On failing every day

the ethics of manque-à-être and the wager on the impossible

Abstract

The text argues that psychoanalysis calls for an ethics of manque-à-être (lack-
of-being). “Failing every day” means, within this horizon, less a defeat than an ethical position in relation to the Real. The author maintains that the analytic experience cannot be reduced to a profession or the application of a technique, but it takes shape as a way of being in the world, oriented by desire and marked by structural incompleteness. Drawing on the teaching of Jacques Lacan, the text situates failure as a structural point, linked to what cannot be sutured and escapes any promise of totality. A subject seeks analysis when their arrangement with jouissance appears as failed; this does not designate a contingent error, but the emergence of a structural limit. The author articulates logical time as a reinscription of this stumbling over time. Inspired by Dominique Fingermann, analytic formation is conceived as (de)formation. Thus, the text wagers on the impossible and affirms failure as a condition of the analytic act.