"In Cain's world, the left needs to face fear. It cannot be merely against." Interview with Massimo Recalcati

Massimo Recalcati, psychoanalyst and essayist, answers some questions after returning from Auschwitz: "It is by no means a tour, as has been clumsily said. It is an encounter with an unprecedented trauma. An example of what the madness of ideology can generate: hell on Earth. Each of us should go there at least once in our life."

The interview is by Alessandro De Angelis, published in La Stampa 05-11-2025. The translation is by Luisa Rabolini.

Here is the interview.

Why does no expression of hate disqualify the one who utters it nowadays?

We live in a time of ideological fanaticism. Look, there are two kinds of ignorance. One is the simple ignorance of those who are unaware of a subject. The other is more widespread and is the true mark of our time. It concerns those who are certain they possess the truth. From this springs all kinds of fundamentalism.

Ideology, in this sense.

The foundation of all ideology is thinking oneself the exclusive owner of the truth. When the truth ceases to be an object of search and becomes a property, it leads to a manichean distinction of the good (oneself) and the bad (the others).

What impresses you most about this violent metamorphosis of language?

Words are what humanize life. They establish the deepest difference in relation to animal life. They allow us to become human by renouncing the shortcut of violence. Where there is hatred and violence, we encounter the opposite path: violence kills the word. This also happens when words are transformed into weapons; the insult then becomes a projectile word.

What is the importance of new technologies in creating a dominated ecosystem that rewards aggression?

On social networks, the relationship between words and their consequences is broken. All aggression becomes lawful. There is no barrier considered inviolable: illness, death, the Holocaust... It is a form of radical psychic immaturity.

The roots of hate. Development.

Hate and violence cannot be explained as a regression of humans to the animal, to the bestial. Animals use violence to survive. We are the only type of animal that takes pleasure in exercising violence. It is Cain’s hate that denies Abel’s experience, that is, the other from oneself, the Two that forces the I to renounce its narcissistic power. If you prefer a rigorous definition of hate, it is this: the effort to bring the Two back to the closed regime of the One.

Does hate enslave?

Hate, said Jacques Lacan, "is a career without limits."

Is this how we explain the crisis of democracies, challenged from within and outside by the Cains of autocracies and populisms?

Democracy is the experience of the death of the One and the discovery of the Two. Wars break out because there was not enough collective time for the symbolic elaboration of mourning for the One. Think of the Russia-Ukraine conflict: instead of guiding Russia toward democracy — the experience of the death of the One — Putin would like to refound the empire, denying the experience of the Two.

The same happens within democracies, with the construction of the enemy.

The search for the enemy is a paranoid vocation that permeates every illiberal regime. It locks each identity into a narrative that denies the Two: the diverse is experienced as a threat, as an obstacle to our full realization.

In short, the trap of identities.

Walter Benjamin said: "Democracy obliges us to continuous translation." In a democracy, indeed, there are more languages, and we are all forced to an effort of translating the language of the other. In illiberal regimes, on the contrary, everyone speaks the same language...

The breeding ground for all this is fear that autocrats or aspiring autocrats work hard to transform into hate?

Psychic sovereignty, as we said, is the destruction of Abel in the name of the One, alone. The masses of the twentieth century, as Wilhelm Reich observed, did not suffer passively under totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, there was an active desire for fascism. This is what is most disconcerting.

Updating, it is equivalent to asking why today, burdened by crisis, people are willing to give up a little freedom in exchange for security, or the illusion of it.

Exactly. It is a desire for protection that may involve flight, as Fromm would say, from freedom. There is, indeed, a deep ambivalence of humans toward freedom. For this reason, Spinoza could say that man may prefer his chains to freedom.

Chains or walls: economic like tariffs, real for migrants.

Protectionism is not an economic policy, just as walls against immigrants are not merely an effective public order policy. Both stimulate a security drive, that is, the search for protection and safety.

Why, in consensus, is narrative more important than results?

The foundation of populism is a substantial equivalence between the People and the Good. The leader does not represent his people, but embodies them in their most basic drives. It is a hypnotic relationship, not one of delegation. The excess of liquid society, to use Bauman’s words, led to a return of solid identities and the search for primal parents, leaders of war and arms, like Netanyahu, Trump, or Putin.

Is the historical mistake of traditional elites and the left to oppose all this only with political correctness?

There is no doubt. The left is only "against": against Trump and against Meloni, almost obsessively. But being against does not broaden consensus. On the contrary, it narrows it sectarianly.

In other words, the left places identity above the country.

Exactly. It cultivates the garden of its identity and that of its followers. Instead, it should start again speaking to the majority of the country, not only to minorities.

Otherwise, it deepens a separation from the people.

Yes, because it denies those needs that the right channels in a regressive way. You denounce authoritarian chains, but do not concern yourself with breaking the chains of fear, which are their deepest premise.

Let’s quote Gramsci: measure oneself with "common sense" and make it explicit.

You cannot say that security is right-wing, otherwise you will not speak to the people. You have to say that the problem exists and address it in an alternative way, according to your principles. If you cannot even utter a word when Emanuele Fiano is contested at university because he does not want to lose the support of the pro-Palestine movement, we are lost.

Is the left also chained to its Cain?

Being democratic is a long-term effort. Being alone against blocks the country and blocks the left along with it.