Il grido di Giobbe

Job’s body and soul are torn by evil; “naked and shaven,” covered with sores, he falls into ashes. Prayer can only take the sharp form of a cry addressed to God, “why me? Why the injustice of all this pain?”

The evil that rages against Job can no longer be conceived of as punishment, for he has committed no crime; it can no longer be vengeance, for he has struck no one. In being exposed to the senseless violence of suffering Job finds himself immersed in an untranslatable experience. Only the cry addressed to God remains as the most radical mode of demand. The same one he carries in the etymon of his name: Job means in the Hebrew language “where is the father?” Question that towers above any possible answer. “Job’s pain,” as Recalcati writes, “cannot be brought back to the order of meaning because no theology, like no other form of knowledge, is able to explain its excess. Job’s cry happens when words are forced into silence, broken by the trauma of evil. It is not indicative of resignation but of struggle and resistance. After The Night of Gethsemane and The Gesture of Cain, with The Cry of Job continues Massimo Recalcati’s intense and surprising journey as a reader of the Bible, committed to tracing the deepest legacy of psychoanalytic thought that will conclude, soon, with an extensive and long-awaited work.