The Son's Secret

From Oedipus to the Prodigal Son

Massimo Recalcati, Alice Kilgarriff

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509531769, 9781509531752
• eBook ISBN: 9781509531783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This new book by Massimo Recalcati focuses on the psycho-social life of the son. Comparing and contrasting the tragic story of Oedipus by Sophocles and the parable of the prodigal son, Recalcati argues that all common parenting strategies, whether authoritarian or democratic, are attempts at sealing the fate of sons – that is, they are designed to ensure that sons realize the dreams and fantasies of the parents. But all that sons want – and this is their secret because they generally do not want, or are unable, to confront their parents directly – is to be recognized as unique, as different, as independent, free-thinking individuals who are able to chart their own path in life, rather than extensions of their parents' fantasies. The parents' task is to acknowledge this, and to create the space for this desire to flourish.

Continuing his remarkable reflections on parents, children and family life, this new book by one of Italy's leading and bestselling public intellectuals will be of interest to a wide general readership.

Part One

1
Oedipus: The Son of Guilt

The Sphinx to Oedipus: ‘The abyss you push me into is within you.’

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edipo re [Oedipus Rex]

The Child’s Condition

The child’s condition is much like that of any human being. In life, we may or may not become fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, or have sisters or brothers, but no being that inhabits language, no human being, is able to avoid being a child. No human life creates itself, no human life exists that is entirely causa sui. There is no option for self-generation because life always comes from another life. It is always, in this strict sense, in debt to the Other. The defenceless, abandoned state in which the child comes into the world clearly demonstrates this condition of debt and fundamental dependence from the outset. Freud believed that, in order to live, human life requires the Other, their response, their role as a ‘saviour’; life needs to not be left alone in absolute abandonment.¹

The child’s condition defines human beings as a form of life that cannot be understood without considering their necessary provenance from the Other. This means that, despite everything we are told today, no one can be their own parent, no one can create themselves. No human life is the founder of its own condition. We all come from the Other. We are immersed in a process of filiation, in a generational chain: human life always comes into the world as someone’s child. This is a profound truth that psychoanalysis has inherited from Christianity.

But if being human means being someone’s child, what does it mean to be someone’s child? On the one hand, it means not being the master of one’s own origins. Human life comes to the world thrown into the symbolic chain of generations, into the history that has preceded it. Being a child means being created by the Other, having one’s own origins in the Other. This is the first paradox in the child’s condition. They have their own life, a distinct, different life, but are never entirely the master of this life because they can only receive it from the Other as an original symbolic debt. The process of filiation contains this paradox. The Other runs through all human life, bringing with it not only a genetic heritage as a biological stamp of its provenance, but also the words, legends, fantasies, guilt and joys of generations that have gone before it. It is constituted entirely by traces of the Other.

The life of a child is, therefore, an autonomous life, one that is separate, distinct from that of the Other, but at the same time it is a life that, incapable of choosing its own provenance, carries with it all of the traces of the Other that created it. This is why, according to Freud, children have a particular propensity to construct romantic stories about family life, using imaginative play to give themselves ideal origins such as being the daughter or son of royalty, presidents or famous scientists.²

The child’s condition is that of fulfilling the role of the heir. Being a child entails the task of inheritance, of making ours that which the Other (for better or worse) has given us. It requires an act of reclamation, making truly our own that which we have received. The trace is not simply an imprint, but a bond with the Other that must be reclaimed in a singular way. This reclaiming constitutes the most central task of inheritance. In this sense, every rightful child is an heir because they have the task of not repeating but uniquely reclaiming – of subjectivizing – that which has been transmitted to them by those who have gone before. If our origin precedes us, constitutes us, and none of us can ever become its master (what Lacan defined as the ‘symbolic debt’ of humans towards language), the ethical task of subjectivizing this very origin – or, rather, that of differentiating themselves through this subjectivization of the Other from which they hail – falls to the child.³

The Word and Language

We can clarify the task of inheritance using a famous pair of terms held to be particularly important by Lacan. I am referring to the pairing ‘word’ and ‘language’.⁴ In order to speak, we are always obliged to subject ourselves to the laws of language that predate our word and to which our word is necessarily subjugated. The function of the word depends upon the existence of the field of language. However, the word that hails from language can never be said by language as its singular event always exceeds the static and universal order of language. The Code of language determines the law to which the word is subjected, but the exercise of the word – its singular event – always exceeds this Code. A prime example of this can be found in poetry, where the singular act of the word overwhelms the dimension of the Code, subverting its very foundations. This is why it has been proposed that Paul Celan viewed the poetic word as a ‘catastrophe’ of language.⁵

And yet being children means accepting the task of the word when it comes to the existence of language and the symbolic debt that the word inherits from that existence. On the one hand, the child drinks from the river of the language of the Other. As Lacan would say, they ‘bathe’ in language, insofar as they cannot help but talk the language of the Other, because ours is always and above all the language of the Other.⁶ On the other hand, the word can never be entirely contained in the Code. It escapes, surpasses, exceeds the (pre-established) universal dimension of language. There is in fact no Code that could host or anticipate the unpredictable trajectory of the word. Is this not the child’s condition as a true heir? On the one hand, their life is dictated by the Other, the child is a manifestation of the Other. They would in fact be nothing without the Other, as their life is ‘made’ from the Other’s traces, imprints, marks. And yet, on the other hand, the child’s condition is also one of transcending these very traces, imprints, marks. The child’s life is forced to break the Other’s net, ripping it, introducing an absolute discontinuity that cannot be assimilated. With its debt to language as a starting point, their condition is to make their own word possible, to subjectivize the event of the word. If the act of the word is always exposed to the interference of the Other, if it cannot exist without the Other, the event of the word exceeds the Other’s neutrality. And this means that, if the subject is nothing without the Other, then equally there is nothing in the Other that can define its existence. These are the two essential temporal dimensions through which the life of the child is constituted. The first is that of the Other, which leaves its own marks on the child’s life. The second is that of the child who has the task of making these marks its own.

Being a child, being a rightful child, means making ourselves the heir of that provenance from the Other in which we had no say: reclaiming it, making it our own. The child’s task is to find their own word in the laws of language. This means taking on that which their parents have left them in a unique way. It requires subjectivizing the debt that binds us to the generations that have gone before us. The rightful child is an heir, but they are also always a heretic, because no true heir must limit themselves to interpreting the past as pure repetition of that which has gone before. Instead, they must reclaim the past in their own way and fill it with new meaning.

The Slave-Messenger

A child is constituted by the traces of the Other, their life constituted by the Other’s language. Lacan successfully encapsulated this condition in the figure of the slave-messenger. It is thought that in ancient times, slave-messengers existed that would carry messages entrusted to them, written on the back of their shaved heads so as to keep the contents secret as it would be impossible for them to read the message whilst delivering it to the recipient.

In this legendary figure of the slave-messenger, we must read the condition of the figure of the child. Every child carries the illegible traces of the Other on the back of their shaved head. We are always written upon, spoken, marked by the Other. We carry the sentences, curses, wishes, hopes, desires and joys of our mothers and fathers on the backs of our necks. We carry on us the writing of the Other without ever being able to read it clearly, or fully decipher it. The mark of the Other is never unequivocal. It does not dictate an inexorable destiny, but can instead be subject to mistakes, misunderstandings, new beginnings and possible rewriting. It is a mark destined to infinite concatenations with other marks. Nevertheless, human destiny, these marks (referred to as ‘mnemic’ by Freud⁷) that humans carry on their shaven napes, is always written behind them. Provenance does not simply refer to a past event, but to how the past continues to have a profound impact on the present and future. This is the paradox of filiation: the guilt of the parents always falls on the child. But the children are never only the fruit of this guilt. There is a discontinuity, a left-over, an inassimilable residue between the guilt of the parents and the shadow of its repetition in the child.

Oedipus, The Son

The slave-messenger is the prisoner of the Other’s message. Does the son, as an heir, inherit the Other’s sentence? Are we nothing more than the outcome of an inexorable necessity? Simple puppets controlled by the Other’s throw of the dice?

As we ask these questions, we must acknowledge the arrival of the unsettling shadow of the cursed child, the child of guilt, the patricidal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Epilogue
• End User License Agreement