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.