A reflection on the role of taboo in contemporary society and on the relationship between taboo and freedom.

Should we break down all taboos? Are taboo and freedom incompatible? What role did they play in the past and what role do they play today? Do taboos mark necessary moral limits and give meaning to life or are they a mere mechanism of repression? Can we really live without taboos?

In this book, Massimo Recalcati addresses the social function of taboos in relation to sexuality, family ties, love, desires and death. He does so using examples from everyday life and also from mythology and literature: from Oedipus to Hamlet, from the sacrifice of Isaac to Medea, from Cain to Don Juan, from Dostoevsky to Sartre, from Beckett to Calvin, from Freud to Lacan. …

The author analyzes the relationship with taboo in contemporary society and comes to the conclusion that "what is in the foreground is no longer the oppression of taboo, but rather its evaporation. Human life seems to lack boundaries, compasses, and lines of demarcation. Does freedom really consist only in being pushed here and there like corks in the white waters of a borderless sea? Here we are faced with a fundamental feature of hypermodern anxiety that the epidermal experience of panic expresses perfectly: lack of reference points, falling dikes, vertigo, opening of a nameless void.

"It invites us to rethink the very concept of taboo, asking ourselves if we are really immune to it and asking ourselves how desirable a life free from the experience of the inviolable could be" (Mariangela Pala, Leggere a Colori).

«Recalcati traces the disappearance of taboos and the appearance of their new masks» (Elena Manzini, La Provincia Cremona).