19 As Marracash sings, Today everything is inclusive apart from exclusive places. Respect oscillates between a hierarchical vocation and an egalitarian aspiration, between being the organizing principle of the social pyramid or the great levelling force of a community of equals. Hence, perhaps, the quest for respect cannot be anything other than an obsession, a kind of disease, a profound but impossible to satisfy need, a bottomless pit. Sisyphus, Prometheus, Tantalus are the mythological figures epitomising this recursive torment that Freud used to call neurosis. But what if our obsessive demand for respect is precisely the cause of its generalized scarcity? Humiliation does not exist in nature; it is the residue of the human attempt to assign a value to everything. If that is the case, then perhaps the only way to free ourselves from the fetters of respect would simply be a matter of giving up the impulse to attach a value to things. Only then, released from the burden of classifying, weighing, and judging, would gazes cease to be instruments of control and sources of neurosis, becoming instead the quiet witnesses of the world's variety.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=