Abstract
Through Machado de Assis’s fiction, we seek to illustrate how certain current behaviors and forms of human subjectivity are the heritage of slavery, which is involved in social discourse and everyday life and transforms itself according to current conditions, but does not disappear. Recognizing the permanence of slavery’s heritage is an opportunity to overcome it. The unconscious remains of these memories are revealed by Machado de Assis and became a valuable tool for psychoanalysts’ practice, since the praxis of its ethics is connected to listening to the discourses that structure subjectivity in time and space.
Impossible; unconscious; other; discontents