ABSTRACT
On a pragmatic level, any universal or sovereign right to free speech is complicated by the tenuous line between speech and action. By creating minimalistic and abstract blueprints, both the Founding Fathers and Sigmund Freud created a space "that enshrines an ambiguity". Speech requires action—such as drawing lines, or resisting the impulse to wound—to avoid degradation into unmediated action, and sometimes speech requires action because a moment calls for marking a line itself, for a symbolic gesture between speech and action. Conversation about boundary setting arises in most therapies, when an ever-precarious and intangible line between speech and action threatens to collapse. Psychoanalysis and democracy each practices faith in the possibilities of an often indeterminate and fuzzy line dividing freedom from tyranny, persuasion from coercion. In psychoanalysis, the grappling with precedent and received wisdom happens in theoretical debates and in clinical practice; in Constitutional realms, at the level of legal theory and case law.
