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42 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic

order to remove them from their phenomenological refuge and
define them, specifically, as processes forming the sigmfier, logi-
cally anterior to the grammatical sequences the Cartesian subject
generates, but synchronous with their unfolding. 5.

The Thetic:
Rupture and/or Boundary

WE SHALL distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articula-

tions) from the realm of signification, which is always that of a
proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions. This
positionality, which Husserlian phenomenology orchestrates
through the concepts of doxa, position, and thesis, is structured as a
break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the
subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality. We shall
call this break, which produces the positing of signification, a thetic
phase. Ail enunciation, whether of a word or of a sentence, is thetic.
It requires an identification; in other words, the subject must sep-
arate from and through his image, from and through his objects.
This image and objects must first be posited in a space that be-
comes symbolic because it connects the two separated positions,
recording them or redistributing them in an open combinatorial
system.
The child's first so-called holophrastic enunciations in-
clude gesture, the object, and vocal emission. Because they are
perhaps not yet sentences (NP-VP), generative grammar is not
readily equipped to account for them. Nevertheless, they are al-
ready thetic in the sense that they separate an object from the
subject, and attribute to it a semiotic fragment, which thereby be-
comes a signifier. That this attribution is either metaphoric or
metonymic ("woof-woof" says the dog, and all animals become
"woof-woof") is logically secondary to the fact that it constitutes
an attribution, which is to say, a positing of identity or difference,
and that it represents the nucleus of judgment or proposition.
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44 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic The Semiotic and the Symbolic I 45
We shall say that the thetic phase of the signifying process without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the
is the "deepest structure" of the possibility of enunciation, in other threshold of language. Such a standpoint constitutes neither a re-
words, of signification and the proposition. Husserl theologizes duction of the subject to the transcendental ego, nor a denial {de-
this deep logic of signification by making it a productive origin of negation} of the thetic phase that establishes signification
the "free spontaneity" of the Ego:
Its free spontaneity and activity consists in positing, positing on the
strength of this or that, positing as an antecedent or a conse-
quent, and so forth; it does not live within the theses as a pas-
sive indweller; the theses radiate from it as from a primary
source of generation \Erzeugungen\. Every thesis begins with a
point of insertion \Einsatzpunkt] with a point at which the positing has
its origin \\Jrsprungssetzung\-, so it is with the first thesis and with
each further one in the synthetic nexus. This 'inserting' even be-
longs to the thesis as such, as a remarkable modus of original
actuality. It somewhat resembles the fiat, the point of insertion of
will and action, 47

In this sense, there exists only one signification, that of the thetic phase,
which contains the object as well as the proposition, and the
complicity between them.48 There is no sign that is not thetic and
every sign is already the germ of a "sentence," attributing a sig-
nifier to an object through a "copula" that will function as a sig-
nified 49 Stoic semiology, which was the first to formulate the ma-
trix of the sign, had already established this complicity between sign
and sentence, making them proofs of each other.
Modern philosophy recognizes that the right to represent
the founding thesis of signification (sign and/or proposition) de-
volves upon the transcendental ego. But only since Freud have
we been able to raise the question not of the origin of this thesis
but rather of the process of its production. To brand the thetic as
the foundation of metaphysics is to risk serving as an antecham-
ber for metaphysics—unless, that is, we specify the way the thetic
is produced. In our view, the Freudian theory of the unconscious
and its Lacanian development show, precisely, that thetic signi-
fication is a stage attained under certain precise conditions dur-
ing the signifying process, and that it constitutes the subject