In Praise of Risk

La libertad es un movimiento de emancipación, no un estado estable

Doubt is the acolyte of suspense—its gravedigger, its messenger

Disobedience is the traversal of mirages, a manner of lightheartedly breaking bonds, because one has agreed to lose everything, including life

A century ahead of time,” writes Annie Le Brun, “Alfred Jarry identified the things that our world seeks to liquidate: my singularity, love, and recklessness. However, he also foresaw the monstrous way in which this liquidation would occur, with the manufacture of soul

our anxieties or our fears sometimes restore us to this newborn’s body at the mercy of hunger, thirst, cold, waiting, pain, and the unknown. The sensations that we experience during the first weeks of life are still there, intact, and a particularly strong wave of melancholy is enough to conjure up this body and bend our adult body back toward it

Would it not suffice less dramatically to think, with Spinoza, what makes us persevere in being? To think patience instead, this measure of time that, in the face of urgency, cauterizes wounds . . . The patience of being—a subtle, forgotten, uncolonized art of the self, in which emotion is entangled with thought, the cuisine of all creation. But it would have to be a patience neither in the service of waiting, nor especially in that of depression, compromise, or fatal renunciation. This risk—the risk of being—cannot be envisaged or evaluated

Miraculously, it would be the opposite of neurosis whose trademark move is to capture the future in such a way that our present becomes modeled on past experiences, leaving no room for the effraction of the new, for the displacement, albeit minimal, that opens a horizon line

Olvidar abre un espacio de disponibilidad a lo desconocido,

Había olvidado su nombre, su vida. Su memoria quedó destroz

El olvido desestabiliza todo lo que sustenta al sujeto: sus objetos, rituales, certezas, descubrimientos. Tiene afinidades caprichosas con la muerte, como el borrado de las huellas de todo lo que constituía una existencia

El riesgo por excelencia , para Dufourmantelle, no es el de muerte o pérdida de la vida; es el riesgo de abrirse a algo oculto o, para usar su palabra privilegiada, a algo “íntimo”, como una “profecía íntima” o un “momento íntimo”. Guiada por el testimonio de sus pacientes, Dufourmantelle encuentra que esta dimensión “íntima” de la vida entra inesperadamente en juego e