The aimless violence of young people. Recalcati speaks out

Massimo Recalcati was seventeen when the ’77 movement erupted in Italy and, along with his generation, found himself face to face with political violence. “Today I feel no solidarity whatsoever for those youngsters who smash shop windows, run riot in the city centre and wreak havoc in our towns and cities. My deep solidarity, on the other hand, lies with the young people who have taken to the streets for the right to housing, to education, against the high cost of living, and for jobs. But also with the police officers who find themselves protecting our cities in a situation of clear imbalance of power, and whom a section of the left struggles to defend because it still harbours the ideological prejudice that equates the ‘uniform’ with power and its abuses”.

A Lacanian psychoanalyst, writer and public intellectual, Recalcati has for some time found himself locked in a fierce battle with a section of his own political and cultural sphere – namely, the left, which he describes as ‘authoritarian’. He has called on pro-Palestine demonstrators to systematically omit any mention of the fate of the hostages abducted by Hamas; he has denounced the risk of a ‘new sexual obscurantism’ being promoted under the progressive banners of identity ideologies; and, finally, he has blamed the ‘bad teachers’ of older generations for the violence that has erupted during demonstrations and looting.

“I never consider it right, in a democracy, to attempt to legitimise violence, let alone to try to politicise the hooliganism of these youngsters. Their violence is clearly pre-political and pre-ideological. It seems to me they are rather hypnotised by social media, brands and logos. They do not espouse any particular ideology, nor do they offer any real critique of the status quo. Theirs is an erratic form of violence, with no aim other than conformist assimilation into the symbols of a successful life. It is an act of intellectual bad faith to regard it as the expression of political conflict.”

According to Recalcati, however, it cannot be denied that there is also a form of ‘social violence’ – an ‘ever-widening gap between those who have a great deal and those who have nothing, economic marginalisation affecting the most vulnerable people and the most fragile sections of society, and the abandonment of city suburbs to a futureless fate. The challenge lies in providing adequate political representation for this discontent; however, this cannot take the form of the violence that methodically infiltrates political demonstrations. For at the root of this violence lies a profound ideological regression. In my view, significant evidence of this is provided by anti-democratic anti-fascism and, more recently, the pro-Pal movement in its extremist forms”.

To illustrate the fascism of the anti-fascists, Recalcati recalls incidents in which right-wing students were prevented from speaking at university simply because they were right-wing. Even more strikingly, this ideological regression is evident ‘whenever the political right – that is, Giorgia Meloni and her legitimately elected government – is conflated with fascism or neo-fascism. It is a typically fascist attitude to challenge the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy. Political debate then regresses towards an ideological alignment that prevents healthy debate, becoming instead a rigid ethical stance – an ‘either/or’ scenario with no room for compromise – which regards the right as ontologically fascist and therefore without any real right to govern our country”.

To this traditional legacy, Recalcati argues, has been added in recent years the emergence, within the Palestinian independence movement and the anti-war movement against the conflict in Gaza, of an extremist element. “I cannot forget a video in which children, in a square in Florence, were calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Who had taught them those slogans? Well, I think those children bear a striking resemblance to the hooligans who ransacked shops in Milan: they are the products of the same educational failure.” And it is within this ideological regression – in which words no longer have a place to express and articulate dissent, in which there is no longer any scope for the democratic exercise of conflict – that opportunities for violence arise.

“For me, this is the link between ideological violence and the pre-ideological violence of the youths who are ransacking our cities. In both cases, the rule of speech – which is the foundation of every democracy – is trampled underfoot. Violence, after all, does not speak. Back in ’77, we were angry with the system. We rejected bourgeois values. We challenged the centre from the outskirts. Today, however, those youths who have ransacked Milan come from the outskirts but would like to be like their peers in the city centre. That is why they smash shop windows and rob shops: so they can wear the same shoes, the same designer clothes, the same accessories as those people. It is violence fuelled by the ephemeral. Violence that aspires to assimilation into the system rather than its overthrow.”

In Rome, in 1977, the autonomists drove the head of the CGIL, Luciano Lama, out of La Sapienza University with blows from sticks, defying the trade union’s security detail. It was the children symbolically killing the father: young revolutionaries against old communists – pure political Oedipus. “First 1968 and then 1977 rightly did away with the sadistically authoritarian figure of the father-master. But in the face of the current crisis in educational discourse, it would be a mistake to look back nostalgically on that figure. What we need today is not the restoration of the patriarchal father but the embodiment of a possible paternal principle, capable of giving the law a human meaning. I am thinking of Sergio Mattarella. The cross-party respect for his word stems from the fact that he knows how to authentically embody that principle which we feel we need.”

Wouldn’t these violent, hooligan youths – this generation – need more fathers like him? “They’d need someone to tell them that not everything is possible, that you can’t do everything, you can’t enjoy everything, you can’t be everything. The paternal principle is the principle of the impossible. But introducing limits does not mean repressing, it does not mean flogging life. Rather, it means giving desire the chance to exist. What strikes me most about this new generation – and I say this as a psychoanalyst – is the loss of significance of Eros; it is the decline of the great theme of love and sex, which were, in contrast, at the centre of our own lives as adolescents. We are now faced with a disinhibition of the drive without desire. These are young people hungry for objects. They live in a sort of continuous libidinal scrolling. We should also give serious thought to our responsibilities as parents: what sense of life have we passed on to our children?’