El fuego de mi juventud

This work explores psychoanalytic concepts to understand the first period of a Colombian political paradigm: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. His trajectory is reconstructed from his adolescence to the dissolution of a youthful endeavor: the National Union of the Revolutionary Left (UNIR). A singular case is constructed: the subject Gaitán, the one of the unconscious and the one of the politician. The one next to the other. The Gaitán signifier, among signifiers, the subject who emerges from the collapse of the signifiers that implicated him. The Gaitán who is a symptom of himself and of the Colombia of that time, the Gaitán who ultimately sustains his subjectivity as his own creation, as his enjoyment. He instilled in us the concept of desire, that of Gaitán, and that of the people who surrounded him—dissatisfied, demanding, and desiring people. The object that caused Gaitán’s desire was politics, its intense practice, its sustenance and enjoyment. The key concept of justice for Gaitán under analysis is addressed. Justice, linked to the subject’s ethics and desire, is inscribed in the psychism through the superego. It is intertwined with the ways in which each subject confronts the symbolic law. Demanding and desiring, Gaitán did not yield, did not conform to social norms; he remained faithful to his unconscious desire. His approach to justice was related to the subject’s coherence with his desire. Justice not as a value that could be applied from the outside, but rather an ethical and singular matter in relation to his desire, to the symbolic law, and to the impossible.