El grito de Job

Job’s body—and his soul—are riddled with evil. Naked, covered in sores, he falls into the ashes and experiences first-hand the injustice of suffering. His prayer can only take the extreme form of a cry, addressed to God: “Why me?” The punishment that Job suffers does not compensate for any wrong, since he has not committed a crime; nor is it revenge, since he has never harmed anyone. Exposed to senseless violence whose nature he cannot understand, Job finds himself immersed in an untranslatable experience. Only the cry remains, as the most radical form of the question—the same one that is inscribed in his name, because Job in Hebrew means “Where is the father?” In this lucid and brief essay, Massimo Recalcati approaches Job’s question from the prism of psychoanalysis, the cry that overwhelms any possible answer: pain cannot be explained in terms of meaning because there is no theology, or any other form of knowledge, capable of justifying its immoderation.