an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor – the neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the neighbor’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the neighbor himself. For this reason, Lacan’s Che vuoi? is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable not only for us, but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?” The temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor – for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s The Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. No wonder, then, that Judaism is also the religion of divine Law which regulates relations between people: this Law is strictly correlative to the emergence of the neighbor as the inhuman Thing. That is to say, the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor.

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