45 "True speech" is the speech authenticated by the other in faith sworn or given. The other makes speech adequate to itself--and no longer to the object--by sending back the message in inverted form, by making it true, by henceforth identifying the subject with itself, by "stating that it is the same." Adequation--as authentification--must pass through intersubjectivity. Speech "is therefore an act, and as such supposes a subject. But it is not enough to say that in this act the subject supposes another subject, for it is much rather that the subject is founded in this act as being the other, but in that paradoxical unity of the one and the other, by whose means, as has been shown above, the one depends upon the other in order to become identical to itself.
"Thus one can say that speech manifests itself not only as a communication in which the subject, in order to await that the other make his message true, is going to project the message in inverted form, but also as a communication in which this message transforms the subject by stating that it is the same. As is apparent in every given pledge, in which declarations like 'you are my wife,' or 'you are my master,' signify 'I am your husband,' 'I am your disciple.'
"Speech therefore appears all the more truly speech in that its truth is less founded in what is called adequation to the thing: true speech, thereby, is opposed paradoxically to true discourse, their truth being distinguished by the fact that the former constitutes the subjects' acknowledgment of their Beings in that they have an inter-est in them, while the later is constituted by the knowledge of the real, to the extent that the subject aims for it in objects. But each of the truths distinguished here is changed by intersecting with the other in its path." Ecrits (F), p 351 (Variantes de la cure-type ). In this intersecting, "true speech" always appears as more true than "true discourse," which always presupposes the order of true speech, the order of the intersubjective contract, of symbolic exchange, and therefore of the debt. ''But true speech, in questioning true discourse about what it signifies, will find that signification always refers to signification, there being no thing that can be shown otherwise than with a sign, and henceforth will show true discourse to be doomed to error." Ecrits (F), p. 352. The ultimate adequation of the truth as true speech therefore has the form of making quits (I'acquittement ), the "strange adequation . . . which finds its response in the symbolic debt for which the subject as subject of speech is responsible." Ecrits (E), p. 144. These are the final words of "The Freudian Thing." Adequation to the thing (true discourse) therefore has its foundation in the adequation of speech to itself (true speech), that is to the thing itself: in other words of the Freudian thing to itself: "The thing speaks of itself" (Ecrits (E), p. 121), and it says: "I, the truth, speak." The thing is the truth: as cause, both of itself and of the things of which true discourse speaks. These propositions are less new, particularly in relation to the Rome Report, to Variantes de la cure-type , and to the texts of the same period, than their author says: "This is to introduce the effects of truth as cause at a quite different point, and to impose a revision of the process of causality--the first stage of which would seem to be to recognize the inherent nature of the heterogeneity of these effects.5" Ecrits (E), p. 127. (The footnote: "5. This rewritten paragraph antedates a line of thought that I have since explored further (1966) ." Ecrits (E), p. 145. )
'True speech" (adequate to itself, conforming to its essence, destined to be quits of a debt which in the last analysis binds it only to itself ) therefore permits the contract which permits the subject "to become identical to itself." Therefore it reconstitutes the ground of Cartesian certainty: the transformation of the truth into certainty, subjectification (the determination of the Being of beings as subject). and intersubjectification (the chain Descartes-Hegel-Husserl ). This chain ceaselessly captures, in the Ecrits . Heideggerian motions which would appear, rigorously speaking, to be allergic to it, and would appear to have "destructive" effects on it. For the moment, let us abandon these kinds of questions--the most decisive ones-that Lacan's discourse never articulates.