Modern social and political life is characterized not only by a passion for freedom and a desire for human contact, but also by the urge to shut down, to refuse freedom and the responsibility that goes with it, to barter it away in return for our security: this is the temptation of the wall, a temptation with which every modern society has to come to terms. Drawing on his experience as a psychoanalyst, Recalcati shows that the temptation of the wall is rooted in a deep psychological inclination: human beings have always drawn up borders and rejected the risks associated with being open to the outside world. But when these borders are turned into walls, they can only result in an impoverishment of the value of exchange and the loss of the dynamic plurality of a life shared with others.
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Massimo Recalcati. The Temptation of the Wall
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
The Temptation of the Wall. Five Short Lessons on Civil Life
Dedication
Warning
Introduction
Notes
1 The Border
Roots and Freedom
The Uncivil Disease of the Wall
Contamination Delirium
The Temptation of the Wall
The First Face of the Foreigner
The Fearful Sensation of Life
The Intruder
We Are All Foreigners
Notes
2 Hate
The Passion of Hate
Hate is Older than Love
Hate or the Word?
Hate as an Alternative to the Painful Labour of Mourning
Envious Hate
Envy of Life
Notes
3 Ignorance
The Father-as-Master
The Consolidation of Ignorance
The Democracy of Books
An Anecdote about Freud
In Praise of Ignorance
Notes
4 Fanaticism
The Power of a Flag
The Fanatical Phantom of Purity
Escape from Freedom
The Inhumane Primacy of the Idea
The Universal and the Particular
The Spirit of Sacrifice
Notes
5 Freedom
The Urge to Freedom
The Sado-Masochistic Bond
We Never Live Alone
Degeneration of Freedom
Populism as an Incestuous Deviation of Democracy
The Poetry of Institutions
Notes
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Massimo Recalcati
Translated by Alice Kilgarriff
.....
Anxiety over contagion, coupled with the necessary defence from the rapid and violent spread of the pandemic, have brought about the imposition of extreme security measures that have objectively restricted our individual freedoms. Some people have interpreted this by evoking the spectre of the totalitarian threat of a new power founded on the biopolitical control of life. But is this really the case? Has the traumatic onslaught of Covid-19, through the unforeseen social and healthcare emergency it unleashed, paved the way for the creation of a neo-totalitarian order that poses a threat to democracy’s very existence?
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.
