The fabric of discourse

No one lives outside discourse. From the moment we are born, we are captured by a network of signifiers that precedes and constitutes us. Language is not a tool we use: it is the very matter from which our social being is made. Even when we believe we are in silence, we are inhabited by the words of others.

The analytic experience shows us that each symptom, each fantasy, each form of suffering is woven with the threads of social discourse. The analysand who believes they speak only from their personal history discovers, little by little, that their most intimate words are interwoven with the signifiers of their time, their class, their culture. There is no subjectivity that isn't crossed by at least one discourse.

What we call "I" is, in reality, a crossing point where various discourses meet and knot together. Our singularity doesn't lie in being outside discourse, but in the unique way in which each of us inhabits and is inhabited by these discourses that constitute us. The true analytic act consists in making visible this invisible weave that sustains and determines us.

The illusion of neutrality

There exists a particularly dangerous contemporary fantasy: that of being able to remain "outside" of politics. As if a neutral position were possible, as if silence weren't already a way of taking sides. We are political beings in the same way that fish are aquatic beings: it's not a choice, it's our condition of existence.

In every daily gesture, in every complicit silence, in every "I don't get involved in politics," we are already doing politics. The difference lies only in whether we are conscious of our position or if we prefer the comfort of believing ourselves neutral. We don't choose whether to participate in the political game, only if we do it actively or passively, if we swim with or against the current.

The myth of neutrality serves perfectly the interests of established power. When someone says "I don't do politics," they are doing precisely the politics that the system needs: that of the passive spectator, the silent accomplice. The only real choice is between being conscious of our political position or letting others choose it for us.

The battlefield of speech

Contemporary clinical practice reveals an uncomfortable truth: there is no neutrality in speech. Every word we pronounce is a position taken, a way of locating ourselves in the social field. When we speak, we don't just communicate: we establish power relations, defend symbolic territories, construct or destroy realities. Language is never innocent: it's a battlefield where each phrase can be both an act of resistance and of submission.

Analysands who come to consultation usually believe their symptoms are purely personal, until they discover that their way of speaking (or staying silent) reproduces social discourses that run through them. Their words are trenches where they take refuge or from which they fire. Each session is a potential small revolution, where worn-out words can acquire new meanings, where imposed silences can transform into cries of freedom.

The true analytic act consists in making visible this political dimension of speech. It's not just about interpreting symptoms, but helping the subject discover how their discourse positions them in the world. Each intervention by the analyst is also a political act: it can reinforce existing power structures or open spaces for new ways of speaking and being.