manner of speech, and closely watches her face,
eyes and special marks, in order to bring a correct report to the
bridegroom; having stayed a short time, she returns to the
bridegroom. If the inspectress takes no liking to the bride, having
discovered that she is silly, or homely, or has imperfect eyes, or is
lame, or a poor talker, and so reports to the groom, he gives her up,
and that is the last of it. But if the bride has found favour in the
inspectress’s eyes, and she tells the groom that the girl is good and
clever, and perfect in speech and all things, the groom sends his
former friends again to the girl’s parents, telling them that he likes
their daughter, and that he wishes to come to a parley to write the
marriage contract, in order to marry her on a certain date. The
bride’s parents send word to the groom through his trusted people
that he should come to the parley with a few of his friends in whom
he has most confidence on a certain day, in the forenoon or
afternoon.
On the appointed day the groom puts on his best clothes, and
drives with his father, or near relatives, or friends whom he loves
best to the bride’s parents. Upon arrival, the bride’s parents and her
near relatives meet them with due honour, after which they go into
the house and seat themselves according to rank. Having sat a
while, the groom’s father or other relative remarks that they have
come for the good work, as he has bid them; the host answers that
he is glad to see them, and that he is ready to take up the matter.
Then both sides begin to discuss all kinds of marriage articles and to
set the day for the wedding according to how soon they can get
ready for it, in a week, a month, half a year, a year, or even more.
Then they enter their names and the bride’s name and the names of
witnesses in the marriage contract, and it is agreed that he is to take
the girl on a certain date, without fail, and that the girl is to be turned
over to him on that date, without fail; and it is provided in that
contract that if the groom does not take the girl on the appointed day,
or the father will not give him his daughter on that day, the offending
party has to pay 1000, or 5000, or 10,000 roubles, as the agreement
may be. Having stayed a while, and having eaten and drunk, they
return home, without having seen the bride, and without the bride
having seen the groom; but the mother, or married sister, or wife of
some relative comes out to present the groom with some embroidery
from the bride.
If after that parley the groom finds out something prejudicial to the
bride, or someone interested in the groom tells him that she is deaf,
or mute, or maimed, or has some other bad characteristic, and the
groom does not want to take her,—and the parents of the bride
complain about it to the Patriarch that he has not taken the girl
according to the marriage articles, and does not want to take her,
and thus has dishonoured her; or the bride’s parents, having found
out about the groom that he is a drunkard, or diceplayer, or maimed,
or has done something bad, will not give him their daughter, and the
groom complains to the Patriarch,—the Patriarch institutes an
inquiry, and the fine is collected from the guilty party according to the
contract, and is given to the groom or bride, as the case may be; and
then both may marry whom they please.
But if both parties carry out their agreement, and get ready for the
wedding on the appointed day, then the groom invites to the wedding
his relatives and such other people as he likes, to be his ceremonial
guests, in the same manner as I described before about the Tsar’s
wedding[124]; on the part of the bride the guests are invited in the
same way. On the day of the wedding tables are set at the houses of
the groom and bride, and the word being given the groom that it is
time to fetch the bride, they all set out according to the ceremonial
rank: First the bread-men carry bread on a tray, then, if it be summer,
the priest with the cross rides on horseback, but in winter in a sleigh;
then follow the boyárs, the thousand-man, and the groom.
Having reached the court of the bride’s house, they enter the hall
in ceremonial order, and the bride’s father and his guests meet them
with due honour, and the order of the wedding is the same as
described in the Tsar’s wedding. When the time arrives to drive to
church to perform the marriage, the bride’smaids ask her parents to
give the groom and bride their blessing for the marriage. They bless
them with words, but before leaving bless them with a holy image,
and, taking their daughter’s hand, give her to the groom.
Then the ceremonial guests, the priest, and the groom with his
bride, whose hand he is holding, go out of the hall, and her parents
and their guests accompany them to the court; the groom places the
bride in a kolymága or kaptána, mounts a horse, or seats himself in
a sleigh; the ceremonial guests do likewise, and all drive to the
church where they are to be married. The bride’s parents and their
guests return to the hall, where they eat and drink until news is
brought from the groom; the bride is accompanied only by her own
and the bridegroom’s go-betweens. The two having been united, the
whole troop drives to the groom’s house, and news is sent to the
bride’s father that they have been propitiously married. When they
arrive at the groom’s court, the groom’s parents and their guests
meet them, and the parents, or those who are in their stead, bless
them with the images, and offer them bread and salt, and then all
seat themselves at the table and begin to eat, according to the
ceremony; and then the bride is unveiled.
The next morning the groom drives out with the bride’s-maid to call
the guests, those of his and the bride’s, to dinner. When he comes to
the bride’s parents, he thanks them for their having well brought up
their daughter, and for having given her to him in perfect health; after
having made the round to all the guests, he returns home. When all
the guests have arrived, the bride offers gifts to all the ceremonial
guests. Before dinner the groom goes with all the company to the
palace to make his obeisance to the Tsar. Having arrived in the
presence of the Tsar, all make a low obeisance, and the Tsar, without
taking off his cap, asks the married couple’s health. The groom bows
to the ground, and then the Tsar congratulates those who are united
in legitimate wedlock, and blesses the married pair with images, and
he presents them with forty sables, and for their garments a bolt of
velvet, and atlas, and gold-coloured silk, and calamanco, and simple
taffeta, and a silver vessel, a pound and a half to two pounds in
weight, to each of them; but the bride is not present at the audience.
Then the Tsar offers the thousand-man, and bridegroom, and the
ceremonial guests a cup of Rumney wine, and then a pitcher of
cherry wine, and after they have emptied their wine the Tsar
dismisses them.
After arriving home, they begin to eat and drink, and after the
dinner the parents and guests bless the married couple with images
and make them all kinds of presents, and after dinner the guests
drive home. On the third day, the bride and groom and the guests go
to dinner to the bride’s parents, with all their guests, and after the
dinner the bride’s parents and their guests make presents to the
married couple, and they drive home; and that is the end of the
festivity.
During the time that the groom is in the presence of the Tsar, the
bride sends in her name presents to the Tsarítsa and Tsarévnas,
tidies of taffeta, worked with gold and silver and pearls; the Tsarítsa
and Tsarévnas accept these gifts, and send to inquire about the
bride’s health.
During all the wedding festivities, no women are present, and
there is no music, except blowing of horns and beating of drums.
The proceeding is the same when a widowed daughter, or sister,
or niece is married off: the ceremonial and the festivity are the same.
In the beginning of the festivity, the priest who is to marry the pair
receives from the Patriarch and the authorities a permit, with the seal
attached to it, to marry them, having first ascertained that the bride
and groom are not related by sponsorship, nor by the ties of
consanguinity in the sixth and seventh generation, nor that he is the
husband of a fourth wife, nor she the wife of a fourth husband; but if
he discover that they are related by sponsorship, and so forth, he is
not allowed to marry them. Should the priest permit such an unlawful
marriage to take place, with his knowledge or without his knowledge,
he would be discharged from his priesthood and, if he was knowingly
guilty, he has to pay a big fine, and the authorities lock him up for a
year; but the married pair is divorced, without being fined, except the
sin which they have incurred, and if they have not been previously
married three times, they may marry again.
If a widower wants to marry a maiden, the ceremonial at the
wedding is the same, but during the wreathing in church the wreath
is placed on the groom’s right shoulder, whereas the bride wears her
wreath upon her head; if a widower for the third time marries a
maiden, the ceremonial is the same, but the wreath is placed on the
groom’s left shoulder, and the bride wears hers upon her head. The
same is done when a widow marries for the second or third time. But
when a widower marries for the second or third time a widow, then
there is no wreathing, and only a prayer is said instead of the
wreathing, and the wedding ceremonial is different from the one
mentioned above.
The manner of the parley, marriage and ceremonial wedding is the
same with the lower orders of the nobility as described above, and
the wedding is as sumptuous as they can afford to make it, but they
do not call upon the Tsar, except those of his retinue.
Among the merchants and peasants the parley and the ceremonial
are exactly the same, but they differ in their acts and dresses from
the nobility, each according to his means.
It sometimes happens that a father or mother has two or three
daughters, where the eldest daughter is maimed, being blind, or
lame, or deaf, or mute, while the other sisters are perfect in shape
and beauty and speech. When a man begins to sue for their
daughter, and he sends his mother, or sister, or someone else in
whom he has confidence to inspect her, the parents sometimes
substitute the second or third daughter for their maimed sister, giving
her the name of the latter, so that the inspectress, not knowing the
deceit, takes a liking to the girl and reports to the groom that she is a
proper person to marry. Then the groom, depending upon her words,
has a parley with the girl’s parents, that he is to marry her upon an
appointed day, and that the parents are to give her to him upon the
appointed day, and the fine is set so high that the guilty party is not
able to pay it. When the wedding takes place, the parents turn over
to him the maimed daughter, whose name is given in the articles of
marriage, but who is not the one the inspectresses had seen. But the
groom cannot discover on the wedding day that she is blind, or
disfigured, or has some other defect, or that she is deaf or mute, for
at the wedding she is veiled and does not say a word, nor can he
know whether she is lame, because her bride’smaids lead her under
her arms.
But in that case the man who has been deceived complains to the
Patriarch and authorities, and these take the articles of marriage and
institute an inquiry among the neighbours and housefolk, each one
individually, whether the person he had married is the one indicated
by name in the marriage articles. If so, the articles are valid, and no
faith is to be put in his contention, on the ground that it was his
business to be sure whom he was going to marry. But if the
neighbours and housefolk depose that the bride is not the same as
mentioned by name in the articles, the married pair is divorced, and
the parents have to pay a large fine and damages to the groom, and
besides the father is beaten with the knout, or his punishment is
even more severe, according to the Tsar’s will.
The same punishment is meted out to the man who presents his
serving maid or a widow in place of his unmarried daughter, by
giving her another name and dressing her up so as to look like his
daughter, or when his daughter is of short stature and they place her
on a high chair in such a way that her defect is not noticeable.
When parents have maimed or old daughters, and no one wants
to marry them, they are sent to a monastery to be shorn nuns.
When a man wants to inspect the bride himself, and the parents
grant the request, knowing that she is fair and that they need not be
ashamed of her, but the groom, having taken no liking to her, decries
her with damaging and injurious words, and thus keeps other suitors
away from her,—and the bride’s parents complain to the Patriarch or
authorities: these institute an inquiry, and having found the man
guilty, marry him to the girl by force; but if he has married another girl
before the complaint has been entered, the girl’s disgrace is taken
from her by an ukase.
When a man marries off his daughter or sister, and gives her a
large dowry in serfs and patrimony, and that daughter or sister,
having borne no children, or having borne some who have all died,
dies herself,—the dowry is all taken from her husband and is turned
over to those who had married her off. But if she leaves a son or
daughter, the dowry is, for the sake of her child, not taken from her
husband.
Gentle reader! Wonder not, it is nothing but the truth when I say
that nowhere in the whole world is there such deception practised
with marriageable girls as in the kingdom of Muscovy; there does not
exist there the custom, as in other countries, for the suitor to see and
sue for the bride himself.
The boyárs and Near People have in their houses 100, or 200, or
300, or 500, or 1000 servants, male and female, according to their
dignity and possessions. These servants receive a yearly salary, if
they are married, 2, 3, 5 or 10 roubles, according to their services,
and their wearing apparel, and a monthly allowance of bread and
victuals; they live in their own rooms in the court of the boyár’s
house. The best of these married servants are sent out by the
boyárs every year, by rotation, to their estates and villages, with the
order to collect from their peasants the taxes and rents. The
unmarried older servants receive some small wages, but the
younger ones receive nothing; all the unmarried servants get their
wearing apparel, hats, shirts and boots; the older of these servants
live in the farther lower apartments, and receive their food and drink
from the kitchen; on holidays they receive two cups of brandy each.
The female servants who are widows remain living in the houses of
their husbands, and they receive a yearly wage and a monthly
allowance of food; other widows and girls stay in the rooms of the
boyárs’ wives and daughters, and they receive their wearing apparel,
and their food from the boyár’s kitchen.
When these girls are grown up, the boyárs marry them, and also
the widows, to some one of their servants to whom they have taken
a liking, but sometimes by force. The wedding takes place in the
boyár’s hall, according to the rank of the marrying parties; the food
and festive dresses are furnished by the boyár. The girls are never
married to any person outside the boyár’s court, because both male
and female servants are his perpetual serfs. In the boyár’s house
there is an office for all domestic affairs, where an account is kept of
income and expenses, and all the affairs of the servants and
peasants are investigated and settled.
FOOTNOTES:
[121] A division of nobility below the boyárs.

[122] In the front corner, under the holy images.
[123] Bending as far as the girdle.
[124] “The wedding ceremony is as follows: on the Tsar’s side
the first order is the father and mother, or those who are in place
of his parents; the second order, the travellers,—the chief priest
with the cross, the thousand-man, who is a great personage in
that procession, and then the Tsar: eight boyárs. The duties of the
travellers are as follows: they stay with the Tsar and Tsarítsa at
the crowning in church, and at the table occupy higher places
than the others; the friends (drúzhka), whose duty it is to call the
guests to the wedding, to make speeches at the wedding in the
name of the thousand-man and Tsar, and to carry presents; the
bride’s maids (svákha) whose duty it is to watch the Tsarítsa, to
dress her and undress her; the candleholder, who holds the
candle when they get the Tsarítsa ready for the crowning; the
breadholders, who carry the bread on litters to and from church
(these litters are covered with gold velvet and embroidered cloth
and sable furs); the equerry with his suite. The third order is the
sitting boyárs, twelve men and twelve women, who sit as guests
at the tables, with the Tsar’s parents, but do not go to church with
the Tsar. The fourth order is of the court, who attend to the food
and drink.”

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