Law, Love and Desire

Massimo Recalcati - An outsider, a forger, a cheater, a demon in charge of other demons, a delusional, a narcissist, a false prophet, an exalted one, a drunkard and a glutton, a frequenter of prostitutes and thieves, an evildoer, a deceiver.

This is the portrait of Jesus that we can glean from the judgment of his enemies: the scribes, the doctors of the law, and the temple priests. In fact, religious people do not know what it means to spend one's life in love; they do not know what it means to desire and love life.

Their resentment poisons them, their helplessness intoxicates them, their sadness withers them. They have no chance to think about the event of the impossible, which breaks through and undermines the already established order of existence, reconstituting it as new.

Their cynical hypocrisy does not allow them to believe in the miracle of desire. Rather, it engages them in a permanent work of denigration and destruction of those who instead embody the impossible becoming possible.

"What is in a name?" asked Stephen Dedalus, one of the two main characters in James Joyce's Ulysses. In Jesus' is the mystery that characterizes him.

In Hebrew, Yeshua means the God who saves.

His word has the power of an irresistible magnet, it transports, moves, heroizes, arouses desire, resembles an ever burning fire, saves by showing that the truth is not already written in the law, but waits to become true each time in the embodied dimension of witness.

It is the actions of Jesus that make salvation possible on this earth.

Without this witness of caring for those in suffering and sorrow, in poverty and abandonment, in tribulation and despair, and also for those in hypocrisy and greed, in the dull preservation of one's possessions and in the rejection of love, the destiny he carries in his name would not have been realized.

Therefore, his first and decisive step is to resignify the relationship between the law and life. For when the law tends to eradicate desire from life, it becomes withered, emptied, hardened, heartless, a repressive norm no longer at the service of life but at the service of death.

By establishing a new covenant between the life of desire and the law, Jesus does not deny the law of Moses, but takes it over completely, that is, as Matthew writes, brings it to its full "fulfillment" (Mt 5:17).

Jesus is a Jew; his preaching would be incomprehensible if one did not take into account his Jewish roots and his deep knowledge of the Torah.

And the Movement, which involves every heir worthy of the name. Freud reminds us of this at the end of his work, quoting Goethe: "What you have inherited from your fathers, you must win back if you really want to possess it."

Inheritance is not a passive acquisition of rents, but a leap into the void, a forward movement, a revival, a forward momentum. The law, in order to be inherited in its substance, must be recovered.

This is the most characteristic feature of the teaching of Jesus: no cancellation of the symbolic debt, no rejection of its origin, no rejection of the Law. It is not for nothing that the most decisive commandment of the New Testament, that of "charity", is already written in the Law of Moses (Lev. 19:34).

In fact, it is precisely because of the centrality of this principle that Jesus reads the Bible anew: "Love your neighbor, the stranger, for you too were strangers in Egypt" (Ex 23:9; Lev 19:34).

But what does it mean to bring the Law to fulfillment if the Mosaic Law itself was already exhaustive of the truth of the Law?

The reclaiming of the inheritance of that law occurs in Jesus through the unprecedented affirmation of the law's excess of desire.

This is the central thesis of this book: the law cannot merely prohibit desire, because the true face of the law coincides precisely with that of desire.

And this is what Jesus committed himself to until the end of his days: to testify that the Law is not averse to desire, is not its ruthless antagonist, is not its stern censor, because the Law is in fact the most privileged name of desire, it is the most appropriate name of the living life, of the life overflowing with life.

This is why desire, raised to the dignity of the law, finds its highest expression in the radicalization of charity wrought by Jesus, which breaks down all narcissistic, co-specular representations of love in order to become, at its most disturbing climax, "love of the enemy".

In formulating the thesis that the Magisterium of Jesus introduces the idea that desire is law, I am in fact evoking a major Freudian theme, taken up forcefully by Lacan, whose roots lie in the biblical logos, namely that of the constitutive relationship between law and desire. The Christian fulfillment of the law consists in liberating life from the law by no longer setting the law against life, but by inscribing the law into the very heart of life.

Law is rediscovered as the expression of a vocation that knows how to give a new form to life, transforming, as Lacan would say, the power of the drive into the ethical order of desire. While every religion of law is the enemy of desire - religion comes from religio, which means to enclose, to fence in the power (dynamis) of desire - the word of Jesus liberates desire from all securitarian concerns.

In this sense, the event of the resurrection takes on the value of the indestructible power of the law of love and forgiveness, which restores life by freeing it forever from the curse of death.

Whenever this new law interrupts the flogging of the law, there is indeed a resurrection: death cannot be the last word on the meaning of life, any more than the law of punishment and sacrifice can be the last word on the meaning of the law.

Translated and edited by epochalchange for educational purposes only and to share with the English audience this profound and interesting article that appeared in the Italian newspaper la repubblica.

Translated and edited by epochalchange.org for educational purposes only. We are sharing this valuable article that appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica for personal use only.
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