Page - 23 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Reality and Paternity | 23www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 takes advantage of the diffused dismay of the subjects and forecloses every re- lation with law, limit and authority (Lacan would call it “castration”29) by prom- ising the subject the “phantom of liberty” and self-realisation. The brothers Dardenne ask about what remains of the Father in the epoch of his evaporation30 and in the time of his irrevocable decline, in order to at least leave this “territory” empty (and therefore still existing). Luc Dardenne records, “The cinema addresses something that does not exist anymore, the void, the nothing, the Other, who is never there. Without the Other, we would eat the flesh of those too similar to us, we would drink their blood. We would be sated by the heart of our reality. God is dead. The place is empty. And above all it must not be occupied.”31 They aim neither at re-establishing a new patriarchy, nor at proclaiming the inexorable disappearance of the father, but attempt to come to terms with his death and the possibility of inheriting at least the pater- nal desire, without regret or deconstructive nihilism. Roger and Igor and Olivier and Francis (as well as Bruno with Jimmy and Sa- mantha with Cyril) embody extreme experiences of the son-father relationship, which enlighten the traumatic deadlock in the encounter between generations, against the human background of a general difficulty with communication. As La Promesse suggests, we feel that these days it is as if we adults no longer want to die to allow the generation coming after us to live. In order to educate someone, you have to know how to die so that he or she can live; so that, simply put, they can take your place. We adults want to be immortal, we want not to die. Somehow it is as if, when all is said and done, we have this desire to eat our children, like the Greek god, Chronos.32 In this sense, they suggest that the social issue has to be linked to a major theme of their films, namely the question of relationships and the anti-pedagogical problem of paternal vocation. What does it mean to be a father in the time of the evaporation of every symbolic function? What does “to inherit” mean in the epoch of the death of the father, or in the time of Chronos, who kills his chil- dren? In economically deserted societies, where families dissolve, fathers are no longer able to transmit a legacy, but are even willing to kill or prevent their sons from living effectively. 29 The Lacanian notion of castration (or castration complex) deals fundamentally with the child’s encounter with the law and prohibition, that is its acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father and the consequent entry into the symbolic order. It involves the primordial loss of an original jouis- sance (the loss of the breast during weaning), namely the primordial interruption of the child’s symbiosis with the mother. Castration then represents a submission to the Name-of-the-Father as the founding signifier who marks the child symbolically, allowing the son to be named by the Other and consequently to accede to desire. Cf. Lacan 1938; Lacan 1999, 219. 30 Cf. Recalcati 2011. 31 Dardenne 2009, 14; cf. Recalcati 2011, 11–23. 32 West/West 2009, 126.