Cain’s Act
The Origins of Hate
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From one of Italy’s most renowned philosophers and psychoanalysts, an urgent and stirring reflection on violence, morality, and our relationship with the Other
What lies at the foundation of human history and society? According to Massimo Recalcati, it is not love for one’s neighbor, as preached by Jesus in the Gospels, but the brutality, jealousy, and violence depicted in the story of Cain and Abel.
As timely as it is brilliant, this essay examines Cain’s murderous act through the lens of psychoanalysis, showing how delusions of self-sufficiency and individual perfection lie at the deepest roots of fear and violence in our societies.
True completeness can only be achieved through others—not despite them. This, argues Recalcati, is the lesson of Cain, one that resonates powerfully in our time.
“Recalcati explores the most fundamental of questions—for Cain, Abel, and every human being: can we believe in love?”—La Stampa
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The biblical story of Cain and Abel reveals the dark side of human nature, posits psychoanalyst Recalcati (The Night in Gethsemane) in this esoteric analysis. "The Bible shows how violence makes manifest the perverse and narcissistic character of human desire: our drive to destroy alterity, our aspiration to become divine, our desire to be God," Recalcati contends, providing a psychoanalytic take on Cain's murder of his brother and suggesting that sin arises from an inherent human drive to see oneself as self-contained and complete. Recalcati defines "true sin" as the desire of humans to be equal to God, who by definition "does not know the negative, lacerating experience of lack." For Recalcati, Cain's jealousy of Abel's superior offerings to God stands in for a basic impulse in which the recognition of difference ("lack") produces a desire to eliminate the "Other" so as to make oneself "absolute." The ideas stimulate, but the discussions of how Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the "mirror stage" and ego apply to Cain are bound to go over the heads of readers not steeped in psychoanalytic theory. Still, this provides plenty to ponder.
