We see the AIDS epidemic first and foremost as exposing a crisis which goes beyond it and which emphasises how urgent and exacting is the challenge facing us all: the challenge to become, both personally and collectively, the subject—or subjects—of our own history.

In approaching this subject, clarification of the obscure relations between AIDS and the question of truth plays an indispensable part. That is why we desire to return to it by tackling it from the angle of the patient/practitioner relationship. This offers us the advantage of a concrete approach to the question of truth and AIDS without exempting us from facing the question at the deeper level of an analysis of our desire to control everything. Also it enables us to stress the close bonds which link this question of truth with that of deficiency.

The patient-practitioner relationship is a particular instance of human relationship in general. It also can be subjected to the same fundamental ethical analysis. As we have shown elsewhere, no true human relationship is possible if those involved do not fulfil the following three conditions: to be present to one another, to accept their differences in fact, and, above all, to cultivate their moral equivalence. But their moral equivalence would be denied by one lying about the other. Why, in fact, pretend to recognise another person as morally your equal if, by hiding the truth from that person, you seal him or her up in a lie?