Reality by surprise

There is a phrase from the Argentine writer Fabián Casas: “The technique that is used to live is used to write.” He refers to the technique of karate, a discipline that he practices. I think of artificial intelligence as a creative machine. In great books one perceives, beyond the plot, an invisible trace, a thickness constituted by the past of the writer, by what he thought and what he lived. I wonder if AI, which works in pure present, could build that thickness. I read a recent work by the Argentine psychoanalyst José Luis Juresa that addresses a difficult question: “What is the reason why faith in words turns out to be effective in relieving suffering?” In this book he writes that an analyst “listens at the level of childhood and is not distracted by attitudinal corrections, as if he were an educator who holds the rod of adulthood. There is no consolation for desire”; and that “If the heart is literally the heart, a heart attack occurs; On the other hand, if the heart is a void in which broken hearts, overflowing feelings, joys, sadnesses, nostalgia and pain are housed, what ensues is life. The heart must be emptied of its “organ” so that life can occur there. “That is an analysis.” The book is titled Reality by surprise (Paidós, 2024) and in it you feel that thickness that I spoke of at the beginning: the prose is paced to the rhythm of a thought that, after having assimilated complex knowledge for years, chooses to ruminate. Move forward but think better, say again, abandon certainty, construct extraordinary metaphors to achieve fuller expressions, place the analyst in the place of a great reader and not in that of someone who holds the power to know everything. His 234 pages are the exciting gesture of someone who not only knows but goes further: he knows not to know. Only the author knows his technique – the karate of his life – but in this case it seems to be made, in large part, of deep humanity. Of a thickness that the machine cannot provide.