ABSTRACT
I am thrown into a nature, and nature appears not only outside of me in objects devoid of history, but is also visible at the center of subjectivity. Theoretical and practical decisions in my personal life can certainly grasp my past and my future from a distance; they can give my past, along with all of its accidents, a definite sense by following it up with a certain future of which, après coup, this past will be said to have been the preparation; and they can introduce a historicity into my life. But there is always something artificial to this order. I currently understand my first twenty-five years as a prolonged childhood that had to be followed by a difficult weaning process in order to arrive finally at autonomy. If I think back to those years such as I lived them and such as I now carry them with me, their happiness refuses to be explained by the protected atmosphere of the parental milieu – the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating – and I can never be certain of understanding my past better than it understood itself while I lived it, nor can I ever silence its protests. My current interpretation is tied to my confidence in psychoanalysis; tomorrow, with more maturity and more insight, I will 362perhaps understand my past differently and I will accordingly construct it differently. In any case, I will in turn interpret my present interpretations, I will discover their latent content and, in order finally to assess their truth value, I will have to take these discoveries into account. My hold on the past and my hold on the future are precarious and my possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive since it would again be a moment, bordered by the horizon of a future, and would in turn require further developments in order to be understood.
