Summary:

In December 2021, the journalist and psychologist Oscar Ranzani published two important notes in the newspaper Página/12 for the 50th anniversary of the premiere of A Clockwork Orange. In one of them he interviewed film people, in the other psychoanalysts. This article, specially prepared by Eduardo Laso, develops this second perspective based on previous theses contained in his book "Ethics and Malaise" and taken up in the comment by Juan Jorge Michel Fariña, which is part of the aforementioned report: "Alex, the character of A Clockwork Orange, bases its ethics on the maxim of jouissance of the Marquis de Sade. That is to say, he builds his actions and those of his droogs (the young people who make up the criminal gang commanded by him) in a form of evil that generates, however, a disturbing well-being (...) When Alex is arrested and subjected to the Ludovico treatment , we find the reverse of this Sadean maxim, now exercised by science. We can say that the rehabilitation program exercises good in evil, that is, in the name of a supreme good (healing, rehabilitation) it subjects Alex to the worst abuse. This Kantian-Sadean dialectic between evil in good and good in evil, formalized by Lacan in 1966, is a finding of Burgess’s novel, published in 1962. And certainly one of the most powerful analytical questions of the film of Kubrick”.

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