“It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality, in its reality which is that of the being.

The ‘subjectivity’ we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject.’  It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being himself…but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness.  Now we hold that ‘subjectivity,’ whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language.  ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’  That is where we see the foundation of ‘subjectivity,’ which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.'”

-Emile Benveniste-

“signification occurs only through discourse, that discourse requires a subject, and that the subject itself is an effect of discourse.”

-Kaja Silverman-