The Function of Hatred in the Constitution of the Ego and the Social Bond

Abstract

This essay proposes an approach to the function of hatred as a mode of social bond in the digital era. From a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in the Freudian tradition and in dialogue with other lines of development, hatred is analyzed as an originary defensive response to what is experienced as unpleasurable and, at the same time, as a binding operator that articulates masses. The paper examines the impact of social media and their algorithms in the creation of informational bubbles that reinforce preexisting beliefs and exclude difference, reducing alterity to a hateable object. It develops the idea that hatred may function not only by separating the subject from what is rejected, but also by uniting them with others who share that rejection and/or by maintaining a paradoxical bond with the hated object. Finally, it argues that hatred, far from being a merely negative phenomenon, can be read as a constitutive manifestation whose fixation as the exclusive form of social bond impoverishes the social link, opening the question of other possible libidinal destinies