"'I' has nothing to say."

"Yet words there are, albeit, so to speak, mute. But at the same time that the other faltering, fragmentary, hesitant story begins to take shape, the unconscious begins to say "I," and the words begin to speak."

"Justin can neither lean on a "me" nor sustain an "I."

"The set of elements making it up is defined by what it does not take into account and...it only comes to life by somehow taking back what it excluded."

"Heartrending as a cry, uncertain as the crack of dawn, the subject withstands nothing less than a splitting, the splitting he ceaselessly ensures, to no avail, between the signifier and its remainder. The subject of the unconscious system, long before being a grammatical function and far more determining than a philosophical concept or a psychological instance, opens up the space of speech. Not that it speaks. At most, one can say that it desires: from the raw edges it is busy cutting, antinomic forces spring up from this "movement called desire," itself split between the fascination of the lost remainder and the attraction of the permanent, unconscious mnemic traces (signifiers)."

"There is no immediate access to this forever unknown continent, although it is called "primal." It remains forever to be discovered in the entanglement of body and words. And no one but the subject knows its borders, for the subject is the one who never stops deciding and cutting, separating and tidying up the order of words (first of all the order of unconscious representatives, signifiers in the Lacanian sense) so that the now indivisible (not guilty) scraps that make up the all-powerful force of the real can be relegated to the order of loss, of the unnamed. We know or reject the subject only as our double: an unsettling shadow or body of light, the mute guarantor of our words, the prerequisite condition of the play...of the forces of our desire."

"The subject vouches for a cosntant struggle between the colonizing power of words and the revolt of what is rejected. The cause upheld is simple: to demolish the overwhelming, totalitarian representation capturing the individual in the eyes of others as an apparent, indivisible whole. No, "I" is not that...The subject is born and reborn solely from a constant disentanglement of body and words, from a perpetually repeatable crossing of the grid of signifiers, from the ghostly, hallucinated reunion with the lost but immediately present object, right there, so very close to us."

"Unity is but a fiction and a "body" is always fragmented."

Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed, pp 44-57