Guilty, Not Guilty, and the Third Way

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
(Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46)

It is not a plea. It is the acknowledgment that the pact has been broken.

Read without dogma or devotion, the Gospel narrative of Jesus is the chronicle of a progressive and radical stripping. It begins with the loss of community and the family’s incomprehension, which goes so far as to believe he is out of his mind; it continues as his friends scatter and he is betrayed; and it culminates when religious and political law withdraw any form of shelter. Even the last boundary of his civil identity is taken from him: his clothes, divided like the remnants of a shipwreck. Immobilized on the cross, the final cry is not an action but the cracking of a symbolic structure collapsing.

At the decisive moment, Jesus even entrusts his mother to the care of a third party, confirming that no refuge remains, not even in the maternal origin. This stripping is not the prelude to a miracle but the instant when the subject discovers that the Big Other, the supposed guarantor of meaning, does not respond and will not respond. It will not come to rescue. It will not repair at the last minute.

The cry confirms that the stripping has ended. Once belonging and recognition have been torn away, the answer is torn away too, leaving him in silence. But the system does not let him fall into anonymity: it fixes him. Above the cross an official inscription is placed, the political charge that justifies his execution: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. It is not a name in the human sense; it is a verdict. No subject remains, only a sarcasm, a cause of death as absurd as it is irrevocable.

And it is precisely there that the most effective substitute begins to appear, the one that keeps us from going mad in the face of meaninglessness: guilt. If the Big Other is silent, if there is no rescue, if there is no interruption of punishment, then thought becomes trapped in a terrible inference: perhaps the verdict was true. Perhaps the suffering was deserved. Perhaps abandonment was the proof.

We prefer to feel guilty rather than accept that we are alone. Guilt is the last attempt to save the Big Other: if the failure is ours, then the world still has laws. But if one is not guilty and the system still discards, then the abyss is total.

The Gospel narrative of Jesus finds an unsettling parallel in the story of Job. Job is an ordinary man with family, possessions, and social standing, who loses everything in an equally progressive way. In the biblical account, what matters is not the final restoration, which can be read as a reparative suturing, but the unbearable time in which Job remains seated in ash, reduced to ruin, listening to his friends, who do not come to console him but to defend the system’s logic. Job must have done something wrong to deserve the tragedy, he must be guilty of something, because if he is innocent and suffers, then the world stops having order and the idea of a protective, benevolent, and just God loses coherence.

Both accounts, Jesus and Job, expose the same thing: a point at which failure ceases to be an accident and becomes a sentence. It is not a matter of losing things or people but of losing the symbolic place that those things and those people guaranteed. Even if we do not know what Job or Jesus thought in their darkest hour, the texts let an internal break show through: when the symbolic support collapses, the experience is no longer only pain but a fall in position. And in that fall an imperative search for meaning is triggered. Answering the question “why is this happening to me?” or “what did I do wrong to deserve this?” becomes an obsessive thought. The question becomes a second torture: the internal one.

When guilt appears, it always appears as the verdict of an inner tribunal. Not as an explanation but as a condemnation.

The Symbolic Order and Deactivation

Lacan would call that social universe in which we live the symbolic order. There nothing exists simply as a thing: everything signifies. And if everything signifies, then tragedy must signify too. It must have an origin, a reason, a culprit: God or the devil, the other or oneself. Everything points to a place within a web of equivalences, hierarchies, and recognitions. That web silently produces identity. That is why, when something falls within the subject’s universe, one does not only suffer: one remains named as the one who falls. Pain is not only a fact; it is an inscription. Failure is not only a loss; it is a way of being.

We live under a binary regime. In or out. Valid or disposable. Visible or nonexistent. Success and failure have been ontologized: they no longer describe situations but states of being. Faced with failure, the system no longer punishes. It simply deactivates.

The excluded, the unemployed, the marginal become a residue that no longer counts, a shadow that no longer registers data in the social machine. And they are not the only ones.

The chronically ill person who does not improve is left out because no future is produced.
The depressed person is left out because no energy is produced.
The old person is left out because desire is no longer produced.
The ugly person is left out because no image is produced, because no aesthetic capital is added.
The migrant who exists physically but not legally is left out because no citizenship is produced.
The poor person is left out because consumption is absent and circulation is not produced.
The addict is left out because hope is no longer produced.
The professional without credentials is left out because no security is provided.
The artist without success is left out because no prestige is provided.
The academic without publications is left out because no legitimacy is provided.
The one who cannot be translated into metrics, diplomas, or results is left out.
Even the one who works and complies is left out, because the subject is not recognized as a subject but as a function: the replaceable one, the invisible cog, the one who has value only while producing.

What is unsettling is that none of them is expelled for a crime. They are erased for a colder reason: they do not fit into the validation circuit. They are not punished for what they did. They are erased for what they cannot emit: the correct sign for the machine to register them. They are not condemned; they are ignored. They are not struck; they are allowed to fall. And that form of exclusion is more cruel than physical punishment, because punishment at least recognizes the subject. Deactivation turns the person into a body without a place, a name without an echo.

The Third Way

Guilt arises there, in the fall, as a desperate attempt to recover position. If the world excludes, guilt offers a form of symbolic reintegration: if I am guilty, I still belong to an order. Even blaming others preserves the same structure: I suffer or I punish, but in both cases the world remains coherent. Everything becomes an effort to explain the unexplainable, to domesticate the real.

Both success and failure are the result of an endless succession of contingent events, accumulated circumstances, chance, and opportunities that open and close without obeying a justice. Sometimes not even one’s own decisions determine destiny. They are only one factor among many. But the human being does not tolerate meaninglessness. It needs to order, attribute, close.

However, the real does not allow itself to be described. It does not allow itself to be fully quantified, predicted, or reduced to a coherent narrative. And yet we keep looking for culprits. When we can no longer blame anyone, guilt falls back onto the self. Guilt is the last refuge of the ego before chaos. It is preferable to say “I am guilty,” because that sentence implies causality, implies that the world answers to a law. It is preferable to say “it is my fault” and place oneself at the center of punishment, rather than admit that life can be a succession of brutal contingencies in which one is never the center.

But this logic is not natural. It is historical. The Manichean world in which we live, divided into salvation and condemnation, innocence and guilt, belonging and expulsion, is the result of a long cultural sedimentation that also runs through the dominant religions of the West. Yet certain early traditions, Greco Roman currents, and Christian apocryphal texts preserve another intuition. They do not offer an alternative doctrine but a different stance toward the binary world: a third way.

Regardless of the faith they preach, in those texts life is not reduced to obedience or sin, integration or expulsion. They do not propose submitting to the existing order or rebelling against it as if the ultimate enemy resided there. They propose something more difficult: inhabiting the order without identifying with it. Remaining within the world without allowing the world to become the subject’s name.

The third way is not comfort or a solution. It is an operation. It consists in suspending the most automatic human reflex: attributing meaning. When something happens, when failure, rejection, or loss erupts, the subject rushes to interpret. It seeks causes, signs, messages. It seeks culprits. It seeks a reason that would make the blow bearable. But that interpretation is not neutral: it is a tribunal. The reading of the event immediately becomes a reading of being.

When the Other fails, two temptations appear. The first is to beg for meaning, to insist on an explanation, to demand a place. The second is to disappear: to conclude that one must be guilty, punished, excluded, reduced to nonexistence. The third position suspends both. It remains without appeal. Not as resignation but as a different form of attention. 

It is not about understanding. It is about looking without translating. About sustaining the event without turning it into identity. About letting the real remain real, without turning it into story, without turning it into destiny, without turning it into essence. The third way does not deny pain. It denies the sentence. It does not deny the fall. It denies that the fall has the right to name the one who falls. It is an attention to what happens without return to the self.

Remaining legible to oneself when no structure grants a place is neither heroism nor resignation. It is lucidity. It promises neither peace nor deferred success. It does not save. But it prevents something worse: that success or failure becomes the only possible name.

That is the third position. Not as a solution but as the place from which life, even in its fragility, is not reduced to a verdict.