Restoring the subjective dialectic of belief to trust involves a question: in the actions and being of the other, what is held to be trustworthy? This involves a wager on otherness, one that is demonstrated in friendship and culminates in love, thereby sustaining the social bond. Here, this ethics of the subject is illuminated by the resources of unconscious knowledge, thereby bringing to light the symbolic order, which is expressed in legal terms by the oath and the “sworn statement.” It is also illustrated by the legal institution of the “fideicommissum.” Ultimately the rotten apple in the barrel of trust, the process of ceasing to believe – which goes beyond disbelief – is what sheds light on both the conflicts involved in trust and what is at stake in this trust. We can trace the symptomatology of this process in the “social passions,” including acute forms of resentment and the development of practices of systematic suspicion, a distrust that feeds a collective form of paranoid discourse that is based on the premise of the Other’s imposture. This puts theories of language and communication to the test, by way of the dimension of reciprocation. The clinic of the subject reveals the paradox of individuals who invariably repeat situations of betrayal, investing the capital of their trust at a loss. In this, we can recognize the death drive at work: the unbinding and destructiveness at the very heart of the bond.
- trust
- belief
- distrust
- the loss of belief
- subject
- law
- symbolic
- reciprocity
- resentment
- language
- communication