The ideology of hatred

NY: I know that for most political scientists or sociologists, theorizing the psyche within the political and the social is irrelevant to practice and to questions of war and peace. But I believe that this pervasive perspective will lead us nowhere in terms of changing the conditions of conflicts rooted in hatred.

Just think of the repeated, obsessive notice in the NYC subways: "If you see something, say something."

Such an utterance not only speaks of suspicious objects, but creates relational mistrust that paradoxically bonds people of all walks of life together through a fearful gaze, suspicion and prejudice. So, hatred has become a political apparatus that creates a community through the horror of the strange and the different.

The pervasive refusal to raise the question of the unconscious, dismissing it as irrelevant to politics, engenders all kinds of theoretical blind spots. This is not to say that hatred is only unconscious or invisible. On the contrary, hatred is a forceful experience with devastating and injurious consequences. But in sharp contrast to its manifestation, the mechanisms of its production remain obscure.

For me, the most urgent task is to explore these blind spots, which I believe can shed light on how the ideology of hatred is manufactured. This, in my mind, is the key problem of the ideology of hatred.

NG: This appears to be connected to the relation you mention between the ideology of hatred and humanitarianism. Can you say something about this?

NY: Often the ideology of hatred operates side by side and in tandem with humanitarianism. The American initiative to build secular schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan is one example, while Israeli food and medical aid to Gaza in the midst of Israel's military attacks on the Strip is another.

Such humanitarian acts allow the Americans and Israelis to think of themselves as decent and righteous people. But in effect these humanitarian interventions are the continuation of war and violence in a language of "love full of hatred" or "hatred full of love." It is precisely this language that sheds light on the political unconscious and the psychic power of discourse.

NG: Could you further elaborate on the phrase "hatred full of love"?

NY: I would begin by responding with a rhetorical question: you intuitively seem to understand the notion of "hatred full of love", and yet doesn't this notion depend on a politics of the unconscious?

But, your question is well taken, because "hatred full of love" (and also its reversal) depicts concrete situations and relations. These phrases are not a metaphor for conflict relations. The prohibition to love the other, at work within national politics, is perhaps the core paradoxical symptom of nationalism and its defense mechanisms.

Albert Memmi provides a poignant example of how this works in the colonial context, when he describes how the colonial experience is informed by the paradox of love and hate. On the one hand, the colonialist wishes to dismiss the colonial subject from thought and to imagine the colony clean of its natives, but, on the other hand, the colonizer knows that without its colonial subjects the colony and his domination has no meaning.