The Personal and the Political

The usual perspective on the relationship of the individual with society or on the relationship of the personal the political fails to take into account the existence of the unconscious. The unconscious—which is both something “within” the individual, but also something “rejected” by the individual and thus not part of conscious thought—has a curious property of at once being internal and external. This topology is enhanced by the additional fact that the substance of the unconscious is also, in fact, taken in from the outside world. In learning a language, one thus takes in not only the vocabulary and the various rules of grammar and syntax, however, but also some unwritten rules of language that have social and political dimensions to them that get woven into the unconscious.