The Temptation of the Wall. Massimo Recalcati

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Introduction

      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

In this book I will attempt to work through some of the fundamental junctures of our life together, using the theoretical tools provided by psychoanalysis: the figure of the foreigner, the significance of the border, of hate and of envy, the dogmatism and secularity of knowledge, fanaticism and the ‘democratic mind’, the anxiety brought on by freedom, the poetry of institutions and the populist mirage of their abolition. Psychoanalysis demonstrates that, in order not to collapse in on itself, mental life requires porous confines capable of feeding an exchange with alterity so as to broaden the horizon of the world. At the same time, it cannot deny the existence of a primal tendency, the drive for self-preservation, that human life uses to protect itself from the world as a place of threatening disturbances where, as Freud writes, the stranger – ‘the outsider’ – is met with hostility.

      While freedom is a fundamental aspiration for human life, we need to recognize that it is also an object of anxiety and rejection. The psychology of the masses throughout the twentieth century has shown us the extent to which human beings have been capable of relinquishing their freedom, preferring to avoid the ethical responsibilities it implies in 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