The Temptation of the Wall. Massimo Recalcati

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The Temptation of the Wall - Massimo Recalcati


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of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4880-4

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942282

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      To Stefano Coletta and Pietro Galeotti, the first people to believe in this lexicon

      The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

      Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

      This book develops the central themes of Lessico civile, the short television series broadcast on Italy’s RAI 3 in spring 2020 and filmed prior to Christmas 2019. The collective trauma of Covid-19 had not yet reared its head. And yet, the reflections developed back then are still pertinent, even now, in the light of the tragedy that has befallen us.

      Before the pandemic exploded, politics was consumed by the enormous global problem of immigration and the need to rethink how we integrate with those who are different from us. In this context, the symbol of the wall appeared as a sovereignist response to the imminent threat posed by the intruder. This sovereignism was not only a political temptation, leading to border closures, a greater military presence at those borders and the radicalization of the securitarian drive, but also reflected a profound mental inclination, as human beings have always drawn up borders, defended their own safety, rejected the risks associated with being open to the outside world.

      The trauma of the pandemic that has swept across the entire planet since early 2020 fatally reactivates this temptation as even our friends, those closest to us, our family members could be carriers of this disease. They are all potential agents of contagion. This is the ‘terroristic’ nature of the virus. It separates every conventional distinction between friends and enemies, people we know and those we don’t, those closest to us and those who couldn’t be further away. Faceless, not really identifiable, invisible, the virus is an intruder that lives in us and among us. Its omnipresence dominates our most established defence mechanisms. Social distancing has therefore had to replicate, by force, the tightening of borders, replacing openness with sealing off, promoting division over integration.

      I do not believe so. From the perspective of freedom, the theme I have chosen to close this book of five brief lessons, the greatest lesson of this pandemic lies, in my opinion, in how it has laid bare the vacuous and purely ideological nature of freedom understood as individual property, and in how it teaches us that, ethically speaking, the greatest indicator of freedom is not that of choice or the unfurling of free will, but solidarity. Behind our being forced to give up our freedom to fight the aggression of Covid-19, there is no sacrificial phantom, no vocation for penance, nor any attack on our collective freedom, but the profound idea that no one can save themselves, that freedom without solidarity is an empty word.

      Milan, 25 April 2020

      Does a lexicon of civility still exist? Are we not living in a time where our societies are marked by a new barbarianism? Have the unrestrained frenzy of the neo-libertine drive and the defence of the globalization of markets made life in the polis impossible? And what to say of the most recent drive for militarization at the borders and their reinforcement through the use of security forces? Where is the basic dimension of hospitality on which every human community is founded?

      The neo-libertine degradation caused by hypermodern individualism and the transfiguration of the border into a wall, a stronghold, a fortress, are two sides of the same coin that define our time’s lack of civility. In both cases we can identify the markers of new discontents in civilization. On the one hand is a freedom that rejects any limit (the neo-libertine drive), and on the other, we have the loss of the symbolic dimension of the border as a place of transit, and its metamorphosis into a barrier (the securitarian drive).1

      While freedom is a fundamental aspiration for


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