The Human Silhouette and the Violence of Interpreting the Other

We do not suffer because of what happens to us, but because of the meaning we impose on what happens.

Pain is not necessarily what is unbearable. What is unbearable is usually the tribunal we build on top of pain: the urgency to turn the wound into an explanation, the loss into a sentence, the void into guilt. Deep down, the human mind does not seek truth. It seeks stability. The previous texts, The Law of Desire, Resentment as a Pathology of Being and Guilty, Not Guilty, and the Third Way, describe three different responses to the same problem: the need to manufacture meaning so as not to collapse in the face of life.

Behind desire, resentment, and guilt, the same silent machinery is always at work, hungry for meanings: the human silhouette.

We do not live with people: we live with silhouettes

The human being enters a world saturated with meanings, what Lacan calls the symbolic world. Everything has a name, an explanation, a sense, and we are part of that machinery. But every symbol, every idea, every word is, at bottom, a hollow relation: nothing explains itself, everything is defined by reference to something else, in an endless chain of signifiers.

Just as symbols do not possess a stable content of their own, the human being also appears as an empty silhouette. It is not defined from a solid inner core, but from what surrounds it: the discourse of the Other, family, culture, profession, social position. That is why it does not relate to the other’s content, but to the place the other occupies in its symbolic universe. We do not see people: we see functions, stereotypes, models the mind builds to orient itself. Seeing a silhouette without meaning is terrifying, because it leaves the subject facing an outline without a script. And if a silhouette cannot be assigned to a position, then the subject loses its reference point.

And the most unsettling thing is this: those silhouettes never remain empty. The mind cannot tolerate an outline without content. If the silhouette brings no meaning, we invent it. If it brings no story, we impose one. If it brings no intention, we attribute it. Thus the Other becomes bearable, but in that very process of naming, it ceases to be free.

That reading begins before words. In silence and without noticing, we register clothing, its cost or wear, posture, the body’s energy, skin, apparent age, health, threat or vulnerability. Then the voice arrives, the rhythm of speech, precision, evasion, doubt, firmness. And within seconds a decision is made, without deliberation, about whether they are trustworthy, intelligent, dangerous, “one of us,” or a stranger. Everything happens at the speed of light, in unconscious layers, crossed by culture, that software that classifies without rest.

Thus the other enters our life as a signifier, not as an individual. And the signifier carries with it an entire network of expectations, wounds, fantasies, fears, and debts. That is why the other is judged before being heard, classified before being known, condemned before speaking. Human violence begins there, in that silent operation: reduction.

To reduce the other, from an empty silhouette to a scarecrow, is an existential taxidermy: stuffing it with conceptual straw so it stays still in our mental display case. I know who you are, therefore I am prepared. Once turned into a doll, the other is no longer someone to dialogue with. It is something to be used, feared, or destroyed.

And those dolls are not born only in the individual. They are inherited molds, templates transmitted by culture, religion, family, politics, history. “Mother,” “father,” “enemy,” “boss,” “foreigner,” “refugee,” “African,” “victim” are not only private interpretations: they are socially available categories, sometimes socially mandatory. Reducing someone to a fixed figure is also a form of administration and violence. It is not only a mental mechanism: it is also a social architecture.

But reduction is not limited to people.
The same operation is applied to life as a whole. We do not only put the Other in a box, we also put facts in a box. Loss, unemployment, illness, old age, failure, the silence of a partner, even joy. Everything is reduced to an explanation, a category, a narrative.

Because a situation without meaning is not only uncomfortable: it is a threat. The mind cannot endure the indeterminate. It needs to decide what what happens means in order to keep existing within it.

Just as we turn the other into a doll, we turn reality into a script. Not to understand it, but to make it bearable.

Interpretation as a modern pathology

Modernity has turned interpretation into a compulsion. Everything must be explained, labeled, diagnosed. The other we live with is no longer encountered: it is processed, filtered, translated into categories.

Ortega y Gasset emphasized that there is no pure self separated from the world, that every life is traversed by a historical and social circumstance. Freud, from another angle, showed that culture not only organizes coexistence, but disciplines, represses, and structures psychic life. In both cases the same intuition appears: we never access naked reality, we always pass through it by means of forms.

Lacan takes that intuition and pushes it further. It is not only that culture influences the subject, but that the subject is constituted in language, in that network of signifiers that precedes and organizes it. And since that network is not closed, neither is the subject. There is no stable identity, but a construction in motion. That is why the silhouettes we fill in change over time and history, and are never final.

The problem appears when a momentary interpretation hardens as if it were essence. We have swapped the experience of encounter for a label. Diagnosis becomes an anesthetic for encounter. Interpretation is not the problem. The problem is forgetting that we interpret, forgetting that every explanation is a provisional construction, not direct access to the thing. When the subject believes its interpretation is reality, the tool becomes a prison, mental and also spiritual.

And yet life offers another clue. When we walk through a forest we do not try to understand every leaf, we do not catalog every shadow, we do not turn every form into a sentence. We simply inhabit. The real does not become less real because it is not explained. It becomes more breathable. The human problem is not a lack of meaning, but the urgency to close everything.

Human beings do not kill out of hatred. They kill out of certainty.

But this compulsion to close does not arise only from culture. It arises from something deeper: the very structure of desire.

Desire does not ask for objects: it asks for suturing

Desire is the hunger for something one does not know what it is and, therefore, it is not satisfied by the possession of any object. The object is only a visible parapet, a momentary screen that calms unease without resolving it. What the subject seeks is something else: a suture, a way of closing the opening that runs through it.

In The Law of Desire this was suggested: psychic life is structured around a crack. But that crack is not a poetic metaphor. It is a real threat to identity, because an identity without guarantee is not identity, it is vertigo: the terror of not knowing what one is, or even whether one is. Hence objects become extensions of being, small symbolic prostheses that promise consistency.

The law of desire is simple: the subject is interested only in what it can make its own, because it cannot tolerate lack. And if it sees a way to fill it, it does so, with an interpretation, an action, or a story. What it cannot intervene in does not move it, does not attract it, does not stimulate it. That is why passive teaching rarely produces brilliant students: it is not enough to present content, one must awaken questions. That is why advice almost never works: because it does not activate the subject, it does not force it to intervene, to build, to interpret, to create. Desire needs a point of attachment, a void that demands to be worked.

And it is precisely there, when the story is born as a suture, that violence is also born: at the moment when the other ceases to be an open subject and becomes a fixed figure, locked inside an interpretation. Not because interpreting is bad, but because the subject interprets to calm itself, interprets to close, interprets to stop feeling the absence of meaning.

In that search for meaning, the subject locks the silhouettes of others in prisons of the soul made of concepts, archetypes, prejudices, and judgments, and from those cages are born resentment, guilt, or the idea of a transcendental purpose as possible exits.

Resentment: desire turned into moral bookkeeping

Resentment is not simply rage. It is a way of organizing the world. When the subject does not receive recognition, when the Other does not respond, a wound appears that has nowhere to be inscribed. Resentment is a response that avoids the void. It is a substitute satisfaction: one suffers, but at least one suffers with an explanation. If the other does not recognize me as an individual, resentment functions like an intimate coup d’état: a rebellion against the symbolic order to restore a lost power.

The resentful does not desire, the resentful calculates: it calculates who owes it something, who ignored it, who humiliated it, who is to blame for the fact that life is not as it should be. Resentment turns uncertainty into structure, and structure into accusation. However, it is worth introducing a nuance: although resentment hides a pathology of being, sometimes it contains a truth that deserves to be heard, the evidence of a concrete injustice, a betrayal, a real harm.

The problem is not that the subject names the harm. The problem appears when harm becomes identity and judgment becomes home. There is a difference between accusing to do justice and accusing to exist. And it is there that resentment becomes destiny.

But resentment does not only accuse. It also fills. It gives weight to an inner silhouette that was emptying out. It turns the subject into someone defined, even if defined by the wound. It is preferable to be a victim than to be indeterminate. It is preferable to be someone unjustly treated than to be nobody.

Guilt: the price we pay for a world with meaning

In Guilty, Not Guilty, and the Third Way, guilt appears as something deeper than a moral feeling. Guilt is an ontological mechanism: a desperate way of rebuilding an order when the order has collapsed. It is the price we pay for living in an intelligible universe.

Because if I am guilty, then a law exists.
If a law exists, then a judge exists.
If a judge exists, then the universe is not absurd.
And if the universe is not absurd, then suffering is not gratuitous.

Guilt turns chaos into a system. And that is why it calms even as it destroys. It is a perfect substitute satisfaction: it hurts, but at least it explains.

Transcendental purpose: meaning as a technology of survival

Not only guilt or resentment manufactures meaning. Transcendental purpose does too. The mind does not limit itself to accusing itself or accusing another: it also invents mission, destiny, learning, redemption, martyrdom for an Other. The subject can endure pain not only when it justifies it with guilt, but when it covers it with utility. Sometimes it is not guilt that saves the subject from collapse, but the idea that suffering serves a purpose.

In both cases, the mechanism is the same: turning the intolerable into symbolic structure, filling the silhouette so as not to fall into the void.

This mechanism can be seen clearly in the figure of Jesus on the cross. Absolute suffering is almost impossible to endure without a narrative that contains it. Either guilt is assumed and pain is justified, or someone is blamed for one’s own pain and the fact becomes an injustice that cries out for revenge. But there is another possibility, perhaps the most effective of all: giving purpose to pain, turning it into mission, destiny, necessary sacrifice.

One’s own guilt, another’s guilt, or transcendental purpose: everything operates as the same technology. Meaning.

If pain has purpose, the subject endures. If it does not, the subject disintegrates. From the outside, that faith may look like delirium, even a form of psychosis: a story imposed on the intolerable. But that accusation is superficial, because all of humanity works this way.

In the previous text a third way was suggested, condensed as follows: not to stop interpreting, but not to turn interpretation into a sentence, the possibility of separating from the story, of suspending the impulse to turn the wound into an explanation. What this text tries to show is that this third way is not a negation of meaning, but a discipline. It is not about living without interpretations, but about remembering that every interpretation is a construction, not an essence. The challenge is not to find the correct meaning, but to survive the instant when meaning is absent without turning it into a verdict.

And perhaps that is why the cross, seen from a psychological and not a devotional point of view, is more important than the resurrection for understanding the human being. The resurrection, if it comes, does not erase the cry. It does not correct it. It only passes through it. But the decisive instant remains that one: when one suffers without a visible limit, when one begs for help and there is no response, when one asks for recognition and receives only silence.

Suspending meaning, what I called the third way, does not mean eliminating desire, since that is impossible, but it also does not mean abolishing prejudice, woven into our most primary architecture. Judging, interpreting, and deciding are inevitable. Even loving implies choosing a reading of the other, a wager, a partial closure. The problem is not closing meanings. The problem is closing them and then believing that closure is the definitive truth, turning the past into irrefutable proof of the future.

Living in society requires interpreting. Living with others also requires the ability to return to blankness: letting the other move, listening before fixing, allowing what is said today not to become essence tomorrow. That back and forth does not eliminate uncertainty, but it prevents certainty from becoming a weapon.

No one can sustain the absence of meanings all the time. Life requires closures. The mind needs rest. But ethics does not consist in living without closure, but in remembering that closure is a momentary refuge, not an absolute truth.

That is why the invitation is not to abandon categories, but to hold them lightly: to remember they are silhouettes, not bodies; to open interpretation and embrace doubt. Outlines, not beings. Desire does not die when explanation is missing. Desire dies when explanation is total, because desire lives off the incomplete.

The problem is not the silhouette: it is believing the silhouette is the human being

And here is the most uncomfortable point: not only the Other is a silhouette. So am I. The “I” is also an outline filled with stories, roles, wounds, expectations, inherited language. The subject does not speak with its own words, but with the grammar of the Other. It does not exist outside that network.

And yet, something in the subject knows that all of this is a construction.
It does not know it as knowledge, it knows it as discomfort.
As lack. As a remainder that does not fit.

But recognizing this does not lead to cynicism. It leads to a strange kind of freedom: the freedom to remember that what we believe we are is not essence, but construction. That what we believe we see in the other is not truth, but filling. And that much of human violence is born not from evil, but from the urgency to fix a meaning.

Resentment, guilt, and transcendental purpose are different ways of doing the same thing: filling a silhouette so as not to fall into the anguish of the incomplete. Turning emptiness into structure. Turning uncertainty into verdict. Turning the other into a doll.

The third way does not consist in stopping interpretation, because that would be impossible. It consists in remembering that every interpretation is provisional. In delaying judgment. In allowing the other not to fit completely. In enduring for a few seconds longer the discomfort of not knowing.

And there is an additional difficulty: we do not only label. We are also labeled. The world fixes us, classifies us, reduces us. There is no total freedom in the face of that machinery, because the subject does not exist outside language. But there is a minimal freedom, the only one that matters: not to confuse oneself with the label. Not to allow the filling imposed by the Other to become destiny.

Perhaps that is where something like love begins. Not when we understand the other, but when we stop demanding that the other be understandable. When we stop using certainty as a weapon. When we accept that the human being is not a content, but a silhouette that always exceeds what we can say of it.

Like oneself.

If you found this post interesting, give it a like.