Primary love

There's always been something exotic about Hungary. Ferenc Puskas, for instance. Then the name: Magyar and the old association with something eastern, tribal. Then there was Ubo's 'Hungarian Goulash' which tasted suspiciously like our own alu gosht.

There's this line in Todorov which he attributes to Balint (I think) and it goes something like:

'What we desire is not pleasure but relationships'

Of course, one gets immense pleasure from relationships (as well as heartache) but all that is derivative. It would be a strange person who sets out to make friends with another because they want to maximize their own happiness. Can pleasure be a reason? Or, to appropriate a line from JB: men either get on with women or get off on them. 

The economic agent, on the other hand, is quite autistic, anal. The 'social' becomes 'social capital' and self-interest is deemed to be the 'first principle'. We start off as isolated and enter into a contract (because it's good for us). If such is the case can we talk about genuine sociality, of a love for conversation-in the broadest sense of the term?

The little Freud you've read you've found to be exhilarating but, but, all that stuff about wanting to kill the father, etc. just seemed fundamentally wrong to you, childish, even. What if love and not conflict was primary?

~~~

"Commercial transactions imply both equality and separation..." whereas in the older idea "you are free from your debt to an ancestor when you become an ancestor;...you are free from your debt to humanity when you act with humanity...these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence the very notion of canceling a debt, and achieving an autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start"
---D. Graeber.