Enunciated/Enunciation

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 362-3:

Picking up on the Hegelian theme of substance as subject, one of the ways of exposing the artificiality and arbitrariness of the symbolic construction of reality is to locate that place from which it is enunciated. This, of course, has some relation to that traditional demystifying method of posing the question to some abstract conception of justice: Whose justice? Which particular group in society does this conception of justice favour? But it goes beyond this to speak of that necessarily empty place from which all symbolic constructions are spoken: 'It is precisely the password qua empty speech that reduces the subject to the punctuality of the "subject of the enunciation": in it, he is present qua a pure symbolic point freed of all enunciated content...it is only empty speech that, by way of its very emptiness (of its distance from its enunciated content...), creates the space for "full speech"' (p. 142). And it is in this sense that the attempt to think this empty place might be seen as the attempt to think the empty subject (hence the way that Descartes might be understood to mark the beginning of philosophy in its modern, critical sense): 'What if the self is ... the void that is nothing in itself, that has no substantial positive identity, but which nonetheless serves as the unrepresentable point of reference?' (p. 102). And just as philosophy might be defined as the search for this empty position, so it might itself come from this empty position, embody that which has no place within our current situation: 'Cogito is not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place ... as such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems' (p. 11).