In viaggio tra i rifiuti con Italo Calvino, Michel Tournier e Ted Botha

Choosing and rejecting are collateral activities:making a decision, and/or some kind of plan entails ruling out a different solution, which sinks into oblivion: i.e. into the realm of what could have been. It is against the background of this antinomic proiectus–reiectus reality that one can comprehend phenomena such as the uncanny, the double, the revenant and any other “residual apparition” endangering the integrity of one’s self. Nevertheless, in this “paludal world” that surrounds us, one can still trace a chance, a rejected and betrayed one (a sort of alter–ego screaming from the nocturnal realm of oblivion), the echo a choice—an alternative and revolutionary one — that is still possible, accessible solely through conversion and repentance. Waste and the image of another self (one’s double, residual and redeemed at the same time, the Alter–residue) are thus the two antinomic faces of one’s existence in a world that imposes constant choices and sacrifices as a precondition for the very existence of the self. Authors such as Italo Calvino,Walter Benjamin, Michel Tournier, and Ted Botha have all taught the importance of coming to terms with this ulterior dimension of meaning hidden in the garbage of the I am. Access to this dimension requires the reversal of the categories through which one interprets the world, theology being no exception. In this light can redemption be considered as a recycling procedure, a divine and spiritual one, conducted by a God—the scavenger par excellence—who rummages through the waste of every person’s life looking for what is still needed in order to achieve it: the rescue of one’s fallen soul from the land of oblivion. This act leads back into the cycle of existence the host of positive alternate realities, discarded following a selection process that often loses sight of the essential values and principles. This liberation, invoked by the “dimitte nobis debita nostra”, is the remission of the sin of being what one is— an opening oward the Other (future, hope, double, alter–ego) which one denied in their past life. It breaks through the facies hippocratica of the subject’s history, thus redeeming those leftovers, those virtualities that were never brought into existence.