We are subjects, aren’t we, that is well known.

First, to our mother tongue that forces us to pass under its conditions to speak.

And that’s just as well, because our French tongue here offers us one of those ambiguities that make it so valuable: subject perhaps, but no less subjected. I am called upon to come in the first-person singular, I, precisely where I am most radically determined, in other words within the conditions of my own tongue and the jouissance transmitted to me by it.

A strange paradox, which is not equally apparent in all languages[1].

The practice of Psychoanalysis exposes us regularly to this subjection: rather than to be engaged in an analysis and the possible exercise of his own responsibility, the subject often prefers, once all things considered, the return to this jouissance, if it exempts him.

Our next winter seminar – suggestion and its avatars – will be an opportunity to examine this regression, and whether we are doomed to it.

Stéphane Thibierge

[1] Ndt In English the paradox is there between the words subject and subjected, as in French Sujet and assujetti.