The Telemachus Complex by Massimo Recalcati;

Author:Massimo Recalcati;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509531745
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2019-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Femicidal Violence

The Law of the word, which is the Law of Culture, always constitutes a barrier to the exercise of violence. The Nazi official Goebbels felt an irresistible urge to reach for his gun every time he heard the word ‘culture’. Violence against women is a particularly hateful, unbearable form of violence because it destroys the word as a fundamental condition of the relationship between the sexes. We notice that rape, torture, femicide, abuse of all kinds to which women are subjected, abolish the Law of the word. These acts are committed in the mindless, brutal silence of the drive, or with humiliating verbal insults and aggression. The Law of the word, as the Law that unites humans in reciprocal recognition, is shattered. The Law of the word, as we have seen, confirms that the humanization of life implies an experience of the limit and otherness. When this limit is surpassed, there is destruction, hate, anger, dissipation, annihilation of oneself and the other. For this reason, the condition that makes love possible as a wholly human form of bond is, as Winnicott theorized, the ability to stay on our own, the ability to accept our own limit. When a man, old or young, rather than interrogating themselves about the failure of their own love lives, rather than mourning for that which they have lost, or measuring themselves by their own responsibility and solitude, pursues, lashes out, threatens or kills the girl or woman who has abandoned them, they demonstrate how, for them, the bond was in no way founded on reciprocal solitude, but enacted as a phobic protection against the anxiety of solitude. We know that many young men who commit rape come from families where instead of the Law of the word, there is a sort of imaginary Law of the clan, a symbiosis between its members that paranoiacally identifies the outside as a place of ever-present threat.18 The passage to the violent act that tragically concludes a relationship demonstrates how that emotional union was not made up of two solitudes, but was based on the anxiety-riddled refusal of solitude, on the furious refusal of the limit, on the trauma of the non-existence of the sexual relationship. Not on the Law of the word but on its negation. To claim a right of absolute ownership (of life and death) over one’s partner is never a sign of love but, as Adriano Sofri reminded us, its ‘profanation’.19 In this claim, extreme narcissism is mixed with a profound depressive sentiment: I cannot bear not being everything to you and so I will kill you because I do not want to recognize that I am, in fact, nothing without you. To kill oneself after having killed everyone else: the world ends with my life (narcissism), but only because without yours I am nothing (depression).

Nothing tramples the Law of the word in such a hateful way as sexual violence. Human sexuality should be an erotic passion for the encounter with the Other, but

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