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This paper argues that the difficulties (or impossibility?) of formulating ethics relate to the conditions of its production. It demonstrates that ethics is usually performed by linguistic categories which are related to an imaginary of completeness and entirety. These categories, in fact, are not very suitable for this formulation. This imaginary is habitual for us and, despite how strange this may appear, is currently always present: it is evoked even when one speaks in terms of “incompleteness” or the “perfect whole,” which belongs to the symbolic order. For this reason, our practice struggles to leave a humanism-humanitarian perception, which often, and in spite of us, is an imaginary compassion or, in any case, a protective attitude (see for example the French social model).