The knowledge that disturbs

The most common fantasy about analysis is that we will learn about ourselves there, like studying an instruction manual for our own psyche. One expects to accumulate reassuring knowledge that will allow us to better "manage" our life. Nothing could be further from what really happens in the analytic process. The true knowledge that emerges in analysis doesn't come to complete our understanding, but to puncture our certainties.

This disturbing knowledge isn't added to what we already believe we know about ourselves; rather, it undermines those carefully built imaginary constructions. It's not knowledge that is learned, but one that erupts, that imposes itself, that emerges despite our resistances. It's a knowledge that destabilizes precisely because it touches something of our most intimate truth, the one we prefer to keep at a distance.

The paradox of analysis is that its efficacy doesn't lie in accumulating more knowledge, but in allowing that disturbing knowledge that already inhabits us to emerge. It's not about building new certainties, but about making space for the old ones to fall, allowing something more authentic to arise from the cracks in our imaginary securities.

Neoliberal virtues

The terms "self-esteem" and "resilience" have become the twin pillars of neoliberal subjectivity, a conceptual machinery designed to produce docile subjects before market voracity. Self-esteem, far from being a tool for genuine self-valuation, functions as a relentless superego imperative: "you must love yourself enough to remain productive." It's the perfect internalization of market logic at the very core of our relationship with ourselves.

Resilience completes this perverse operation. It doesn't celebrate the human capacity to resist and transform adverse conditions, but rather rewards silent submission to any form of systemic violence. The message is clear: your value lies in your capacity to endure, to bend without breaking, to absorb blow after blow without ever questioning who delivers them. It's the perfect depoliticization of suffering, now converted into an opportunity to demonstrate your "strength."

This conceptual pair operates as the perfect device of contemporary capitalism: while self-esteem demands you constantly meet market demands, resilience congratulates you for enduring its consequences without rebellion. It's no coincidence that this discourse deliberately confuses submissive optimism with the true enthusiasm that arises from collective struggle and transformation.

The poetics of lack

Language offers us an array of words to name that which constitutes us: hiatus, gap, void, hollow. It's no coincidence that there are so many ways to signal absence. Each of these words illuminates a different aspect of that fundamental lack that runs through us, as if language itself were trying to circle, again and again, this central truth of our condition: we are beings marked by incompleteness.

The gap is not an accident in our structure, a defect that we must correct. It is the very space where the possibility of desire, movement, and change emerges. In the distance between what we are and what we believe ourselves to be, in the separation between the saying and what is said, in the interval between one moment and another, opens the field where subjectivity can unfold. The pause is not an interruption of meaning, but its condition of possibility.

These words, in their apparent negativity, reveal something fundamental: lack is not the enemy to be conquered, but the vital space that allows us to exist as desiring subjects. The hollow in our being is not there to be filled, but to be inhabited. It is in this constitutive void where our most radical potential resides, our capacity to become something more than what we already are.