The Telemachus Complex

Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their children s playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be? In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homer s Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mother s love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future. This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.

Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their children's playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be?In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mother's love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future.This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.

Introduction1. The Law of the Word and the New HellPraying Is No Longer Like Breathing; Aphonia and the Father's Amnesia; The Hell of Salò; The Law of the Word; How Do We Transmit the Word of the Law?; We are A Scream in the Night; Escape From Freedom; The Fantasy of Freedom As a Hypermodern Fantasy; Mass Freedom; Dying to Work2. The Confusion Between GenerationsThe Parents' Task; The Law and the laws; Adulterations; Transgression, or an Appeal to the Law?; A New Discontent of Youth; The Trauma of the Non-Existence of the Sexual Relationship; Femicidal Violence; The Technological Object and Depression in Youth; Evaporation and Invention3. From Oedipus to TelemachusFour Types of Child; The Child-as-Oedipus; The Anti-Oedipal Child; The Child-as-Narcissus; The Child-as-Telemachus4. What Does It Mean To Be A Rightful Heir?Inheritance as Reclamation; An Excess of Memory; The Anti-Melancholy of Jesus and Nietzsche; The Negation of Symbolic Debt; Telemachus Is The Rightful Heir; What Does Inheritance Mean?; The Recognition of the Symbolic Debt; The Symbolic Difference Between Generations; Act, Faith and PromiseEpilogue: Reading Pain on the LeavesIndex of Names