The Son's Secret. Massimo Recalcati

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СКАЧАТЬ him not only the irreducible difference of his own generation from that of his parents, but also the most elusive detail of his own existence. The greatest gift given to the son by the father in Luke’s parable is that of freedom, which is the greatest gift any parent can give their child. The father does not demand dialogue or reciprocal comprehension, but recognizes the son’s desire as an indecipherable enigma. Is this indecipherability not constantly experienced by every parent? Does love as an absolute openness to the mystery of the child’s otherness not arise precisely from this? Does respect for the child’s secret not perhaps indicate how being a parent is never an experience of acquisition or appropriation, but of decentralization of the self? Love is not empathetic. It is not based on reciprocal understanding, on sharing, but is respect for the absolute secret of the Other, for their solitude. Love is founded on the distance of difference, on that which cannot be shared, on the real of the Two that cannot be assimilated. This is not only the case for the bond between parents and their children, but even more so in every other relationship. Psychoanalysis allows us to see how those lasting loving relationships capable of being generative are the ones that never dissolve the enigma of the Other, the ones that know how to maintain the Other’s absolute secret that is impossible to comprehend. Only on the basis of this solitude, of this enigma that each person is and must remain for the Other (as well as for themselves) can a relationship with the Other, a being together with the Other, occur.

I watch my children grow, becoming autonomous and increasingly mysterious to me. I believe that this mystery is the mark of a difference that must always be preserved and admired, even when it seems disconcerting. I am always as amazed by their beauty and their splendour as I am by their messiness and laziness. So infinitely different from how I remember my condition as a son, and yet so incomprehensibly the same. I do not demand to know or understand anything about their lives, which rightly escape me, lying beyond my grasp. When walking next to them, in the silence of our close bodies, I sense the sound of their breathing as an inexpressible difference. It is a fact: every child carries an inaccessible secret with them, in their breath. No illusion of empathetic sharing will ever get to the bottom of this strange proximity. The joy between us erupts precisely when that which cannot be shared, the thing that separates us, generates a closeness with no illusion of communion. Our children are out there in the world, exposed to its beauty and its atrocity with no shelter. They are, like all of us, at the mercy of the four winds, despite or thanks to the love that we give them.

       I truly know nothing about my children’s lives, but I love them for precisely this reason. I am always at the door waiting for them without ever asking them to return. If we are close, it is not because I understand them, but because I value their secret.

      Milan-Noli-Valchiusella, January 2017

      This book brings together talks given at three conferences: Bose (2016), the Teatro Parenti in Milan (2016) and the Biblical Festival of Vicenza (2014).

Notes

      1 1. I address this theme and the relationship between parents and their children in our time in general, in Massimo Recalcati, Che cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipermoderna [What Remains of the Father? Fatherhood in Hypermodern Times], Milan: Raffaella Cortina, 2011, and The Telemachus Complex: Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father, Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

      2 2. This is one of the reasons the event of a child’s death is so utterly senseless and traumatic, literally inconceivable, for a parent.

      3 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 276–7.

      4 4. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’: Mark 2:27.

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