Prefatory Note to “Communism: Social Love?”

Sick with revolution, mad with love

• Gherasim Luca

The text below is a follow-through from the Camatte dossier, not so much in terms of an overall commentary, but in terms of riding out along a tangent that seems to be only rarely discussed by communists or, when it is, it is relegated to the status of ‘utopian socialism’ or left alone for poets to deal with. Yet, the notion of love, and as Camatte cautiously noted in De La Vie, our incapacity to love, seems, amidst the current geo-political ethnocide, to be a pressing concern; one that, it could be said, leads us as far from programmatism as it is possible to go.¹

 Hate and enmity are the order of the day whilst love seems to flounder around in the private sphere as both a means of reclusion, a mode of fending-off economic bankruptcy and as a means of strengthening the ego. Such an individualising notion of love, one represented to us as a goal pertaining to personal fulfilment, does not help us overcome our own boundaries, it does not lead to an overspill of the person as a singular multiplicity (individual-gemeinwesen), it has no other social horizon than the limits of family and state.

Thus, Camatte could speak starkly of a psychopathology of love: “Love, of course, operates powerfully on all of us. But love alone cannot be the decisive factor as it is tinged with psychosis. This is why, at the start of any romantic encounter, its power is such that the two partners perceive each other beyond their psychosis. They live a ‘perfect love’. But in so far as they do not embark on a liberatory pathway the behavioural patterns are reactivated and after a more or less long time, the two partners arrive at mutual misunderstanding, at non-communication.”²

With the help of psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler and theorist of the Nazi psyche, Klaus Theweleit, as well as novelist Robert Walser, the text that follows attempts to grapple with this ‘psychosis’ as it is informed not by some personalised pathology but by a capital that, in reducing human potentiality to self-preservation, is not so much overseeing a ‘return’ to barbarism, as blocking any pathway to overcoming a perennial barbarism that, enshrined as entrepreneurialism, as “asocial socialisation,” has been its means of doing business all along. 

And, of course, the business of life, life as a business, entails making profit from those ‘behavioural patterns’ that are cultivated by institutions; a conformity to which (as gaining an advantage) brings on that assertive self-satisfaction, which, oedipally role-secure, not only expects to be loved like a child but, if questioned, if exposed, threatens others with violence. Love is a war when (as will be discussed below) the infantile substratum, love as intractable demand, as self-pleasuring, becomes indurate. 

Against such bleakness, there is what Camatte refers to as the ‘liberatory pathway’ and what is referred to in this text as ‘social love.’³ This latter, not to be confused with ‘open relationships or ‘polyamory’ or with Christian piety, is primarily a placeholder for what love could be if comes to be differentiated from its individualised meanings and explored as what the Lacanian’s call ‘extimacy.’ Are considerations such as these as much a revolutionary endeavour as understanding the structural mechanisms of capital? Is it not a truism that social conscience, or the capacity to empathise, is at the root of what compels us towards enacting the revolutionary imaginary? 

One could say that an exploration of love, its diffused articulation (or its reinvention as poet Gherasim Luca once urged in the midst of WW2) would entail expanding the dialectic to the emotions; not so much as a means of rationalising them psychologically as being cognizant of their far from coherent dynamism: “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Just as relevant, and enticing further exploration beyond the text at hand, is the inkling that social love could describe the emotional expressivity of the ‘social individual’ as both the figure of a communist subjectivity to be won and as an immanence actively foreclosed in its being by capital’s infantilising processes. 

COMMUNISM: SOCIAL LOVE?

All are in need of love

• Amadeo Bordiga

It was as if I hadn’t yet been born, as if I were

 swimming in some element before birth

• Robert Walser

I

What was love but a bourgeois utopian figment; an overinvestment in a salvatory image as it helped us disavow seemingly intractable finalities: Cognitive Automation, Revolutionary Decisionism, Relational Aggression, Smug Genocide. How, then, can such a love be summoned to overcome the fact that self-preservation has become a matter of atavistic gratification? Is not the saturation of the public sphere with instinctive lures and luxuriant staples a ruse to turn survival into jouissance? How not to conclude, then, that love is not only an insufficient word but, if its experiential polysemy remains unexplored, it will only be strengthened as a structural idealism, a protective cover, a common-sensical cliché proffered so as to maintain the couple as a degree-zero social form? So, if love, this compensatory goal, remains monosyllabic and mutually regulatory, we risk being maintained as perpetually symbiotic and, in lacking recourse to individuation, we will unconsciously uphold self-preservation as nothing more than an embryonic stasis, a stillbirth.

II

To individuate. To become through the other. One could say that these psycho-social processes are anathema to Capital in that, if encouraged, they cannot but widen the self’s horizon of experience into hitherto unknown open-ended life-contexts (situations) beyond the self-protecting symbiotic dyad. And yet, as we interweave with the sensoriums of others, our existential journey gathers together psychic residues through which we can not only recollect these others (their affective impact upon us) but which go towards substantiating the self as a dividual, a collective entity. In this way we can talk of subjective history, the history of a social individuation, as a means by which a life process can enter into relation with the more objective social history of the empirical real. Does such a ‘personal history,’ in the words of Ashis Nandi, amount to “hosting within oneself the otherness of others?”⁴ One of the instillations of Capital is to make sure such breakthroughs into social intimacy never happen, that the emotional experiences of the everyday remains shorn of their history. There can be no un-mediated exchange of experience. There can be no such thing as social love. There can be no ‘slate’ for radical empathy.⁵

III

There is an ever-recurring counter-revolutionary danger in leaving the emotional experience of love unarticulated. We can only ‘articulate’ by means of the presence of others. And we can only be activated into an acceptance of our own internal others (the psychic residues that enable individuation) if these presences encourage us to upset our pre-supposed and Capitalised identities through a mode of love that, in sharing its intimacies, in stumbling to be expressed, encourages us to meet these stammers of being with our own sense of affective liminality. We could call this radical empathy. Not an empathy between ‘individuals’ in some form of symbiosis, but an empathy informed by a tacit sense that this presence before us (yet within us) is a psycho-dynamic collectivity (an individuality-gemeinwesen). Love, then, can become a practice of communalising empathy that, like the ‘selflessness’ of parental love, reaches towards its socialisation and thus to a more variegated individuation. In this way it can begin to evolve away from a Capitalised love that is not solely a proprietorial exchange but one that, in line with Capital’s need for arrested development, promotes self-preservation as a chimerical and ersatz jouissance.  

IV

To recapitulate: life is maintained as self-preservation in that, under conditions of permanent austerity, the potentialities of desire are blunted by the reduction of life to basic survival. In order to maintain our treading water as an unchanging human aim, as sufficient in itself, Capital turns the staples of survival into prized commodities: food, clothes and shelter become promoted as luxuries that are paraded before consumers as desirable items in order to cover-over the fact that, for most of us, the society of capital is nothing more than a subsistence economy that strips us of our human potential. As a sop to existence as subsistence, love, as a superstructural transcendence, an ideal of mutual deification, is encouraged to become that which ensures that desire remains contained within the bounds of the dyad as a limit-point beyond which social love, a radical empathy which would insure against the possessive-dependency of couples, is unconscionable. So, this form of dis-articulated and monological love does not help us resist the cultural and behavioural norm of self-preservation as, ultimately, does it not, under these homeostatic material circumstances, assure our being psychologically underpinned by a Capitalised pleasure principle that, whilst it may reassure us of our ‘humanity,’ may very well amount to little more than the symbiotic satieties of post-natal infancy? 

V

Are human beings, in their current form, capable of social love? Does our need for love, rather, translate into a search for the symbiotic? Is it at odds to becoming, to individuation? Does it make radical empathy, our indentifying ourselves as species-beings, a woke perversion? The symbiosis in question here is one that chimes with what Michael Balint has variously referred to as ‘primary love,’ as ‘archaic love’, as ‘naïve egoism.’ These are all markers of the form that love takes in what is called the pre-oedipal stage and are what lead Balint to ask whether we are not so much species-beings as ‘neotenic embryos.’ In a startling summation he wonders whether people, even when deemed mature adults, remain capable only of an ‘infantile form of love.’ The problem with this is that, for Balint, this form of love implies a deep lying experience of symbiosis that preserves an illusion of unconditionality, of instinctive interdependence; it renders the early infant omnipotent in that it can expect parental love, tender attentiveness, without having any obligation to return that love in kind.⁶ To an extent this expectancy translates into a sense of self-centred entitlement that gave rise to the notion of ‘King Baby.’ This sovereignty, this fledgling will-to-power, is difficult to relinquish because, as a pre-verbal experience, it cannot be articulated or find form as a phase of self-awareness.

VI

However, we have seen that this ‘retardation’, or we could say ever-encouraged symbiotic psychical aim, is put forth as a socially imposed reality principle not only by proffering self-preservation as the limit-point of our social horizons but also by emotionally petrifying the subject at the level of the pre-verbal child in that the libido, in thus maintaining its founding association with the need for self-preservation, is, under conditions of continual economic insecurity, reactivated as an ‘infantile form of love.’ Our inability to discern the presence of such an ‘archaic love’, to remain in the orbit of such an anterior state, to be unaware of its impact upon others, is to freeze the vital force of libido and neutralise it as a mode of individuation. Many practicing psychoanalysts report having been the recipient of such a regressive love; one which lay-persons know as the experience of ‘being taken for granted.’ Outside of the analytic session or the parental relationship where such an entitlement can be brought to articulation by means of non-judgemental empathy, this ‘being taken for granted’ is a common complaint in love relationships as well as in business enterprises: areas which are deprived of any inkling of social love as this would lead to accusations of unfaithfulness… to the lover, to the company.

VII

With Capital increasingly becoming described as a zombie economy (non-growth) we find ourselves in the parallel domain of infantalisation as a disavowed yet hegemonic psychological norm, as a fear of emotional experience that, rendered embarrassing and disturbing, becomes unavailable for individuation. This is akin to what Margaret Mahler describes as an interruption of our ‘psychological birth.’ For Mahler this is about coming through the symbiotic period by means of a “slowly unfolding intrapsychic process,” one of an individuation that enables the child to “emerge from symbiotic fusion with the mother” and, as Balint implies, to supercede the ‘primary love’ relationship with its instinctive discarding of any need to account for itself, let alone the other.⁷ For Mahler, failures of individuation, which can lead to attachment issues and separation anxiety, also play a role in psychosis in that (and here she cites Sandor Ferenczi) they help “preserve the delusion of the unconditionally omnipotent symbiotic unity.” This failure in achieving a “separate functioning” as it leads to a “lack of differentiation between the self and the non-self” impacts upon what she terms “true object relationships.” We see here the dangers in an unrecognised persistence of ‘primary love’ in that, bereft of the historical and contextual paradigm of developmental stages, the socio-economic realities of Capital render it a psychical side-effect of the reduction of life to the struggle for self-preservation. With its basis in a once necessary post-natal symbiotic security, it is even more dangerous if ‘primary love’ becomes an ideal to pursue for it then actively and deludedly stymies ‘true object relationships’: our individuating towards the radical empathy of social love.

VIII

Taking Mahler as an influence, Klaus Theweleit, in his study of the fascist psyche, speaks of the human as “not-yet-fully-born.” If self-preservation is maintained as our lot under Capitalism, if love thus retains the de-socialised infantile libido of non-reciprocation and the deification of the self, then we get an insight into the wrathful indictment of humanity as homo insipiens proprietaries.⁸ This phrase of Bordiga’s suggests, amongst other things, that the ‘human’ is yet to become homo sapiens; is, in terms offered here, yet to embark on the process of individuation. For Theweleit, the not-yet-fully-born “needs a totality within which it can be dominant since […] it needs to perceive its opposite as functioning on its behalf.” ⁹ This is apposite to the notions of ‘primary love’ in which not only is the symbiotic relationship sought as an illusory guarantor of ‘pleasurable’ survival, but, for Theweleit, it becomes embodied not simply in a continually scapegoated ‘mother figure,’ but in institutions that serve as extra-familial fusional containers. Here the former symbiotic relationship of early infancy, the need to have another function on our behalf, is re-encountered in “some larger social form that guarantees and maintains its [the self’s] boundaries.” For the non-individuated, those rendered unable to ‘host the other within themselves,’ the institution figures as what Theweleit terms a “symbiotic structure.” 

IX

With the foregoing in mind, one could suggest that self-preservation and its infantilising effects lead to a situation in which we are all produced as ‘not-yet-fully-born,’ as living still births, for whom potentialising self-reflexivity (a mode of individuation) is kept-on-ice at the level of what Balint calls the ‘neotenic embryo’. So, for the ‘not-yet-fully-born,’ as Theweleit suggests, the process of individuation takes place within institutions that, in mimicking the protective boundaries of a symbiotic relationship (alma mater), act as closed totalities that police the limits of social and emotional experience. The process of individuation offered by institutions such as schools (from the age of five!) is one in which individuation is mediated and controlled under the auspices of a ‘socialisation’ informed by the reality principle of Capital. In this way hierarchical ranking, obedience, conformity, malleability etc. become factors in a surrogate psychological birth, as do notions of threats to the cherished security of symbiosis i.e. suspicion of others and their unwanted introduction of empathic-inducing differences between the self and the non-self. The attraction of institutionally-led individuation for Capital is that under its auspices, with emotional experience off the curriculum, libido is reinforced as narcissistic and ‘primary love’ becomes the harbinger of a domineering de-othering jouissance. 

X

As with Kafka’s novelistic depictions of institutional pathologies, their cruelty-inducing conformities and procedurally sanctioned aggressions, Robert Walser perhaps encapsulates the effect of institutionalised individuation when he depicts the “energetic self-denial” that appears as the pedagogic aim of the Institute Benjamenta.¹⁰ This school for servants, which has neither teachers nor curricula other than a behavioural handbook, seems to imply that a large part of this training in subservience is concerned with sensory shutdown: “it is forbidden for us to look about us.” Such a foreclosure of horizons, a lack of others as the inspiration for a differentiating individuation, has the effect of creating a symbiotic container that is isomorphic with early infancy and there is further reinforcement of the pre-verbal reality of this phase in that with mouths “obediently and devoutly shut,” with access to language being determined by the handbook and “learning by heart,” the libidinal pull of a unindividuated  ‘primary love’ is left unrecognised and inarticulateable. To ensure sensory shutdown and emotional homeostasis, the institution comes to generate a determining vocabulary that is given over to the needs of an institutional reproduction tied to self-preservation. Deeming what is relevant, topical and on-point, gives rise to an institutional ‘common sense’ that, with ‘self-denial’ blocking individuation, creates a sense of instinctive belonging that is tantamount to a hypnoid state. As Walser offers of one pupil: “He has no character, for he still has no idea at all what this is.” To become, to individuate, is to become a ‘character’ in Walser’s sense but this is more easily left to the faceless host, the institution as an hermetic and symbiotic entity. So, the danger of a ‘loss of love’ that afflicts love-relationships also has its institutional counterpart: the fear of exclusion not only instils the debilitating guilt of betrayal but summons up the fear of being punished for threatening the binding reality principle of accepting self-preservation as source of jouissance. 

XI

Under these conditions …  with libido overcoded by survival instincts … with symbiosis ensuring that the social and its history is no concern of ours… with emotional experiences such as love sublated by idealistic delusions and relationships rendered as a mutual opportuning … there seems little chance of our individuating towards ‘true object relationships,’ towards radical empathy and social love. Here, with the institutional takeover of individuation, with a dynamic inner-life deemed superfluous, we are faced with a hollowed-out love that translates into an empathic deficit towards others.  Christiane Rochefort has put this quite bleakly: “Love becomes this strange creature: the meeting of two needs to be loved. Two voids fill each other.”¹¹ Is such a void informed by the persistence of a ‘primary love’ that, allied to self-preservation, makes us incapable of not only fully accepting, hosting, the other but, crucially, of repressing and rendering mute the contradictory processes of our emotional life? Thus, when Bordiga offered that “all are in need of love”¹² he was perhaps hinting at a ‘social love’ that could overcome the affective limitations of a socially maintained naive ego. As sentimental as this may sound, is this not the promise of communism, a communism in which, as Theweleit puts it “complementary relationships have to be invented as relationships between equals touching the multiplicity of their mutual selves rather than between bearers of socially dictated functions.”¹³ Once ‘invented,’ or should we say, once recognised and brought to articulation, such multiplicities (individuality-gemeinwesen) are the intimate material that, undermining the division between private and public, can win back the process of individuation as a ‘living labour’ no longer informing the production of commodities as objects and services but as the production of social relations. In this light the struggle for communism, in opposition to Capital as the social non-relation of competitive self-preservation and symbiotic satiety, is furthered by the instauration of Care Communes, Affective Soviets, Centres for Psycho-Social Attention, by the production of a radical empathy aimed at the ‘all’ of which Bordiga speaks.

CODA

Are we here daring to talk about the communisation of the psyche? Are we raising once more the spectre of public intimacy? Are we seeking to set individuation against individualism? In his short piece on Guy Debord, Giorgio Agamben picks up on a phrase of Debord’s that bemoans the “clandestinity of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.”¹⁴ Whilst this seems neglectful of the unflinching conjurings of poetic individuations, is Debord’s complaint perhaps a result of the fact that, under the terms of self-preservation and arrested development, expressing this private life would be to risk stumbling into the persistent undertones of ‘primary love’? Is private life, to an extent the site of spontaneity, free association and gleesome error, maintained as clandestine out of fear of revealing ourselves as ‘not-yet-fully-born’? Stripped of discursive language, often itself a marker of institutionalised individuation, are we not all, to some degree, privately ashamed of just how thoroughly we have been conditioned and rendered not just ‘characterless’ but, as Camatte warns, incapable of loving. The Situationist ‘construction of situations’ often became code for an insurrectionary event fomented by special people, yet, as Agamben offers in his text, “a genuine political element lies precisely in this incommunicable and almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life.” Was this insight missing from a Situationist project whose early works sometimes carried a melancholic tone? Is this why we can be so fearful of one another? Is this why groups and movements are so easily infiltrated? Is this why insurrections falter? Despite the hope respectfully placed in the martyrdom of those revolutionaries who refused self-preservation, is it the sharing of our unverbalizable affects, our scotomised infra-conducts, that remain the most dangerous of dangerous games?  A game played by such as Giorgio Cesarano, by those “who cannot put up with the interiorisation of capital and who struggle against every form of self-valorisation.”¹⁵

Howard Slater

February-March 2026