These are two extreme but real positions. Between them, there is the acceptance of everyday conditioning, making oneself into a fit commodity for international trade, which can also be called “pursuing a career,” or, in Sarkozy’s terms, “being deserving.”

This conviction – which I sometimes call “the communist Idea” – holds that, after the inevitable abandonment of tradition has been accepted, in the very process of this abandonment, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolization that will guide, code, and form the peaceful subjective basis for the collectivization of resources, the effective

The adult becomes someone who’s a little better able than the young person to afford to buy big toys. The difference is more quantitative than qualitative.

So I think – this is a hypothesis – that this initiation without initiation offers boys three alternatives. I’ll call them: the perverted body, the sacrificed body, and the deserving body.

This law is that of the market, which is characterized by equating everything with everything else, by being an anonymous law, with the result that the figure of the father has been cut off from it, and any control of the sons is itself a-symbolic.

They’re completely stranded and have to head homeward.

Piercing the body, drugging it, deadening it with ear-splitting music, tattooing it. This is the figure of a body that one wants to make a-subjective, or even a-subjectivizable, a body exposed and marked, which preserves within itself the trace of the impossible identity.

But what is the family? Already in Plato there were three major social functions: producing, reproducing, and defending.

I can only hope, for all of you, that settling down, having a job, a career, is not your top priority, but rather a true thinking that is sister to the dream.