The Son's Secret. Massimo Recalcati

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Introduction

      The need for dialogue between children and their parents as a fundamental part of children’s upbringing is insisted upon today in a variety of ways. Faced with the slow yet traumatic erosion of paternal authority that has seen the dissolution of the father-as-master, this dialogue seems to have rightly replaced the brutal commands, loud voice and stern looks that had previously characterized the all-too-familiar face of the father-as-master. There has been an epochal shift. Fathers and sons find themselves in a state of proximity that, until a short time ago, was entirely unheard of. Fathers are no longer the symbol of the Law. Now, like mothers, they too occupy themselves with the bodies, free time and emotions of their children. This proximity – an effect of the rightful weakening of paternal authority – can no doubt be welcomed as the positive emancipation of the educational discourse from excessively rigid, normative precepts.

Never before has such careful attention been paid to the relationship between parents and their children. The son is increasingly presented as a prince to whom the family offers its myriad services. The risk here is that this newfound attention justifies an alteration in the symbolic difference that distinguishes children from their parents, with children demanding the same symbolic dignity as their parents, the same rights, the same opportunities.¹ This new proximity characterizing the bond between parents and their children paves the way for a closeness among equals, or, worse, a sort of confused identification that springs from the horizontalization of bonding, causing it to lose any sense of verticality. The pedagogical rhetoric of dialogue, which today is king, is in my opinion a macroscopic effect of this confusion.

      The same can be said of the word ‘empathy’, now hegemonic and central to all psycho-pedagogical reasoning. A basic supposition – that speaking to our children means understanding them, seeing ourselves in them, sharing their joy and their suffering, essentially living their lives – sustains its inflated use. Who today would be brave enough to object to this positive empathy- and dialogue-based representation of the family’s educational bond? Is this not the politically correct model that must be supported and widely disseminated? And who, furthermore, would ever dream of denying the importance of dialogue and empathetic understanding in the relationship between parents and their children?

In this book, by revisiting two famous sons – Sophocles’ Oedipus and the prodigal son from the parable in Luke’s Gospel – and their complex relationships with their respective fathers, I aim to problematize this outcome of the hypermodern educational discourse in a critical manner, attempting to indicate a different path. Not that of the often rhetorical valorization of dialogue and empathy, but that of recognizing that a child’s life is, above all, another life: a life that is foreign, distinct, different – that it exists within the limit zone and is impossible to comprehend. Is a child not the greatest mystery, one that defies all attempts at interpretation? Is a child not precisely a point of difference, of resistance, of the uncontainable insurgence of life? Is this not their beauty, which is both radiant and threatening? Is the child’s life not an indecipherable secret that must be respected as such?

      The enigma of the son is what disturbs Oedipus’ father, Laius, to such a degree (as he is warned by the oracle that his son is destined to murder him and possess his wife) that he takes the terrible decision to kill him. In the myth of Oedipus, Laius reacts to his destiny of death by his son’s hand by demanding the death of his son. He is not able to see his son as the mystery, at once threatening and radiant, fertile, that each child is for their parents. Should the son’s life not surpass that of those who have created him – should the child’s life not sanction their death, their inevitable decline?² When she predicts Oedipus’ destiny, is the oracle not revealing an inevitable and unavoidable truth about the relationship between fathers and their sons? Is the ‘threatening’ nature of every son – like that of a student for their master – not that which inevitably imposes the death of their own origins, of their own parents? Does a child coming into the world not remind their creators of their own mortal destiny? Does the child’s life not perhaps always signal the limitlessness of life and, as a consequence (as Hegel carefully pointed out), the arrival of the end as revealed to their parents?³

This book is inspired by a re-reading of the events narrated by Sophocles in Oedipus the King and in Luke’s parable of the prodigal son, which both take as their premise the interwoven destinies of fathers and sons. Does the father’s guilt always fall on the son? Does an absence of desire in the parents necessarily condemn the child, relentlessly excluding them from any access to desire? And what Law is passed on from one generation to the next? The Law of destiny that seals the fate of the child’s life as a guilt-ridden repetition of that of the parent? Or another form of the Law, which invites us to suspend that Law’s inflexibility?

      Oedipus and the prodigal son demonstrate the oscillation between these two poles in the process of filiation. Oedipus the son is trapped in a symmetrical conflict with his father, with no hope of resolution. Infanticide and patricide mirror one another. The father of the prodigal son shows instead that he knows how to bear the real that cannot be shared, embodied by the life of his son. He does not respond to his son’s ‘patricidal’ gesture with hate, but chooses to trust him, to not stand in his way. He shows that, unlike Laius, he does not fear his son’s absolute secret but loves it deeply. In his father’s gesture of forgiveness, the warm welcome he extends upon his son’s return, the prodigal son finds a dissymmetry that breaks with any understanding of the Law as an inexorable destiny or punishment, the very thing that crushes Oedipus’ life. This father is able to recognize the enigma of the prodigal son without demanding to solve it. He offers himself as a Law whose foundations do not lie in any Code but only in the act of forgiveness itself, as the highest possible form of the Law, as the freedom of the Law. This is what the son learns for himself: it is СКАЧАТЬ