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.