Lacan metaphorizes the question of our contradictions, paradoxes and apparent aporias in the following way: he says that we are busy. Busy preparing our suitcases, examining our conscience, or organizing a labyrinth. Busy getting our suitcases together, forgetting them or leaving them in the locker, but they are always suitcases for a trip that is never made.
The anguish of becoming is evident in the following scene: The train is about to leave, it is the only one, there will be no others, and we have fifteen minutes to collect all our belongings in order to catch it.
Of course the trains come, and sometimes they are lived and one gets on them, several trips and several trains; nevertheless, at a certain moment bathed in contingency, one of them appears as the last, as the important or the only one – if one has not yet ventured into a journey towards the unknown.
We believe that there is not enough time and, nevertheless, we always have time to procrastinate about something. Perhaps about the most authentic in each one of us, what summons us as a cause of movement. Not delaying means arriving at the act that reaches the target and baptizes a new horizon, the instant that makes a dent in what has been and is no longer.
Crossing the Rubicon, raising your voice – your own – against the immensity of what until now was prohibited, vetoed by yourself, opens the possibility of realization, a “I did it, therefore it is possible.”
There are those who transgress the frameworks of legality in order to generate new laws. Others only enjoy the transgression. Hence the radical difference between irreverence – revealing oneself as a subject of desire, of one’s own desire, of desire for desire, that is, a desire to continue desiring – and rebellion – a rebellion against the established, commonly called “complaining.”
The desire of the fabricating other to some degree provokes in us the phrase: “What does he want from me?” And the constructed response, for or against, is nothing more than a desire subject to the service of the other (loved or not).
Since we are constituted on the basis of a borrowed desire, alienating ourselves to it is always the inevitable first step; and to separate in order to form one of our own, finding a foot on it, is one of the greatest challenges: a leap into the void, the precipice of the unexpected.
What is it that I want?!
Jean Paul Sartre throws some light on the question: “We are what we do with what they did with us.”
The anguish of what has been lost, the nostalgia of past time, is in fact a defence against the anguish of the time that comes and will come, against the chance and the determination of an act, which impacts from inside or outside with the fierceness of uncertainty.
Anguish is what is certain, what one can be sure of. A glimpse of an exit to this labyrinthine entrance: “To act is to extract certainty from anguish” Lacan proposed. Love is certain. Hate is certain, that of the drifting disappointment of love and the other. What is certain is that there is a choice. The truth is that, sometimes, there is not. The truth is that desire is destiny, and destiny is uncertain. The certain thing is that necessarily something is lost; and that to win, you have to lose.