The cage of representations

Human relationships break down less through conflict than through construction: we fabricate characters, we assign them roles, and in this seemingly innocuous gesture lies a violence that can go so far as to symbolically kill the other.

The characters we invent

I used to believe that I knew the people around me. That this knowledge came from observation, exchange, shared time. Then I understood that I didn’t know them. I fabricated them. We all fabricate characters around us, we give them roles, we place them in the theater of our own reality. And this construction is not innocuous: it can become a form of violence, a way of locking the other in what they are not.

This violence, I call it the absence of care in the relationship. Because care is not only a gesture of solicitude, it’s a way of being in the world that recognizes the fundamental interdependence of living beings. Not taking care of the other means precisely reducing them to our construction of them, rather than cultivating the attention necessary to let them exist in their irreducible otherness. True care would be this listening that accepts being disturbed, this availability to see the other differently than we had anticipated.

Anthropologist Jack Goody demonstrated this in his work on graphic reason: we never think the world in a neutral way, but always through “technologies of the intellect” that structure our relationship to reality. He writes:

“Writing is not only recording speech, it is also giving oneself the means to cut out and abstract its elements, to classify words in lists and combine lists in tables. Might there not be a properly graphic way of reasoning, of knowing? Modes of thought could not be independent of means of thought.”

The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977)

This domestication of thought that Goody speaks of doesn’t only concern writing. It applies to our way of perceiving others. We cut them out, we classify them, we arrange them in predefined categories. We construct correspondence tables, “this person is like that,” “they belong to this group,” “they correspond to this type,” and these tables become our reality, even though they are only our constructions.

This mechanism is all the more formidable in that it operates without our knowledge. Pierre Bourdieu conceptualized it under the term “habitus,” this system of durable dispositions that functions as a generative grammar of our perceptions:

“By constructivism, I mean that there is a social genesis on the one hand of schemes of perception, thought and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and in particular of what I call fields.”

In Other Words (1987)

These schemes of perception structure our relationship to the other without our being aware of it. We perceive others through our own filters, constructed by our history, our environment, our experiences. And in this process, the true other disappears. They become the product of our mental categories, the embodiment of our projections. We no longer see them, we only see our construction of them.

The refusal of true otherness

This tendency to lock the other in our representations derives from what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the movement of the “Same” which seeks to reduce the “Other” to what it can understand and master. In his analysis of Western philosophical tradition, Levinas writes:

“All attempts of Western philosophy to think the Other from the I would in fact testify to the insurmountable allergy, to the horror inspired by the Other who remains Other. By reducing the stranger to a theme or an object, incapable as it is of letting them be in their singularity, this philosophy condemns itself to being a philosophy of Being, of immanence, of narcissism.”

Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger (1949)

This “allergy” to otherness is not just an abstract philosophical concept. It manifests concretely in our relationships. Rather than accepting that the other escapes us, that they are radically distinct from what we can grasp of them, we prefer to fix them in a stable image. This image reassures us because it gives us the illusion of mastery. We know “who” this person “is,” we can anticipate their reactions, we can control them. But this mastery is illusory, and above all, it is violent.

The violence of this operation resides precisely in what it denies: the irreducible singularity of the other, their mystery, their freedom to be otherwise than what we expect. We refuse them the right to exist outside our understanding. We lock them in the role we have assigned them, and any attempt on their part to escape it is experienced as a betrayal, an aggression, an endangerment of our own construction of the world.

The escape through sensible co-presence

Yet there exists a resistance to these rigid mental constructions: the experience of what I call sensible co-presence. When bodies are physically present to one another, when we share the same space, the same time, the same sensory environment, something disrupts our neat categories. The other’s gaze, their voice, their gestures, their physical presence remind us that they exist beyond our representations.

This sensible co-presence has the power to crack open our constructed images. The body of the other, in its materiality, resists our attempts at pure conceptualization. It imposes an evidence that our mental schemas cannot entirely contain. This is why direct encounters sometimes surprise us, disarm us, contradict what we thought we knew about a person.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his phenomenology of perception, insists on this primacy of the sensory experience over abstract thought:

“Consciousness is not primarily ’I think that,’ but ’I can.’ It is fundamentally not a matter of ’I think’ but of ’I can.’ The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”

Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

This “I can” of the body-subject is what allows us to exceed our mental constructions. In sensible co-presence, I am not only faced with my idea of the other, but with their lived presence that affects me, that moves me, that transforms me. The other is no longer a concept but a force, a presence that resonates in my own body.

This dimension of co-presence explains why certain relationships maintained solely through technological mediation—messages, social networks, video calls—tend to favor the fixation of representations. In the absence of full bodily presence, we more easily project our constructions without them being contradicted by the sensory reality of the other. Distance facilitates imagination, and imagination, when it is not nourished by lived experience, easily slips into fiction.

This is not to romanticize physical presence or condemn mediated relationships. But it is to recognize that sensible co-presence offers specific resources for resisting the violence of mental constructions. In the physical encounter, the other’s body reminds us that they are not reducible to what we think of them. It creates an opening, a space where surprise and true encounter become possible.

This is why participatory artistic practices, which place bodies together in a shared creative process, have such transformative potential. When we create together, in the same space, with our hands, our voices, our bodies in movement, we produce a common experience that transcends individual representations. The artwork that emerges does not belong to anyone in particular; it is born from the encounter itself, from the friction of presences, from the negotiation of differences.

This sensible co-presence is also what makes community vulnerable to absence and distance. When bodies separate, when physical encounters become rare, representations have more room to harden, to become autonomous, to disconnect from the lived reality of relationships. This is perhaps one of the great challenges of our time: how to maintain the vitality of the relational bond in a world where distance and mediation are increasingly omnipresent?

The answer cannot be a simple return to an idealized past of permanent proximity. But it invites us to conscious awareness of what is lost in distance, and to actively cultivate moments of sensible co-presence, spaces where bodies can meet, surprise each other, create together. These moments are not a luxury or a supplement: they are the necessary condition for relationships not to fossilize into mutually excluding fictions.

Care as a path out

How then can we escape this mechanism? How can we stop fabricating characters and start truly encountering others? The answer lies not in some theoretical solution but in a practical attitude: care as attention to relationship.

Care, as I understand it here, is not a matter of benevolence or kindness. It’s a fundamental posture that recognizes our radical vulnerability and interdependence. The philosophy of care, developed notably by Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, shows that care is not a secondary activity but a fundamental dimension of human existence:

“At the heart of the ethic of care lies the recognition that we are all, throughout our lives, vulnerable and interdependent. Care is therefore not an act of heroism or exceptional virtue, but the normal fabric of social relationships.”

Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993)

This recognition of vulnerability and interdependence disrupts the logic of mastery that underlies our mental constructions. If I recognize that I am fundamentally dependent on others, that my existence is woven through my relationships, then I can no longer approach the other as an object to be understood and controlled. The other becomes someone on whom my own flourishing depends, and whom I must therefore let exist in their difference.

This approach also requires awareness of our own perceptual mechanisms. Bourdieu invites us to this reflexivity when he analyzes the habitus. Understanding that our ways of perceiving the world and others are socially constructed, that they are not “natural” or “objective,” is already beginning to free ourselves from them. It creates a space for play, a critical distance that allows us to no longer confuse our representations with reality itself.

But this awareness is not enough. We must also actively cultivate other ways of perceiving, other modes of relationship. This is where the properly creative dimension of care comes in. Taking care of the relationship means inventing together new forms of coexistence, new languages, new rituals that allow each person to exist in their difference while participating in a common world.

This attitude goes against our habitus, our need for stability and coherence. It asks us to accept the discomfort of not understanding everything, of not mastering everything. It asks us to renounce the characters we have constructed, however reassuring they may be, to welcome the strangeness of the other. But it is precisely in this discomfort, in this openness to the unexpected, that an authentic relationship can be born.

Inner construction as the origin of violence

What makes this reflection so urgent is that violence does not always need to manifest physically to destroy. Symbolic violence, which consists of locking the other in an image that denies them, can be just as destructive. It kills the relationship, it kills the very possibility of encounter. It transforms the other into a ghost, into a projection of our own fears or our own desires.

I have seen friendships break over this mechanism. Not because the people had actually changed, but because one had reconstructed the other in a fixed image that no longer corresponded, or perhaps had never corresponded, to reality. I have seen families tear apart because each person locked the others in roles inherited from childhood, refusing to see that people had evolved, or because they thought differently during the Covid period, and the bonds are permanently damaged. I have seen couples separate not because of a real relational problem, but because one locked themselves in an image of the other that no longer had anything to do with the other’s reality; the other having become a character, a role in the interior fiction, and no longer an enriching otherness at all.

This violence of mental construction is all the more pernicious in that it often drapes itself in the clothes of benevolence. “I know you,” “I know who you are,” “I want your well-being,” “You are cowardly,” all these phrases can mask a form of violence when they serve to justify locking the other in our own vision of the world. Even love can become violence when it refuses the other the right to exist outside our desire, our need, our image.

The awareness of this mechanism is painful. It obliges us to recognize that we all participate, to different degrees, in this symbolic violence. That our relationships are traversed by this play of projections and imaginary constructions. That we never really see the other, but always a mediation, a filter, a representation.
But this awareness is also liberating. It opens the possibility of another relationship to otherness, based not on mastery but on welcome, not on total understanding but on acceptance of mystery. It invites us to a form of caution in our judgments, to a suspension of our certainties, to an openness to what disturbs us because it doesn’t fit into our pre-established frameworks.

The issue is not only moral or psychological. It is profoundly political. Because it is this same logic of mental construction that makes possible the worst collective atrocities. Between the friend who disowns his friend because he has reconstructed him as an “enemy” under the influence of an ideology, as in Address Unknown, and the mechanisms that led to the genocides of the 20^th century, to that of the 21^st century and even to the dehumanization of the “unvaccinated” during the Covid period, there is only a difference of scale, not of nature. What is common between Nazism and the Covid period is the sanitary pretext: the other is dangerous to collective health. This discourse of pseudo care for the collective, with manipulation through fear and false benevolence, at the cost of dehumanizing a part of humanity that would be dangerously irresponsible, and therefore justified to ostracize for the good of others, is a discourse still held today about the Covid period, even though the scientific consensus on the non-dangerousness of the “unvaccinated” for others, which was hidden but very real at the time for those who wanted to inform themselves, and which is much more public today, also for those interested, is set aside in favor of continuing the role we give others to feed our fiction.

I had the pleasant surprise, nevertheless, during this period, in public transportation where everyone or almost everyone wore a mask, out of fear of illness or fear of the law, while I almost never wore one or as little as possible (because it was never proven that these masks protected from the virus, which was infinitely finer than the mesh, which it passed through cheerfully as if they weren’t there) to receive above all benevolence, and very very rarely disapproving remarks, and never a fine from the controllers who simply asked me to put the mask back on. It is indeed the presence of the body, resistant and constructive of another kind of bond, that allowed this enriching presence in otherness, the sensible co-presence that offers us to transcend categories.

Recognizing the other in their irreducible otherness means recognizing their right to exist otherwise than in our representations. It means accepting that they escape us, that they surprise us, that they contradict our expectations. It means renouncing the gentle violence of our constructions to accept the discomfort of true encounter.

Towards an epistemology of the bond

Faced with this violence of fixed representations, I propose an epistemology of the bond: a way of knowing that passes through relationship rather than through categorization. In this perspective, knowing the other does not mean putting them in a box, but cultivating a relational space where their singularity can unfold. Knowledge then becomes not the grasping of an object, but participation in a living process.

This epistemology of the bond rests on three pillars that intersect and nourish each other:

• Care constitutes its ethical modality. Taking care of the relationship means cultivating attention to the other in their otherness, creating the conditions for them to exist otherwise than in my expectations. Care is not here a supplement to the soul, but the very foundation of any authentic relationship. It transforms the relationship to the other into a space of hospitality where each person can reveal themselves without being immediately judged, classified, locked up.
• Otherness is its existential condition. We never exist alone, but always already in relationship. The subject is not an autonomous monad, but a being-in-relation, constituted by the bonds that traverse and exceed them. Recognizing this relational dimension of our existence means accepting that the other is not an accident in our solitary trajectory, but the very condition of our becoming.
• Creation is its aesthetic and practical manifestation. Creating together means producing common forms that belong to no one in particular but emerge from the encounter. It means making the bond itself a work, a shared space of meaning and beauty. This creation is not reserved for artists: it concerns any form of collective activity where the common is fabricated.

These three dimensions form what I call creative interdependence: the recognition that we create nothing alone, that all thought, all work, all existence carries within it the trace of multiple othernesses that constitute it. This interdependence is not a limitation of our freedom, but its condition. It is because we are connected, affected, traversed by other presences that we can produce something new.

In this perspective, the collective is not a sum of juxtaposed individuals, but a living fabric of relationships where each person takes care of everyone’s vulnerability. Society does not hold together by contract, but by mutual support. And this support passes through the continuous creation of shared forms, rituals, languages, works, institutions, that allow each person to exist in their singularity while participating in a common world.

This is where I locate the major political issue of our time: moving from a society based on categorization and separation to a society based on relational care and the creation of the common. Moving from a logic of mastery, where the other must fit into my frameworks, to a logic of welcome, where we fabricate together the frameworks of our coexistence. Moving from an individualism that isolates to a recognition of our fundamental interdependence.

This transformation cannot be decreed. It is cultivated, day by day, in the micro-practices of our daily relationships. Each time we renounce locking the other in our representation of them, each time we accept being disturbed by their otherness, each time we create together something that exceeds us, we participate in this transformation. We leave the cage of representations to enter the open space of true relationship.

This is perhaps the only way to escape the cage we build around the other, and around ourselves: not through a heroic effort of total understanding, but through the humble acceptance that the other always escapes us, and that it is precisely in this escape that lies the very possibility of the bond.