ABSTRACT
A son demands money for a car from his mother. She refuses to empty her bank account. “With the right that motherhood gave me,” she writes, “I still tried to move him out of my way and to escape, but I had lost the right of the mother. It was shredded in the teeth of life, it had turned into pulp. What remained of it was nothing but weak flesh, devoured by healthy, strong teeth: I was an old female. ‘What do you need that money for, you old female?’ ‘To feed you. You ate from that money just now.’ He rallied back but not enough to make space for me, only to gather momentum for his slap. Then it came. I stumbled over the kitchen sink and shut my eyes, but there was no second slap. When I opened my eyes he was already gone.” (Tikka 2000, p.1)
These sentences, short, direct and lacerating, are quoted from Eva Tikka’s The Return of the Son, a quasi-memoir of a mother, a piercing meditation on the son which is necessarily a reflection on herself, and thereby on the myth of the mother and on the roots of evil.1 I look at this story because, facing two dominant discourses on evil, the psychoanalyticclinical discourse on the one hand and the socio-political one on the other; facing the intimate discourse whose scope might seem too narrow and perhaps even meaningless in the global ocean of evils that demands our urgent practical reaction – in the intersection between these two distinct discursive gestures this story stands out in its most horrifying frequency: every criminal has a mother, nobody knows her son more than a mother, we say, as if called by this story to humanize the discourse on evil and to weave together the loose threads of the discussion.
