The need for dialogue between children and their parents as a fundamental part of children’s upbringing is insisted upon today in a variety of ways. Faced with the slow yet traumatic erosion of paternal authority that has seen the dissolution of the father-as-master, this dialogue seems to have rightly replaced the brutal commands, loud voice and stern looks that had previously characterized the all-too-familiar face of the father-as-master. There has been an epochal shift. Fathers and sons find themselves in a state of proximity that, until a short time ago, was entirely unheard of. Fathers are no longer the symbol of the Law. Now, like mothers, they too occupy themselves with the bodies, free time and emotions of their children. This proximity – an effect of the rightful weakening of paternal authority – can no doubt be welcomed as the positive emancipation of the educational discourse from excessively rigid, normative precepts.

Never before has such careful attention been paid to the relationship between parents and their children. The son is increasingly presented as a prince to whom the family offers its myriad services. The risk here is that this newfound attention justifies an alteration in the symbolic difference that distinguishes children from their parents, with children demanding the same symbolic dignity as their parents, the same rights, the same opportunities.¹ This new proximity characterizing the bond between parents and their children paves the way for a closeness among equals, or, worse, a sort of confused identification that springs from the horizontalization of bonding, causing it to lose any sense of verticality. The pedagogical rhetoric of dialogue, which today is king, is in my opinion a macroscopic effect of this confusion.

The same can be said of the word ‘empathy’, now hegemonic and central to all psycho-pedagogical reasoning. A basic supposition – that speaking to our children means understanding them, seeing ourselves in them, sharing their joy and their suffering, essentially living their lives – sustains its inflated use. Who today would be brave enough to object to this positive empathy- and dialogue-based representation of the family’s educational bond? Is this not the politically correct model that must be supported and widely disseminated? And who, furthermore, would ever dream of denying the importance of dialogue and empathetic understanding in the relationship between parents and their children?

In this book, by revisiting two famous sons – Sophocles’ Oedipus and the prodigal son from the parable in Luke’s Gospel – and their complex relationships with their respective fathers, I aim to problematize this outcome of the hypermodern educational discourse in a critical manner, attempting to indicate a different path. Not that of the often rhetorical valorization of dialogue and empathy, but that of recognizing that a child’s life is, above all, another life: a life that is foreign, distinct, different – that it exists within the limit zone and is impossible to comprehend. Is a child not the greatest mystery, one that defies all attempts at interpretation? Is a child not precisely a point of difference, of resistance, of the uncontainable insurgence of life? Is this not their beauty, which is both radiant and threatening? Is the child’s life not an indecipherable secret that must be respected as such?

The enigma of the son is what disturbs Oedipus’ father, Laius, to such a degree (as he is warned by the oracle that his son is destined to murder him and possess his wife) that he takes the terrible decision to kill him. In the myth of Oedipus, Laius reacts to his destiny of death by his son’s hand by demanding the death of his son. He is not able to see his son as the mystery, at once threatening and radiant, fertile, that each child is for their parents. Should the son’s life not surpass that of those who have created him – should the child’s life not sanction their death, their inevitable decline?² When she predicts Oedipus’ destiny, is the oracle not revealing an inevitable and unavoidable truth about the relationship between fathers and their sons? Is the ‘threatening’ nature of every son – like that of a student for their master – not that which inevitably imposes the death of their own origins, of their own parents? Does a child coming into the world not remind their creators of their own mortal destiny? Does the child’s life not perhaps always signal the limitlessness of life and, as a consequence (as Hegel carefully pointed out), the arrival of the end as revealed to their parents?³

This book is inspired by a re-reading of the events narrated by Sophocles in Oedipus the King and in Luke’s parable of the prodigal son, which both take as their premise the interwoven destinies of fathers and sons. Does the father’s guilt always fall on the son? Does an absence of desire in the parents necessarily condemn the child, relentlessly excluding them from any access to desire? And what Law is passed on from one generation to the next? The Law of destiny that seals the fate of the child’s life as a guilt-ridden repetition of that of the parent? Or another form of the Law, which invites us to suspend that Law’s inflexibility?

Oedipus and the prodigal son demonstrate the oscillation between these two poles in the process of filiation. Oedipus the son is trapped in a symmetrical conflict with his father, with no hope of resolution. Infanticide and patricide mirror one another. The father of the prodigal son shows instead that he knows how to bear the real that cannot be shared, embodied by the life of his son. He does not respond to his son’s ‘patricidal’ gesture with hate, but chooses to trust him, to not stand in his way. He shows that, unlike Laius, he does not fear his son’s absolute secret but loves it deeply. In his father’s gesture of forgiveness, the warm welcome he extends upon his son’s return, the prodigal son finds a dissymmetry that breaks with any understanding of the Law as an inexorable destiny or punishment, the very thing that crushes Oedipus’ life. This father is able to recognize the enigma of the prodigal son without demanding to solve it. He offers himself as a Law whose foundations do not lie in any Code but only in the act of forgiveness itself, as the highest possible form of the Law, as the freedom of the Law. This is what the son learns for himself: it is not humankind that is made for the Law but the Law that is made for humankind.⁴

The son embodies the unsharable difference of life and its limitless strength. He resists any possible empathetic identification. He moves through the world carrying with him not only the irreducible difference of his own generation from that of his parents, but also the most elusive detail of his own existence. The greatest gift given to the son by the father in Luke’s parable is that of freedom, which is the greatest gift any parent can give their child. The father does not demand dialogue or reciprocal comprehension, but recognizes the son’s desire as an indecipherable enigma. Is this indecipherability not constantly experienced by every parent? Does love as an absolute openness to the mystery of the child’s otherness not arise precisely from this? Does respect for the child’s secret not perhaps indicate how being a parent is never an experience of acquisition or appropriation, but of decentralization of the self? Love is not empathetic. It is not based on reciprocal understanding, on sharing, but is respect for the absolute secret of the Other, for their solitude. Love is founded on the distance of difference, on that which cannot be shared, on the real of the Two that cannot be assimilated. This is not only the case for the bond between parents and their children, but even more so in every other relationship. Psychoanalysis allows us to see how those lasting loving relationships capable of being generative are the ones that never dissolve the enigma of the Other, the ones that know how to maintain the Other’s absolute secret that is impossible to comprehend. Only on the basis of this solitude, of this enigma that each person is and must remain for the Other (as well as for themselves) can a relationship with the Other, a being together with the Other, occur.

I watch my children grow, becoming autonomous and increasingly mysterious to me. I believe that this mystery is the mark of a difference that must always be preserved and admired, even when it seems disconcerting. I am always as amazed by their beauty and their splendour as I am by their messiness and laziness. So infinitely different from how I remember my condition as a son, and yet so incomprehensibly the same. I do not demand to know or understand anything about their lives, which rightly escape me, lying beyond my grasp. When walking next to them, in the silence of our close bodies, I sense the sound of their breathing as an inexpressible difference. It is a fact: every child carries an inaccessible secret with them, in their breath. No illusion of empathetic sharing will ever get to the bottom of this strange proximity. The joy between us erupts precisely when that which cannot be shared, the thing that separates us, generates a closeness with no illusion of communion. Our children are out there in the world, exposed to its beauty and its atrocity with no shelter. They are, like all of us, at the mercy of the four winds, despite or thanks to the love that we give them.

I truly know nothing about my children’s lives, but I love them for precisely this reason. I am always at the door waiting for them without ever asking them to return. If we are close, it is not because I understand them, but because I value their secret.

Milan-Noli-Valchiusella, January 2017

This book brings together talks given at three conferences: Bose (2016), the Teatro Parenti in Milan (2016) and the Biblical Festival of Vicenza (2014).