The ideology of hatred

Consider the famous speeches of president Habyarimana of Rwanda between 1973 and 1994. He continuously attacked the Tutsi for being counter revolutionary bourgeoisie traitors; but at the same time he constantly referred to them as brothers. This, I argue, is typical and symptomatic.

The use of intimate familial language to characterize the so-called traitor is a common practice in many ideologies of hatred. So, when we hear, speak of, or examine hatred we must pay particular attention to issues of proximity, attachment, intimacy, desire and even love. Of course, these forces are not obvious when we think of hatred. But, if we want to understand how people become our hated enemy we must study the conditions of closeness and proximity.

NG: Someone might say that this is counterintuitive. Don't we commonly understand hatred in terms of distance, difference, and enmity?

NY: You are right to say that the ideology of hatred produces and means to produce separation and estrangement. But this is exactly my point. The paradox of hatred is that hatred aims to produce distance precisely because the two rivals are considered to be too close, too intertwined.

Think about the Hutu and the Tutsi, the Serbs and the Croats, the Turks and the Armenians, the Israelis and the Palestinians, and so on. I am not simply saying that love can turn into hatred or vice versa, but that hatred is always an ambivalent experience and a hyperbolic concept. One cannot hate an individual or a group without attachment and closeness, without love. Lack of attachment tends to produce indifference, not hatred.

NG: What then is the relation between the psyche and politics?

NY: First of all, the psyche and politics are not separate spheres. They operate together, although the mechanisms they deploy and their forms of visibility differ.

I am certainly not the first to highlight the absent, repressed, or the hidden in the political; how what is said often conceals what is left unsaid or how the visible veils what goes unrepresented. In a world characterized by a multitude of conflicts and hatreds, it would be misguided to continue overlooking the forces of the political unconscious.

Yet, my contribution has to do with my examination of the ideology of hatred. I believe that by excavating the ideology of hatred we can reveal how the political unconscious operates in the current political climate-through desire and its repression, through love and its disavowal, and through attachment and its elision. Once the unconscious workings of the ideology of hatred are laid bare then other future discourses, which recognize their ambivalence towards the other, suddenly become possible.

Let me give another example. The Israeli government forces the Palestinians to declare loyalty to the state of Israel as the condition for entering dialogue. No matter how many times Palestinians in Israel declare loyalty to the state or denounce terrorism, their words will not be heard and accepted because for Jewish Israelis this is not enough; they want the Palestinians to love them. Without love it is difficult for them to maintain their moral superiority. But at the same time the Jews in Israel will never ever admit to this.

So for me the discourse of loyalty and betrayal, and particularly the repetitious demand that the Palestinians be loyal signifies that something else is going on here. It is about something the Jews want and will not get, or want and will never acknowledge. The repetition suggests that unconscious forces are at work here and in this case they are not individual but political.

NG: This brings us to the second part of the title of your book, The Psychic Power of Discourse. When you say that to understand hatred we should focus on unconscious mechanisms, you obviously allude to a political unconscious. What do you mean by political unconscious? Are you saying that political discourse has an unconscious?