The necessary wound

Vulnerability is not a weakness we can overcome nor a condition we can choose: it is the very structure of our subjectivity. Like a city that has let its walls fall, the subject is fundamentally exposed, open to the wounds that come from encountering the other. This radical openness precedes any conscious decision or voluntary act; it is the primordial mode of our existence.

The contemporary fantasy of an armored, self-sufficient self is precisely that: a defensive fantasy against this fundamental truth. We are not vulnerable by accident or by default: vulnerability is the very condition of being alive, of being able to be affected, of being able to feel and relate. The self is, at its most intimate core, a wound that never heals.

This constitutive openness, this impossibility of closing ourselves completely upon ourselves, is what makes every significant experience possible. Only because we are vulnerable can we love, learn, transform ourselves. True strength does not consist in denying this condition, but in consciously inhabiting it, in making our fundamental wound a source of encounter and creation.

The face as primordial call

The face of the Other is not simply a configuration of physical features or a social mask: it is the irruption of a radical alterity that precedes any attempt at understanding or categorization. Before we can assign it meaning, even before we can defend ourselves from its presence, the face has already interpellated us. It is an opening that emerges from beyond form, a manifestation that exceeds the visible.

This manifestation constitutes the first discourse, not because it articulates words, but because it establishes the very possibility of all dialogue. The face speaks in a language older than words: it is both plea and command, vulnerability and authority intertwined. It confronts us with an ethical demand we cannot evade, a call that constitutes us as responsible subjects before any conscious decision.

What is revealed in the face is the impossibility of reducing the Other to our categories of understanding. It is an opening that appears in the opening itself, an enigma that asks not to be solved but responded to. The face speaks to us precisely from this irreducibility, from this fundamental resistance to being converted into an object of our knowledge or our power.

The word as light

The symbolic power of the word transcends its communicative function: it is presence that illuminates, that transforms the ominous into habitable. It's not the content of speaking that sustains, but the very act of enunciation as testimony of presence. The voice of the Other operates as a beacon in darkness, not for what it says, but for the very fact of its emergence in the void.

Language reveals here its most fundamental function: creating bridges between solitudes, converting the threatening space of absence into habitable territory. The word functions as an organizer of experience, as a constructor of psychic reality. It doesn't simply transmit information: it establishes the very coordinates of what is possible, thinkable, livable.

In this phenomenon condenses the deepest truth about language's function in subjective constitution: its capacity to transform reality by the mere act of naming it, to make present what is absent, to convert chaos into cosmos. The word doesn't just describe the world: it creates it, organizes it, makes it habitable. It is light that not only illuminates, but constitutes what is illuminated.

-

In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1)