FLASH
Shkruar nga Massimo Recalcati
The most cruel and brutal crimes in history have always been justified in the name of Truth...
Hatred is the passionate foundation of every war. In the animal world, there is neither crime nor war because the passion of hatred does not exist. The aggressive instinct is released only to defend one's territory, for the survival of one's own existence or that of one's pack. However, it never assumes the irresistible value of a passion destined to endure and corrupt life.
In an extraordinary novel like Joseph Conrad's "The Duelists," one can clearly see how this passion can consume, like a cancer, an entire existence. It is no coincidence that Lacan defines it as a career without limits. There are individual and collective lives that base their identity on the permanent mobilization of hatred. Psychoanalysts know well how hatred can give meaning to a life inhabited at its core by a profound emptiness. I have repeatedly witnessed the depression of people who, for various reasons, had lost contact with their object of hatred. It was the passion of hatred that kept them alive.
In the collective dimension of human life, education in hatred is the first step that motivates prejudice, discrimination and division, justifying the use of violence. The passion of hatred is the passion of the One that seeks to exclude the Two to the point of its ultimate destruction. Where there is hatred, the virtuoso traumatic experience of the Two is always rejected in the name of the One. Destroying the enemy means, in fact, first of all destroying the experience of self-limitation that constitutes the Two. For this reason, the gesture of Cain finds its foundation in the myth of Narcissus: to love one's own image, to present oneself as a One-completely-alone, to worship the Self, involves the suppression of everything other than oneself. Bad teachers of all times incite hatred, arm the hands of their children or students, and fan the nihilistic flames of the enemy's destruction.
Mainly, as happened exemplarily in our country in the 1970s, by hiding their responsibilities. In fact, it is always the irresponsible use of words by bad teachers that incites the outbreak of violence.
But how can the chain of hatred be broken? When Jesus' teaching evokes love as a radical antidote to the passion of hatred, he does not accept the rhetoric of good feelings. His words, in fact, do not urge us to love our neighbors, to love those who love us, but, in an unprecedented way, to love our enemies. It is a dizzying change in his thinking that not even Sigmund Freud could accept. However, his message remains today more than ever as difficult as it is essential: brotherhood is in no way an experience of assimilation, standardization, or, in the narrow sense of the word, even of separation. With the paradoxical invitation to love your enemy, Jesus aims instead to overturn every naive, harmonious and peaceful conception of love, highlighting its most insoluble side. To love your enemy means to love someone who is not at our disposal, who escapes our control, who can never be assimilated into our ego.
In this sense, the passion of love is a passion for decentralization, while that of hate is, conversely, a passion for centralization. The enemy becomes a target, an otherness to be despised or annihilated, before which one reaffirms one's moral, ethical, racial, or cultural superiority.
Will we then be held responsible to future generations for supporting a culture of war and hatred instead of a radical culture of love? Isn't this perhaps the great and immense task of education?
It is no coincidence that war and school are profoundly antagonistic. The primary function of school is not the transmission of knowledge, but rather the shaping of life in its naturally plural dimension, in the experience of the Two and not the One-Only. For this reason, all totalitarian ideologies distort the democratic vocation of school, transforming it into a workshop of war and indoctrination, subordinating it to the service of hatred. It is no wonder that it was precisely Hitler's philosophy of hatred that made the horror of the Shoah and the Second World War possible.
The passion of hatred, in fact, is fed by the dogmatic certainty of the possession of the Truth. It excludes doubt and contradictions in principle because it thrives on an integralist and fundamentalist ideal of purity. It is in the name of this purity that Hitler legitimized his savage hatred of the Jews, of Bolshevism and of liberal democracies. The most cruel and brutal crimes in history have always been justified in the name of the Truth. This is why hatred is the daily food of every sectarian ideology.
It is no coincidence that Freud declared that hatred is a direct expression of the death instinct, the instinct that nourishes not life, but its destruction. In every totalitarian regime, the democratic mission of the school is poisoned and distorted by the virus of ideology. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were shocking historical examples of how indoctrination can replace education in the plural law of the word, the law of the Two. Our time traumatically presents the same challenge on the eve of a war that threatens to become global: will the passion of hatred triumph, or will we be able to find in brotherhood, in the love of the Two, an ethical alternative to this monstrous human passion? / Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “ La Repubblica”
Lini një Përgjigje