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From a psychoanalytic standpoint, truth reveals itself less as a goal to be reached than as a path to follow. Failure is no longer a fault, but the very breath of desire and of existence in the making.
Within this framework, the statement can be read as an ethic of movement, desire, and fruitful incompleteness. It suggests that truth is not a fixed object, but a direction; not a trophy, but a process. Likewise, failing is not a mistake, but the condition of one who is on the journey. As Franck Pavloff, French writer and psychologist, puts it in L’hôtel du Rayon Vert: “The path is made by walking; there is no truth other than the one toward which you are moving. Not reaching it is not a problem.”
What do these words tell us? That we do not discover ourselves by staring at some distant, untouchable truth, like a fortress on the horizon, but by taking steps that carve a path through a landscape we have yet to know. That truth is not a ready-made object to grasp, but a direction to follow. That failure is not a mistake, but the very rhythm of the journey. And, finally, that truth is always a matter of perspective.
At the heart of the statement lies a paradox: truth is measured not by possession or “reaching it,” but by staying true to a chosen direction. In psychoanalysis, this reversal reflects the ethic of desire. What shapes us is less the sense of completion than the ongoing, renewing impulse that carries us forward.
From its beginnings, psychoanalysis has sought to listen to what the subject does not fully know about themselves, yet reveals through dreams, slips of the tongue, or symptoms, and to help this veiled expression reach a form of livable insight. Such insight, however, is never total or final. Lacan emphasized this with a striking phrase: truth is “a half-saying.” It appears in fragments, in flashes, and in partial admissions, never as a closed conclusion. It develops with the rhythm of speech as it is tested. When the analysand speaks, stumbles, corrects themselves, returns, or contradicts themselves, they are simply weaving their truth through the act of speaking. This is not a failure, but the very condition for understanding.
Positivist ideology seeks to “reach” and in doing so aims for closure. In contrast, psychic understanding allows itself to be surprised by a pattern that gradually takes shape as one moves forward. The walker discovers that what once seemed like sterile repetition can, if they allow themselves, become a path toward their true self and toward their truth, showing how they are in tune with the source of their desire.
Here, desire does not mean a need or a passing fancy. It is the structuring tension that sets us in motion, never reaching its object, but doing something far richer by moving and creating. In the consulting room, many analysands say, “I want to be done,” “I want to understand once and for all,” “I want to change.” But analysis teaches a different temporality, a different rhythm. The subject learns to recognize which thread carries them forward and which illusions lead them astray. The destination becomes secondary to the steadiness of the step. Truth becomes the trace left by the walk.
The modern ear, fed by injunctions to triumphalism, does not understand incompleteness or failure. Psychoanalysis reverses the meaning of lack. Lack is not a void to fill, but the very condition of a desire that exhales. If I were to reach the supposed truth, I would have nothing left to say, nothing left to live. Analysis teaches that not knowing everything is not necessarily distressing. In the consulting room, one sometimes hears, “I thought I was done with this problem, and now it has returned.” The temptation is to blame oneself. Yet what returns is never identical. Repetition is not simply doing the same thing again; it is also trying again. The cure sometimes helps repetition take on a new form, setting it differently. The analysand then notices, “I made the same choice again, but this time I see it. I catch the hint of deception earlier.”
This quotation from Pavloff rejects the intoxication of total truths, which cause so much harm. Ideologies, for example, favor destinations; they promise an absolute “after,” an Eden delivered ready-made. The ethic of the step stands against this, reminding us that the human being is shaped through exploration, self-critique, and revision. The truth we speak of does not confine, but remains open in its unfolding, protecting against fanaticism. Our times, however, fear uncertainty. They prefer loud credos to paths that must be traced, paths that demand letting go of knowledge, images, or ideas that are too full and promise an always-illusory fusion, whether romantic, ideological, or identity-based.
Some might object that this politics of the fragile is a weakness, when in reality it is a patient strength. It values steadiness over the intoxication of spectacular endings. It encourages endurance, doubt, correction when one is wrong, and, when necessary, starting anew. A people, a community, or an institution are sustained more by the quality of their ongoing journey than by the brilliance of their proclamations. The truth of a social body—whether at the scale of a nation, a couple, or an individual—is measured by its ability to acknowledge mistakes without self-hatred, to begin again without crushing guilt, and to persevere in this continual movement.
We are born without a predetermined path. Throughout our lives, we learn to walk and to rise again after countless falls. Language is part of this learning. Before speaking, we babble, mumble, invent. During a session, these falls and stammers are taken seriously. Fragility is never regarded as a weakness; quite the contrary, it is seen as a sensitivity in motion that offers valuable guidance in tracing one’s own path. Truth then becomes a patient construction, in which past and present speak to one another, and the future itself is continually rewritten.
How can we recognize the subjective truth toward which we are moving? By a sense of inner harmony. Not euphoria, not the absence of anxiety — the latter is part of the journey — but a feeling of internal coherence. What I do, what I think, what I feel resonates with who I am; it does not betray me. These actions and experiences are faithful to my desire, even while acknowledging that it can never be fully satisfied.
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