Le nuove melanconie

Do human beings prefer darkness to light? Slavery to freedom? Dead life to living life? After Man without the Unconscious, Massimo Recalcati returns with this book to interrogate the psychoanalytic clinic in its relation to the crucial transformations of contemporary society and the psychology of the masses. At the center is no longer the perverse dimension of a neo-libertine jouissance that rejects the Law, but the social withdrawal of the subject, his melancholic introversion. The wall emerges as the disturbing symbol of our time; it is the wall of life’s closure to life; it is the neo-melancholic tendency to reject the transcendence of existence; it is the securitarian impulse that would like to transform the border from a vital place of exchange into a rampart, barbed wire, closed port. The perturbing silhouette of the death drive, which psychoanalysis after Freud would have liked to repudiate, returns overbearingly to the scene of individual and collective life.