Abstract
While friend/enemy are commonly perceived to be mutually constitutive opposites, it is not so evident that hatred is the opposite of love. Hatred is oriented by two ideologies specific to European thought—‘nature’ as an illusory universal, and the ‘ego’ (me, moi), distinct from the ‘I’, as an irreducible expression of identity. The origins of racial hatred in naturalised hierarchical classification at the time of European colonial expansion demonstrates how naturalism and egoism combined to produce an over-valuation of one’s own self or group as authentic or pure. Drawing on Pascal, Fanon and Derrida, this essay challenges the autonomous, self-loving and naturalised sense of self. It calls for education as a form of action against racial hatred, including hate-speech. It suggests that the dignity or absoluteness of each individual or group should be thought as a ‘sense’ which cannot be reduced to a meaning. This is in contrast to hatred which presupposes closed or solidified meanings.
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Notes
It should be added that, before the advances of twentieth-century ethnology, societies such as those defined by Pierre Clastres as being structured ‘against the state’ were barely known.
See Instincts and their vicissitudes. I cannot dwell here on Freudian discourse. To some extent it is itself dependent on the individualistic and egocentric representation. At the same time, however, Freud was one of the first, after Nietzsche and Rimbaud, to have described the inconsistency and fragility of the me.
In the film by Mathieu Kassowitz, La Haine (1995), a character standing in front of a mirror mimes replies to imaginary insults by another person, as if practising doing this, by repeating the following question, which is almost a cliché: ‘Are you talking to me? To me?’ The scene can of course be interpreted in several ways.
I tend to see the love/hate pairing as a pair of affects specific to our culture. If one were to object that Antiquity was familiar with them, the answer to this is that they were viewed less as feelings of a subject than as formative forces of the world (mingling and separating, attracting and repelling).
There would be much to say, for example, about the violence between young people from different villages in nineteenth century France. Fatal clashes were not uncommon in some regions.
In the legal field, a history of the relationship between jus proprium and jus commune would be instructive.
Criticism should be understood here in the sense of analysis and identification of the parts of a whole rather than in the sense of moral denunciation, which is frequently simplistic.
References
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Montaigne, Michel de. 2003 [1580]. The complete essays. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin.
Montesinos. 1511. Sermon, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/spain/spain_montesinos.cfm.
Pascal, Blaise. 1897. Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, 455. http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Pascal/Pensees_brunschvicg.pdf.
Vacher de Lapouge, Georges. 1909. Race et milieu social, Paris, p. XXII–XXIII.
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Translated from French by Colin Matt. The text has been drafted within the framework of Council of Europe activities on hate speech. It was published on the website: http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/media/belgrade2013/default_EN.asp?
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Nancy, JL. Hatred, A Solidification of Meaning. Law Critique 25, 15–24 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9129-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9129-x