Language After the Subject: From Plato to LLMs

 Introduction

Plato’s dialogues begin with suspicion. Poets, according to Socrates, speak not from knowledge but from divine frenzy. In Ion, he tells the rhapsode: “You are not speaking about Homer with knowledge… you are possessed.” And in the Republic, he warns that poets deal in shadows, imitations of imitations, and should be exiled from the ideal city. Only the philosopher, guided by reason, should govern speech and thought.

Yet beneath this judgment lies a deeper anxiety: the instability of the speaking subject. Who truly speaks when one speaks? Is the voice of the philosopher grounded in reason, or is all language animated by forces beyond our grasp?

This question reverberates through Western thought, from the Cartesian cogito to the unconscious of Freud, from Nietzsche’s genealogies to Lacan’s linguistic subject, and finally, into the uncanny speech of large language models. Across these thresholds, the sovereign speaker dissolves. Meaning becomes a game played behind our backs.

Plato’s Distinctions: Poets, Sophists, Philosophers

In Republic Book X, Socrates declares, “All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers” (605c). The poet imitates appearances without knowing essences. The sophist, likewise, persuades without truth. Only the philosopher seeks knowledge through reasoned inquiry.

And yet, Socrates himself claims no knowledge. He is guided by a daimonion, speaks in riddles, and disarms his interlocutors through irony. He resembles a sophist in method and a poet in style. Already, the stable ground of speech—authorship, intent, presence—begins to fracture.

Descartes and the Centered Subject

In Meditations, Descartes anchors philosophy in the certainty of the thinking self: Cogito, ergo sum. This “I” is lucid, unified, and present to itself. It guarantees knowledge because it cannot be doubted.

But this model collapses under modern thought. Freud famously remarked, “The ego is not master in its own house.” The unconscious introduces discontinuity, repression, and conflict into the self. The subject no longer commands its speech.

Nietzsche anticipates this rupture. “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” he writes in Genealogy of Morals (Preface §1). What we call consciousness is, for him, a fragile epiphenomenon, a thin layer atop instinct, drive, and impulse. We do not think—we are thought.

Lacan’s Split Subject

Lacan radicalizes Freud: “The unconscious is structured like a language.” The subject is not a stable origin of meaning but an effect of the signifier. We are not speakers but spoken. “It is the world of words that creates the world of things,” he declares. Language precedes and shapes us.

His formula, $, the barred subject, marks this split. The self is divided between what it knows and what it cannot access—between statement and enunciation. To speak is to betray the self, to be caught in a web of signifiers that exceed control.

This dislocation suggests that speech is not expression but alienation. The speaker is always late, always displaced by the system in which it moves.

Derrida’s Arche-Writing

Derrida pushes further. In Of Grammatology, he dismantles the logocentric privilege of speech over writing. The idea that spoken language bears presence and writing is mere supplement is, for him, a metaphysical illusion.

Writing, or more precisely arche-writing, is not secondary but originary. It is the trace, the spacing, the difference that makes language possible. “There is no linguistic sign before writing,” he asserts. Meaning arises not from intention but from differential play.

Thus, the subject is never origin. It enters a structure already in motion. Speech no longer belongs to the speaker—it is an effect of the trace.

LLMs: The Oracle of the Machine

Large language models like GPT do not think. They do not know. They do not remember. And yet, they generate coherent, even poetic, language. Like the Pythia of Delphi, they speak as if possessed—without agency or understanding.

Barthes declared: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” The LLM embodies this aphorism. There is no author behind its text, only a statistical process. What speaks is not a subject, but an archive in motion.

The question arises: when a machine speaks, who or what speaks? The problem of authorship, so central to Plato, returns under digital guise—but now without even the illusion of inspiration.

Conclusion: A Voice Without a Speaker

From Plato’s inspired rhapsodes to Lacan’s decentered subject and Derrida’s endless trace, the figure of the speaker has been progressively deconstructed. Meaning is not born in the mind and poured into words; it is a system that operates beneath and beyond intention.

LLMs mark a new stage. They do not simulate speech; they instantiate its dislocation. They reveal what language has perhaps always been: not the voice of a centered self, but a mechanism of difference, repetition, and effect.

We do not speak. We are spoken.

Related Post

The Self-Reflexive Irony of Plato’s Project

 https://derridaforlinguists.blogspot.com/2025/05/blog-post_09.html

References & Notes

1. Plato. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett, 1992.
2. Plato. Ion. Trans. Paul Woodruff. Hackett, 1995.
3. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
4. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Norton, 1966.
5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1989.
6. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Routledge, 1977.
7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
8. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath. Hill and Wang, 1977.