If hate is the precursor of love, then getting out of relationships is the precursor of getting into them; and this, Freud suggests, is the origin of morality. Love starts from hate. The precursor of love is knowing what we don’t want, what we want to get out of. It is not surprising, though it needs to be teased out, why this should be the origin of morality, at least in Freud’s view. In my version of strong reading, the strong reader is trying to rediscover what he hates, and he is looking for clues about how he can get out of it. It is a paradoxical idea that the human subject begins by
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