Liebesraum

The co-constitution of social media and the Symbolic Order – the system of norms, law, culture, and language conditioning intersubjectivity – has generated an unprecedented political ontology marked by commodified performativity under neoliberalism. This ontology displaces the experience of the political in favour of its consumption as a spectacle. This spectacle expedites the misrecognition of far-right discourses as anomic rather than central to the neoliberal Symbolic Order. This paper explores how the relationship between social media and the neoliberal Symbolic Order sustains the normalisation of the far-right as an ontologically-securitising fantasy. I develop a Lacanian framework entangling the concepts of antagonism and ontological security. Through it, I examine the architecture of social media in terms of programmability (the mutual influence between users and algorithms) and homophilic networks (neighbourhoods of ‘love for sameness’). Based on the transition from ‘hate of the other’ to ‘love for the same’, I synthesise this framework and social media architecture into the novel notion of liebesraum or ‘space of love’. Liebesraum constitutes a spatial-affective apparatus that mediates the occlusion of traumatic encounters with anxieties of sociocultural collapse by situating them in a deceptive homeostasis of commodified antagonism on social media. Through the politically-stunting oscillation between transgressive enjoyment and corrective ‘love’, and in fostering faux agency, liebesraum reinforces neoliberalism’s ideological grip while simultaneously hollowing it by algorithmically mainstreaming ideologies of exclusion, supremacy, and brutalisation. I illustrate liebesraum in two political crises in the US: the 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection and Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory.