Onbehagen: het subject tussen tekort en creativiteit

Samenvatting

Discontent: the subject between lack and creativity

Contrary to popular belief, discontent (onbehagen) is not a temporary mood or social pathology, but a structural condition of human existence. Historically, religion, ideology, and community offered symbolic frameworks to contain it. In the twenty-first century, however, unease surfaces unfiltered in public spaces and social media, where intimacy merges with visibility.

Drawing on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), this paper argues that unease is inherent to culture itself. Civilization restrains desire, producing perpetual tension between individual impulses and collective order. Attempts to abolish unease — through therapy, medication, or technological control — reflect a modern illusion of total mastery that risks repressing difference and plurality.

Structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Lyotard reveal that the subject is not autonomous but constituted through language, discourse, and social systems. The self is fractured and relational, continually seeking coherence but never achieving it. This lack (manque) is not merely a deficit but the very source of creativity and subjectivation.

In contemporary culture, the exposure of inner life often replaces genuine expression. The psychoanalytic distinction between empty and full speech illuminates how the digital age converts emotion into consumable content, depriving it of symbolic depth. Yet through language, art, and ritual, unease can be transformed rather than erased.

The author ultimately views unease as an ethical compass and a creative principle. Accepting human incompleteness resists the modern obsession with optimization and control. Freedom emerges not from total self-mastery but from engaging with what remains unresolved. Unease, then, is both a symptom and a resource — a reminder that to be human is to inhabit the tension between lack and creation.