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.