Man is a subject and therefore an heir

Every month, youtuber Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a phenomenon typical of our times. This month, he tackles the idea that the individual can develop alone.

In A crazy solitude (2006), the philosopher Olivier Rey, with a flair that we can now give him credit for, attacked a founding illusion of modernity: that of a subject who would make himself alone, free from laws, authority figures and traditions. Against this fantasy of self-engendering, he rightly reminded us that we only become human by becoming part of a symbolic order that precedes us.

The ambivalence of the term subject (both that which is submissive, and that which subdues) suggests that man conquers his freedom through subjection. From Latin subjectum, literally «placed under», the subject is in respect of something beyond him. The subject of a community, of rites, of a religion, of a law, of a culture, and so on. - In all cases, of a structure that includes, in the etymological sense of the term, a «symbolic‘ dimension of interlocking, reciprocal recognition‘.

Being a subject implies fitting into a framework that no-one brings with them or builds on their own. Thus, biological birth must be replayed on a symbolic level, carnal filiation coupled with moral filiation. 

Today, the individual is invited to build himself alone and summoned to be «himself». Yet there is a fundamental contradiction between the cult of self-sufficiency and the ideal of the ’self".’be self: because being oneself implies keeping one's word and making a commitment. I am what I have confessed to be in front of others, so I can't be myself. be without them.

The first function of the law, i.e. the symbolic, is to civilize the loss of fusional wholeness that marks our entry into life. Jean-Pierre Lebrun (A world without limits, Erès, 1997) argues that the limit is first and foremost the father - not as a man or genitor, but as the figure who introduces the child to the order of language and lack. The father, says Lebrun, acts as the «first stranger». He is the one who comes to say to the child you're not all and not everything is due to you. In other words, it introduces the law of otherness.

The symbolic - all that is instituted by man's symbolic skills, including customs and values, and above all language - makes absence bearable, so that emptiness and lack are not destructive. Through language, the negative is not presented in the brutal form of impossibility, but in the civilized form of laws and prohibitions that the subject is called upon to respect. The forbidden is not an instrument of coercion; it is the symbolic response to a structural impossibility, «the transposition of a state of affairs into a fact of speech. It's there to help us move on from the fantastical ‘anything's possible‘ to the limitations imposed by reality, other than by an empirical and bestial clash with the resistance of things. It's there to give meaning to the negative, and thereby make it acceptable, if not pleasant.’

In their blind pursuit of an ideal of emancipation, our societies have undermined the conditions of their own promise. They forget that passing on the law means passing on what alone gives meaning to freedom. To reject any structuring externality is to condemn each individual to tinker alone with a humanity that can only fall from his or her hands.

In each issue, trainer Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a social phenomenon. Watch his videos on the YouTube channel «La Cartouche».

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All chronicles by Ralph Müller

To its YouTube channel «The Cartridge»