The Telemachus Complex

Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father

Massimo Recalcati, Alice Kilgarriff

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509531721, 9781509531714
• eBook ISBN: 9781509531745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their children's playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be?

In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mother's love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future.

This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.

1
The Law of the Word and the New Hell

Praying Is No Longer Like Breathing

There was a time when praying was like breathing, when praying was a force of nature. Prayer had the same force as snow, rain, sun, fog. It was like the passing of the seasons: it was a collective ritual that articulated our daily life. I cannot remember when I learnt to pray. It is as if I have always known how. I was taught to pray in the same way I was taught to show respect for my elders and to behave at the table. I grew up at a time when praying was like eating, sleeping, running. That time, when praying was comparable to a force of nature, to breathing, has definitively come to an end. We are now in another time, one in which parents must, for example, choose whether or not to pass on the meaning of prayer to their children. If praying is no longer a practice that is passed on automatically through the force of tradition, if this is no longer a mechanism whose ability to function is guaranteed by the symbolic power of the Other, then the time of prayer has become the time of a subjective choice. Parents are obliged to make a conscious decision, one that is no longer automatically passed down through the Other of tradition.

At the beginning of Cosa resta del padre? [What Remains of the Father?],¹ I ask whether in the time of the death of God – the epochal event that defines the horizon of our time – it still makes sense to teach our children to pray. Some of my fellow psychoanalysts were eager to remind me that psychoanalysis had closed off all contact with religious discourse, and that my reasoning oscillated ambiguously between the risk of a nostalgic exhumation of the father’s body, or that of God himself. As if asking questions about the meaning of prayer necessarily meant the nostalgic evocation of a religious society founded on the symbolic authority of the God-as-father.

Aphonia and the Father’s Amnesia

I have previously described the time we live in using a formula belonging to Lacan: that of the evaporation of the father.² I did not use this expression simply to comment on the crisis faced by real fathers in exercising their authority, but, more radically, to expose the failure of the guiding function of the Ideal in individual and collective life. More precisely, this formula demonstrates how it is impossible for the father to still have the final word on the meaning of life and death, on the meaning of good and evil. This word retreats, extinguishes itself; it appears worn out, exhausted. This word no longer exists. This point is demonstrated with great lyrical force in the opening scene of Nanni Moretti’s 2011 film Habemus papam. The balcony of St Peter’s stands desperately empty. Moretti knowingly lingers on the movement of the purple curtains fluttering in the wind, which, rather than announcing the presence of a new pontiff, instead reveal to the faithful, who stand in trepid anticipation, the melancholy and definitive absence of their beloved father. He who has been named by the College of Cardinals as a symbol of God on Earth, as the unique representative of His word, is not up to the task of carrying the symbolic weight of the role. His word falters, it is extinguished. He remains silent. It is something more than a humanization of the heir of St Peter, as film critics chose to see it. What Moretti is showing us is the evaporation of the father as an impossibility of carrying the symbolic weight of a word that still wishes to proclaim the ultimate meaning of the world, that of good and evil, of life and death. It is the breakdown of the time in which praying was like breathing. The new pope’s aspiration to be an actor, his frustrated theatrical vocation, reveals how the word of the father has now been reduced to mere semblance. A game, fiction, betrayal, illusion, recitation, mise en scène. When, on the balcony of St Peter’s, the new pope must speak in his symbolic capacity of Father to the faithful, his voice can no longer recite his part. It remains aphonic, aphasic; he withdraws into silence.³ The word does not want to come out, it does not take shape, remaining trapped beyond the voice, revealing the aphonia, aphasia of the Father-pope, of the universal symbol of the father. Is this aphasia not one of the fundamental symptoms of our time? The multitude of souls that fills St Peter’s Square awaiting the guiding words of the father are left disappointed, bewildered. The very person who should have offered them reassurance, who should have brought them encouragement, who should fill existence on Earth with the power of the word of God, is not only incapable of speaking, but reveals himself to also be lost. With a masterstroke, Moretti hits a nerve, suddenly inverting the generational order. The father who should reassure must now be reassured himself; the father who saves (us) from getting lost is lost himself. The father who should save his own children himself becomes a child. Generational metamorphosis: the Father-pope has become a terrified and crying child, who must be consoled and protected. An infantilization of the powerful adult image of the great paterfamilias. Generational inversion: who is the father? Who is the child? Who is offering shelter? Who is lost?

This scene from Habemus papam evokes another (equally pertinent) scene from Moretti’s work, which is well worth revisiting. I am referring to Palombella rossa, the film shot by Moretti in the aftermath of the crisis in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the fall of the Berlin Wall, released in 1989. Faced with questions from a television journalist on the fate of the party, the secretary of the PCI, the film’s protagonist played by Moretti, hesitates, appearing disoriented to the point of losing his memory. Rather than answering the journalist’s questions, he asks himself: who am I? Who are we? What has happened? Here we find ourselves faced with another symptom, one with which the psychoanalyst is all too familiar: amnesia. This corresponds with and is, in some ways, fatally evoked by the aphonia-aphasia of the Father-pope. Who am I? Who are we? What has happened? The party secretary is no longer able to guide the party faithful. He is lost in the fog of a memory that has suddenly become unstable. Like the Father-pope, he is absent from himself. His memories plunge him into a series of sketches that hark back to his childhood: the smell of summer, the atmosphere in the swimming pool, the water polo matches, the ever-present bread and Nutella, Doctor Zhivago. The questioning about the collective destiny of the party leads to a dramatic calling into question of its very existence. Who am ‘I’? Where am I? Where am I from? Where am I going? The metaphysics of the question outclasses that of the response.

At the intersection between Habemus papam and Palombella rossa, the two great symbols of the Ideals that have guided the lives of the masses in the West (the leader of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the secretary of the glorious Communist Party) are no longer able to speak, they can no longer carry the symbolic weight of their public role. They appear lost, evaporated.

The Hell of Salò

One final cinematographic reference can provide an even more radical summary of the phenomenon of the father’s evaporation and its effect on our time. I refer to the last film-testament of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini wilfully conceived this as a film that is impossible to watch. This is common in the most extreme contemporary art: the unveiled real of what is terrifying forces the spectator to retreat into anxiety. The horror of what is shown onscreen forces the spectator to lower their eyes, rendering the gaze impossible, as happens in one of the final scenes, in which a victim is sodomized whilst being brutally scalped with a knife, before being killed mercilessly.

Pasolini’s final film wants to show the real of enjoyment without any symbolic filters: sadistic torture, coprophagia, humiliation, brutality, gratuitous murder. ‘Everything is good when it is excessive’, is the Bataille-esque statement made by one of the four sadistic libertines in the film’s opening scene. The victims are presented as pure instruments at the service of the only Law of enjoyment: bodies are lacerated, throats are slit, they are tormented, burned, tortured and cynically murdered. In this Godless universe there is no salvation, there is no horizon, no desire. Everything is consumed in the claustrophobic compound of the will to enjoy. Though Pasolini had long used his works to promote a version of the sexual body, inspired by Rousseau and Bataille, as a transgressive force that challenges the repressive and coercive dimension of the Law in the name of the (impossible) return to Nature, in Salò he seems to move away from this representation of the conflict between the Law and desire, recognizing that the cult of enjoyment and the logic of its pure waste (present in Sade and theorized by Bataille) have become a rule for the biopolitical administration and manipulation of bodies under the new Law dictated by the capitalist discourse: compulsive sex, the assertion of a freedom without Law, the eternal repetition of all the Sadean scenarios demonstrate that our time has made enjoyment an imperative which, rather than liberating our lives, oppresses and enslaves them.⁴ Herein lies the radical political indictment that runs through Salò. It is in no way, as Cesare Musatti believed, an outburst of perverse-polymorphic sexuality faced with the failure of a normative access to a fully genital sexuality that would reveal the unconscious fantasy of its author,⁵ but a rather more lofty attempt at describing the very unconscious of the capitalist discourse as a radical destruction of the Eros of desire.⁶ It is in no way a depiction of a private theatre used to portray Pasolini’s perverse fantasy (as a purely pathographical application of psychoanalysis to this film would do), but an exhibition of ‘excess’ as the assertion of a Law that rejects any limits and that qualifies the neo-capitalist degradation of the erotic body to a mere instrument of enjoyment. It is not a provocative representation of the polymorphic sexuality of childhood, but a desperate and entirely anti-erotic enjoyment that, without even the slightest regard for the Law of symbolic castration, melds disastrously with the death drive. Is this not one of the fundamental ciphers of our time, a time in which the command to enjoy seems to triumph as the only form of the Law?

Having only seen Salò once in my youth, in 1976, I had wrongly remembered a scene in which a boy and a girl, whilst being drowned in a bucket of shit, reacted to their imminent death one by making the sign of the cross, and the other by holding up a closed fist. Having recently watched Pasolini’s film once more, I realized that this scene does not exist, but was the result of my unconscious combination of another two scenes in the film. In one of these, a girl finds herself immersed in shit and invokes the Christian God – ‘God, God, why have you forsaken us?’ – whilst in another scene, a soldier from Salò is discovered as he makes love to a servant girl – thus transgressing the Law, which by insisting that there can only be enjoyment paradoxically prohibits the possibility of love – and is brutally riddled with bullets. Before dying he has time to proudly raise his closed fist. This ‘error of memory’, in reality, contains a subjective interpretation that I think remains incredibly faithful to Pasolini’s narrative: the capitalist discourse drowns ideals (both Christian and communist) in shit and blood in the name of enjoyment, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• 1 The Law of the Word and the New Hell
• 2 The Confusion Between Generations
• 3 From Oedipus to Telemachus
• 4 What Does It Mean To Be a Rightful Heir?
• Epilogue
• End User License Agreement