The arbitrariness of power

Contemporary clinical practice constantly confronts us with this uncomfortable truth: the power of the master's discourse resides not in its rationality or justice, but in its pure arbitrariness. It doesn't need to make sense to function; it functions precisely because it can dispense with meaning. Its authority doesn't emerge from the logic of its arguments but from its ability to impose itself without needing to argue.

What makes this discourse effective is precisely its indifference to coherence or justification. The master doesn't say "this is so because..." but simply "this is so." The absence of justification isn't a weakness of this discourse but its strength: by not depending on reasons, it becomes immune to rational questioning. Power sustains itself in its own exercise, not in its legitimacy.

The paradox is that the more arbitrary the command, the more effective it becomes. The master's discourse produces obedience not despite its senselessness, but because of it. Its ability to reign doesn't depend on its content but on its pure form of imposition. It's a discourse that seeks not to convince but to subdue, aspires not to truth but to dominion.

Beyond the system

There's a frequent confusion that current clinical practice compels us to clarify: discourse is not simply language. While language operates as a formal system of signs and rules, discourse is that point where words intertwine with desire, where grammar meets subjectivity. We don't speak just with linguistic code: we speak from our wounds, from our voids, from the identifications that constitute us.

Language can be studied as an abstract structure, but discourse always implies a subject who is at stake in what they say. Every time we speak, we don't just transmit information: we reveal our subjective position, our unconscious identifications, our singular way of inhabiting the symbolic world. Discourse is language traversed by desire.

What constitutes us as subjects is not the mastery of a linguistic system, but our unique way of being caught in discourse. The analysand doesn't suffer from poor use of language: they suffer from their position in discourse, from the place from which they speak and from which they are spoken. Analysis operates precisely in this dimension, where saying always exceeds what is said.

The credit factory

The contemporary subject emerges from university transformed into a figure: so many accumulated credits, so much acquired market value, so much debt incurred. It's no coincidence that we use the same term -credit- for both passed courses and financial debt. The university no longer forms subjects: it produces credit carriers, calculable units of potential value in the labor market.

This transformation of the student into a walking credit reveals the true function of today's university: converting knowledge into a quantifiable commodity and the subject into its bearer. We don't study to know, but to accumulate credits. We don't learn to transform ourselves, but to become more "creditworthy," more financeable, more sellable in the competencies market.

The paradox is that these credits that supposedly qualify us, actually disqualify us as thinking subjects. We leave university marked, yes, but not by knowledge but by a mercantile logic that reduces all knowledge to its exchange value. True education should begin precisely by questioning this reduction of knowledge to credits.