The Subject in Lacan (3 of 4): The split that IS the subject

Lacan’s idea of the act is helpful in understanding the subject as event in speech. The act, for Lacan, requires the symbolic - it occurs, after all, through symbolic utterance - yet without being wholly mandated or reducible to it. And yet this does not mean we have a self-possessed subject who is able to over-ride, or step outside of, the symbolic. In the act we have instead an event enabled through the medium of speech, which, like a declarative statement, is able to render a change to the symbolic and the speaker alike. It helps here to remember that the subject, as over-written or inhabited by the Other of language, has otherness folded into itself, is grounded in that which is unassimilable, and is thus itself necessarily incommensurable, an instance of irreconcilability subjectivized.