The Temptation of the Wall. Massimo Recalcati
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favour of the totalitarian chains of fascist regimes.
As we will see, truth, like freedom, is still an inalienable component of every lexicon of civility, but this does not in any way stop that same thirst for truth from sometimes tipping over into its opposite. This is the explosive blend of fanaticism: ignorance elevated to a supreme form of the truth, ignorance as the passion of one, single Truth that rejects any other possible truth.
This paradox demonstrates just how much the mental life of individuals, of groups of human beings and of institutions, is contradictory and vulnerable. Fascism is not simply a dramatic historical moment for many countries, but is a tendency that inhabits the human being. A tendency to prefer obedience to freedom, the wall to the open sea, slavery to responsibility, ignorance to knowledge, the incivility of hate to the civility of agreements and words.
In spring 2020, after presenting my Lexicons on love and the family, I introduced my third and final one on RAI 3: that of civility. In these written texts, developed in both their references and reasoning, the reader will find the ideas that guided the television programmes. I purposefully chose this lexicon to end the cycle.2 Family and the loving discourse are indeed nothing if we do not consider them also in terms of the civility they are capable of generating. In the family, we have the civility of care and education, whereas in love we have that of the absolute respect for difference, for heteros, the only one, as Lacan explained, worthy of love.
Nevertheless, this third and final Lexicon does not take the intimate dimension of life in its singularity and its primary bonds as a starting point. Instead, it considers how this singularity has always appeared as part of the wider social dimension, which is not added to life at a later time but is a constituent part of its being. Indeed, as Homer’s Telemachus declares in the opening pages of The Odyssey, no one has seen their own birth.3 We are all thrown into a life that we never wanted, a life decided by the Other. Our lives are, from the outset, never without the Other. This is the idea that Freud always insisted upon: there is no individual psychology without social psychology. There is no human life that is not life immersed in a civilization.
Notes
1 1. I recently developed an in-depth clinical reflection on these themes in my book Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio nel tempo ipermoderno (The New Melancholies: Destinies of Desire in Hypermodern Times), Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2019.
2 2. The content of my Family Lexicon can be found throughout several of my books, including Cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipermoderna (What Remains of the Father? Fatherhood in Hypermodern Times), Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2011; The Telemachus Complex: Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father, Polity, Cambridge 2019; The Mother’s Hands: Desire, Fantasy and the Inheritance of the Maternal, Polity, Cambridge 2019; The Son’s Secret: From Oedipus to the Prodigal Son, Polity, Cambridge 2020. My Lexicon on Love can be found in the book The Enduring Kiss: Seven Short Lessons on Love, Polity, Cambridge 2021.
3 3. See Homer, The Odyssey, I, 214–20.
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