The Journey Is the Meaning: How Searching Creates What We Find
In the novel The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, the main character realizes that his journey was part of the destination; the real treasure that he was looking for did not even exist, but was retroactively created through the act of searching for it (“the real treasure is the friends we made along the way”), as he discovers that his personal legend — the fulfillment of his dreams — was less about a physical reward and more about the spiritual growth, self-discovery, and connections formed during his pursuit.
Why aren’t we justified in applying the exact same logic for semiosis, for any act of meaning? Meaning here is a process, not a static state of affairs, which is compatible with process philosophy. Structural linguistics would have us believe that the signified of a signifier is like an image (for example the word ‘tree’ signifies the image of a tree). But what if what is signified is not an image, but more like a video? The meaning of a signifier changes through time — what I mean by what I say is not fixed and set in stone, instead its meaning changes in light of new information and the past is retroactively reinterpreted.
I see a parallel between the novel ‘The Alchemist’ and the interpretation of dreams. In psychoanalysis, the dream-work is just as important as its latent content. More than that, I would argue that working through the meaning of a dream (“the journey”) is part of its latent content (“the destination”). Here, it is necessary to assume a priori that the dream has a meaning before you even begin to interpret it. After that, you try to search for its meaning. And through the very act of searching for a pre-existing yet non-existent meaning, you are creating the meaning of the dream. Discovery and creation are here deeply intertwined, here meaning is neither discovered nor created, but it is discovered through the act of creation and created through the act of discovery. When we interpret a dream, we give it meaning: the meaning of my dream today may not be the meaning of my dream tomorrow, because in light of new information, I am retroactively reinterpreting the past meaning of my dream. When I search for the meaning of the dream, that meaning does not even exist, instead I am creating it through my search. But this act of creation is in itself a discovery of what I am actively creating through my search.
Zizek in his latest book “Against Progress” suggests that in order to deal with the apocalypse, we need to assume a priori that there is nothing we can do about the apocalypse, that it will inevitably happen; but at the same time, we must nevertheless do our moral duty and try to prevent it, knowing fully well that our efforts are fruitless. It is only by trying to prevent an inevitable apocalypse that we actually end up preventing it — the negation of salvation is itself negated in dialectical fashion. Can’t we apply the same logic to analysis of meaning? When we create the meaning of our dreams, we have to act as if the dream already has a meaning that we are only discovering. In other words, in order to create, we have to act as if we are not creating but discovering something that in reality does not even exist yet.
This logic is not limited to dream analysis, but to every act of meaning — to create meaning we have to assume a priori that it already exists and that we are only discovering it, even when it doesn’t technically exist. Here, we have to break out of our narcissistic bubble: the meaning of an utterance is not accessible only to the subject who uttered it. We must apply the “death of the author”: when someone says something, what their words mean to them is not the same as what they mean to me. In other words, just as you can mean something by what you say, I can also mean something by what you say and you can mean something by what I say. Just like dream analysis, to create meaning in someone’s speech involves acting as if the other person already means something by what they say, already ‘has a point’, even if we can disavow this belief (“I know very well that they do not mean one single thing by what they say, BUT… I act as if I don’t believe it”).
For example, when a woman gives a man a perplexing and ambiguous ‘hint’ and the man is confused as to whether she is really into him or is just being friendly, the man needs to act as if the question “Is she into me?” already has a pre-determined answer, even when it doesn’t. Only through this a priori assumption can this meaning be created, by pretending that he is merely discovering it. What if the meaning of her speech is not an answer to the respective question but merely an invitation to interpret her desire? Her desire here is not for him, but for his desire — what she desires is for him to spend time trying to figure her out and to figure out the meaning of her speech or acts. When she gives an ambiguous hint, what she ‘means’ by that hint is not a static signified that is set in stone, but an invitation to explore together the meaning of that hint.
Riddles work in a similar fashion, the journey of trying to discover the meaning of a confusing riddle is part of the destination (the destination here being the answer to the riddle). And why don’t we apply the same logic to obscurantist public intellectuals? When I intentionally obfuscate the meaning of my speech, my readers have to assume that I mean something particular by what I say, and the journey of trying to discover what the hell I mean is itself part of the destination — if I were to be clear in my statements, they would simply be spoon-fed information without putting in the work in trying to work through the complex topics at hand. As they say: give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. When a philosopher is intentionally obscure: they are teaching you how to fish, and even teaching you that the fish is part of the act of fishing itself.
This is the strategy that both Lacan and Deleuze employed (even if they did it unintentionally), although in different ways. Lacan put himself in the position of the subject supposed to know with his students, while Deleuze demonstrated a concept through its very form in the way it was presented. Our traditional way of understanding concepts is through representation, through what Deleuze calls “the image of thought”: each concept has some essential defining qualities that tie each of its concrete manifestation together. In other words, our traditional way of understanding a concept is that all its concrete examples have something in common, an identity, that defines that very concept. But trying to understand Deleuze in this way is fruitless. The various examples of a particular Deleuzian concept have nothing in common at first glance. The best example I can give here is Deleuze’s concept of “the body without organs” (BwO). The BwO is at the same time an egg, a plane of intensities, Spinoza’s God, a whole without its parts, and so on. But all these particular examples have nothing in common. It’s clear that trying to understand Deleuze through the image of thought does not look very promising. Instead, we have to work through the meaning of Deleuze’s words in the same way we work through the meaning of a dream. The journey of trying to understand Deleuze is part of the destination here: the only way for you to understand the true meaning of the BwO is to turn yourself into a BwO. This is why the second chapter of “A Thousand Plateaus” is not entitled “What is the body without organs?” but “How to make yourself a body without organs”. The very fact that the BwO is hard to understand, self-contradictory and heterogenous is an example of the BwO itself. The BwO is defined by heterogeneity, multiplicity and a lack of structure and organization: so the fact that the concept of the BwO is heterogenous, multiple and chaotic is itself an example of the BwO.
The journey is part of the destination in acts of transference in psychotherapy too. Carl Jung once said that when he asked his patients what their dreams meant, they would not know how to answer. But then Jung asked them “What do you think that I think your dream meant?” and all their unconscious material would surface. Here, Jung positioned himself as the subject supposed to know: the patient had to assume a priori that Jung knows the meaning of the dream (even when he didn’t) in order to find out the real meaning of the dream. The meaning of the dream here is not something that can be represented or thought about, not a simple sentence, instead the meaning of the dream is the very process of trying to discover the meaning of the dream and everything that the patient learned in that journey. And this is how we should treat every act of ‘indirect communication’ too: hints, allusions, euphemisms and so on. When I give a romantic interest an ambiguous hint that I may be interested in them, I do not necessarily mean something by it (even if I think I do), instead I am inviting them in figuring out the non-existent meaning of my speech by assuming that such a thing exists in the first place. My desire when giving someone a hint is for them to think about me and keep me in their memory, the journey of them trying to discover the meaning of my words is part of the meaning of my speech itself: thus, meaning here is neither discovered nor created, but both and neither at the same time.
Meaning here is thus analogous to Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “objet petit a” — not the object of desire, but the object-cause of desire. The objet petit a is like a ghost or specter, an empty template without content that can mold itself differently in different circumstances. This object causes our desire instead of representing what we desire; no matter how many partial objects of desire we accumulate, we are never fully satisfied, so we keep looking for more because none of those objects is ‘it’. Meaning here is alike the objet petit a, this ‘lost object’: it does not exist as a fixed or pre-determined entity but persists as a driving force, a placeholder for a void that compels us to search and create. In the same way that the objet petit a fuels our desire by remaining elusive and unattainable, meaning arises as something fundamentally incomplete, constantly deferred, and reshaped by our attempts to grasp it. Each act of interpretation — whether it is of a dream, a text, or another’s ambiguous words — engages us in a process where meaning is generated not in arriving at an ultimate “answer,” but in the transformative journey of seeking.
This analogy also highlights the perplexing nature of meaning. Just as the objet petit a structures our desire by its very absence, meaning structures our engagement with language, symbols, and relationships through its indeterminacy. What we take to be the “final” meaning of a text or a dream is always provisional, subject to revision in light of new contexts or interpretations. It is this instability that keeps meaning alive, dynamic, and productive.
In psychoanalysis, this process is exemplified by the work of transference. The patient projects their desires, fears, and fantasies onto the analyst, assuming the analyst holds the key to the meaning of their unconscious. Yet, as Lacan points out, the analyst does not actually possess this key. Instead, it is the patient’s very act of attributing meaning to the analyst that enables the unfolding of their unconscious material. The subject supposed to know is a necessary fiction, a symbolic placeholder that allows the patient to engage in the work of interpretation. Similarly, the act of meaning-making requires us to posit a pre-existing significance even when none exists, creating meaning through the process of attributing and re-attributing it.
This logic extends to all forms of indirect communication. Ambiguity — whether in a romantic hint, a poetic metaphor, or the dense writings of philosophers like Deleuze — does not hinder meaning but invites it. The very opacity of such communication demands that we participate in the construction of its significance. Deleuze’s Body without Organs (BwO), for instance, resists static definition because it exemplifies a concept in flux, a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to a single representation. The process of grappling with the BwO is itself an enactment of its meaning: to understand it, one must engage in the kind of creative, non-linear thinking that the concept embodies.
