SARA AHMED
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
ABSTRACT. In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the
organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’
as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition – that it comes
from within a psyche and then moves out to others – the paper suggests that hate works to
align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such
alignments are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, object
or body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects that
it does. Furthermore, although hate does not reside positively in a subject, body or sign,
this does not mean that hate does have effects that are structural and mediated. This paper
shows that hate becomes attached or ‘stuck’ to particular bodies, often through violence,
force and harm. The paper dramatises its arguments by a reflection on racism as hate crime,
looking at the circulation of figures of hate in discourses of nationhood, from both extreme
right wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doing
can precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designated
as the hated, an affective life that is crucial to the injustice of hate crime.
KEY WORDS: affect, alignment, attachment, displacement, hate, racism
The depths of Love are rooted and very deep in a real White Nationalist’s soul and spirit, no
form of ‘hate’ could even begin to compare. At least, not a hate motivated by ungrounded
reasoning. It is not hate that makes the average White man look upon a mixed race couple
with a scowl on his face and loathing in his heart. It is not hate that makes the White
housewife throw down the daily newspaper in repulsion and anger, after reading of yet
another child-molester or rapist sentenced by corrupt courts to a couple of short years in
prison or parole. It is not hate that makes the White working class man curse about the
latest boatload of aliens dumped on our shores to be given job preferences over the White
citizen who built this land. It is not hate that brings rage into the heart of a White Christian
farmer when he reads of billions loaned or given away as ‘aid’ to foreigners when he cannot
get the smallest break from an unmerciful government to save his failing farm. Not, it’s not
hate. It is Love (Aryan Nations Website).1
It is a common theme within so-called hate groups to declare themselves as organisations of love on their web sites. This apparent reversal
(we do and say this because we love, not because we hate) does an
enormous amount of work, as a form of justification and persuasion. In
the instance above, it is the imagined subject of both party and nation (the
1 The website was accessed on 4/01/01. http:/www.nidlink.com/∼aryanvic/index-
E.html.
Law and Critique 12: 345–365, 2001.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
346
SARA AHMED
White nationalist, the average White man, the White housewife, the White
working man, the White Citizen and the White Christian farmer) who is
hated, and who is threatened and victimised by the Law and polity. The
narrative works precisely as a narrative of hate, not as the emotion that
explains the story (it is not a question of hate being at its root), but as
that which is affected by the story, and as that which enables the story to
be affective. What it so significant in hate stories is precisely the way in
which they imagine a subject that is under threat by imagined others whose
proximity threatens, not only to take something away from the subject
(jobs, security, wealth and so on), but to take the place of the subject. In
other words, the presence of this other is imagined as a threat to the object
of love. It is this perceived threat that makes the hate reasonable rather
than prejudicial: ‘it is not a hate motivated by ungrounded reasoning’. The
story functions as a narrative of entitlement (it names those who worked to
create the nation and who work on the Land to make the nation) as well as
a narrative of displacement (it names those who seek to take the benefits
of that work away). There is an alignment of the imagined subject with
rights and the imagined nation with ground. This alignment is affected
by the representation of both the rights of the subject and the grounds of
the nation as already under threat. It is the emotional response of hate that
works to bind the imagined White subject and nation together. The average
white man feels ‘fear and loathing’; the White housewife, ‘repulsion and
anger’; the White workingman ‘curses’; the White Christian farmer feels
‘rage’. The passion of these negative attachments to others is re-defined
simultaneously as a positive attachment to the imagined subjects brought
together through the capitalisation of the signifier, ‘White’. It is the love of
White, or those that are recognisable as White, which supposedly explains
this shared ‘communal’ visceral response of hate. Together we hate and
this hate is what makes us together.
This narrative, I would suggest, is far from extraordinary. Indeed, what
it shows us is the production of the ordinary. The ordinary is here fantastic.
The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the
mobilisation of hate, as a passionate attachment closely tied to love. The
emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy
to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary
person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already
under threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime
against person as well as place. Hate is distributed in such narratives across
various figures (in this case, the mixed racial couple, the child-molester or
rapist, aliens and foreigners) all of which come to embody the danger of
impurity, or the mixing or taking of blood. They threaten to violate the
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
347
pure bodies; such bodies can only be imagined as pure by the perpetual restaging of this fantasy of violation. Given this, hate cannot be found in one
figure, but works to create the very outline of different figures or objects
of hate, a creation that crucially aligns the figures together, and constitutes
them as a ‘common’ threat. Importantly, then, hate does not reside in a
given subject or object. Hate is economic; it circulates between signifiers
in relationships of difference and displacement.
If hate involves a series of displacements that do not reside positively
either in a sign or symbol, then it also does not belong to an individual
psyche; it does not reside positively in consciousness. So the economic
nature of hate also suggests that hate operates at an unconscious level,
or resists consciousness understood as plenitude, or what we might call
‘positive residence’. My reliance on ‘the unconscious’ here signals my
debt to psychoanalytical understandings of the subject. However, I need to
clarify how my argument will exercise a concept of the unconscious, which
is not a term that I will use throughout. In his paper on the unconscious,
Freud introduces the notion of unconscious emotions, whereby an affective
impulse is perceived but misconstrued, and which becomes attached to
another idea.2 What is repressed from consciousness is not the feeling as
such, but the idea to which the feeling may have been first (but provisionally) connected. While we may not seek to use the terms of this analysis,
which imply a correspondence between a feeling and an idea (as if both
of these could exist in a singular form), these reflections are nevertheless
suggestive. Psychoanalysis allows us to see that emotions such as hate
involves a process of movement or association, whereby ‘feelings’ take us
across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in
the present. This is what I would call the rippling effect of emotions; they
moves sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures and
objects) as well as forwards and backwards (repression always leaves its
trace in the present – hence ‘what sticks’ is also bound up with the ‘absent
presence’ of its historicity). In the opening quote, we can see precisely
how hate ‘slides’ sideways across signifiers and between figures, as well
as backwards and forwards, by re-opening past associations whereby some
bodies are ‘already read’ as more hateful than others. This re-opening of
past associations also imagines a different future (where ‘they’ will not be
‘here’).
Where my approach will involve a departure from psychoanalysis is
precisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic one (although
neither is it not a psychic one), that is, to return these relationships of
2 S. Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15, J. Strachey, trans. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964).
348
SARA AHMED
difference and displacement to the signifier of ‘the subject’. This ‘return’ is
not only clear in Freud’s work, but also in Lacan’s positing of ‘the subject’
as the proper scene of absence and loss.3 As Laplanche and Pontalis argue,
if Lacan defines ‘the subject’ as ‘the locus of the signifier’, then it is
in ‘a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles’.4 This
constitution of the subject as ‘settlement’, even if what settles is precisely
lacking in presence, means that the suspended contexts of the signifier are
de-limited by the contours of the subject. In contrast, my account of hate
as an affective economy will show that emotions do not positively inhabit
any-body or any-thing, meaning that ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point
in the economy, rather than its origin and destination. This is extremely
important: it suggests that the sideways, forwards and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained within the contours of a
subject, but moves across or between subjects, objects, signs and others,
which themselves are not locatable or found within the present.
How can this re-thinking of hate as an affective economy contribute to
reflections on hate crime? We might note that hate has been most strongly
debated within the context of hate crime in the United States, and in
response to the violence committed by members of hate groups such as
the one from which I have quoted above. But within some of the critical
literature on hate crime there has been a distrust expressed with the use
of hate to understand those forms of violence that involve a performative
means by which relationships of structural equality are ensured (violence
against Black people, gays, lesbians and transgendered people, though
not, we might note violence against women, at least when directed to
women as women). Theo Goldberg, for example, argues that the use of
hate turns racist expression into a psychological disposition.5 Annjanette
Rosga argues that the use of hate crime as a category has ‘a susceptibility to individualised models of oppression through its mobilisation of
personal, psychological notions of prejudice and hatred’.6 These critiques
are powerful and persuasive. What I want to do here is to supplement these
critiques of the psychologising of power and inequality by arguing that we
need to understand hate as an emotion in ways that resist its very psychologisation. Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities
3 S. Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97–98.
4 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, D. Nicholson-Smith,
trans. (London: Karnac Books, 1992), 65.
5 D.T. Goldberg, ‘Hate or Power’, in R.K. Whillock and D. Slayden, eds., Hate Speech
(Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995), 267–276 at 269.
6 A. Rosga, ‘Policing the State’, The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 1
(1999), 145–174 at 149.
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
349
– or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their
attachments, even when (or indeed through) that alignment is called into
question by the very ‘movement’ engendered by intensifications of feeling.
Rather than seeing emotions such as hate as psychological dispositions,
we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to
mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social.
Partly this argument will be developed as a critique of a model of
social structure and power that neglects the emotional intensities that allow
such structures to be reified as forms of being. Attention to modalities
of love and hate allow us to address the question of how subjects and
others become invested in particular structures such that their demise is
felt as a kind of living death. In other words, while we need to take care to
avoid psychologising power and inequality, we also need to avoid reifiying
structures and institutions. To be invested means to spend time, money and
labour on something as well as to endow that something with power and
meaning. To consider the investments we have in structures is precisely to
attend to how they become meaningful – or indeed, are felt as natural –
through the emotional work of labour, work that takes time, and that takes
place in time.
B OUND U P BY H ATE
It is possible, of course, to hate an individual person because of what they
have done or what they are like; this would be a hate that is brought
about by the particularity of engagement. This would be a hatred that
makes it possible to say, ‘I hate you’ to a face that is familiar, and to
turn away, trembling. It is this kind of hate that is described by Baird
and Rosenbaum when they talk of ‘seething with passion against another
human being’.7 And yet, classically, Aristotle differentiated anger from
hatred in that ‘anger is customarily felts towards individuals only, whereas
hatred may be felt towards whole classes of people’.8 Hate may respond
to the particular, but it tends to do so by aligning the particular with the
general; ‘I hate you because you are this or that’, where the ‘this’ or ‘that’
evokes a group that the individual comes to stand for or stand in for. This
is why hatred works as a form of investment; it endows a particular other
7 R.M. Baird and S.E. Rosenbaums, ‘Introduction’, in R.M. Baird and S.E.
Rosenbaums, eds., Bigotry, Prejudice and Hatred: Definitions, Causes and Solutions
(Buffalo, New York: Prometheas Books, 1992), 9–20.
8 Cited in G.W. Allport, ‘The Nature of Hatred’, in R.M. Baird and S.E. Rosenbaums,
eds., Bigotry, Prejudice and Hatred: Definitions, Causes and Solutions (Buffalo, New
York: Prometheas Books, 1992), 31–34.
350
SARA AHMED
with meaning or power as a member of a group that is imagined as a form
of positive residence (as residing positively in the body of the individual).
In hate crime legislation in the United States, the signifiers ‘because of’
hence do an enormous amount of work. Hate crimes typically are defined
when the crime is committed because of that individual’s perceived group
identity (defined in terms of race, religion, sexuality):
if a person intentionally selects the person against whom the crime . . . is committed or
selects the property that is damaged or otherwise affected by the crime because of the race,
religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry of that person or
the owner of the property, the penalties for the underlying crime are increased [Wisconsin
v. Mitchell] (emphasis added).9
What is at stake in hate crime is the perception of a group in the body of
an individual. However, the way in which it is perception that is at stake is
concealed by the word ‘because’ in hate crime legislation, which implies
that group identity is already in place, and that it works only as a cause,
rather than also being an effect of the crime.10 The fact that hate crime
9 J.B. Jacobs and K. Potter, Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.
10 There are some difficulties around cause and effect here. I would argue, with Rosga in
A. Rosga, ‘Policing the State’, The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 1 (1999),
145–174, that hate crime legislation does tend to reify social groups, by assuming that
groups are sealed entities that hate is then directed towards. At the same time, I would
question the work of critics such as Jacobs and Potter see J.B. Jacobs and K. Potter Hate
Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
who, in arguing against the efficacy of the category ‘hate crime’, suggest that the legislation
itself is creating the divisions that the crime is supposed to be a result of. They imply,
hence, that such divisions would not exist if they were not introduced and then exacerbated
through hate crime legislation. I cannot go along with this. Rather, I would argue that
hate crimes (which I would define as forms of violence directed towards others that are
perceived to be a member of a social group, whereby the violence is ‘directed’ towards the
group) work to effect divisions partly by enforcing others into an identity through violence.
This does not mean that other’s are not aligned with an identity (= identification) before the
violence. In other words, the enactment of hate through violence does not ‘invent’ social
groups out of nothing. Rather, such enactments function as a form of enforcement; hate
crimes may work by sealing a particular other into an identity that is already affective.
The distinction between cause and effect is hence not useful: hate both affects, and is
effected by, the sealing of others into group identities. This is why some bodies and not
others become the object of hate crimes: hate ties the particular with the group only by
re-opening a past history of violence and exclusion that allows us to recognise the bodies
of some others as out of place. See S. Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 38–54. Of course, the relevant laws within
the UK, the ‘incitement to racial hatred’ in Part 111 (ss. 17–29) of the Public Order Act,
are about hate speech rather than hate crime defined in the terms above. Here, racial hatred
is not described as the origin of crime, but as the effect (there is criminal liability if a person
uses or publishes words of behaviour that is theatening, abusing or insulting, and where it
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
351
involves a perception of a group in the body of the individual does not
make the violence any less real or ‘directed’; this perception has material
effects insofar as it is enacted through violence. That is, hate crime works
as a form of violence against groups through violence against the bodies
of individuals. As I will argue later, violence against others is one way in
which the other’s identity is fixed or sealed; the other is forced to embody
a particular identity by and for the perpetrator of the crime, and that force
involves harm or injury.
But more generally, hate also names an intense emotion, a feeling of
‘againstness’ that is always, in the phenomenological sense, intentional.
Hate is always hatred of something or somebody, although that something
or somebody does not necessarily pre-exist the hate. To this event, hate as
an emotion involves the negotiation of an intimate relationship between a
subject and an imagined other, an other that cannot then be relegated to the
outside. Indeed, one of the psychoanalytical models that is often used to
explain the force of hatred is projection: here, the self projects all that it is
undesirable onto an another, while concealing any traces of that projection,
such that this other comes to appear as a being with a life of its own.11 To
seek to harm this other would then be to seek to eliminate the part of one’s
self that one does not like. However, this model is problematic to the extent
that it repeats the commonly held assumption that hate moves from inside
to outside (pushing what is undesirable out), even if it then undermines
the objectivity of this distinction. I want to suggest instead that the circulation of hate takes place between bodies, and it is this circulation which
affects/effects the very distinction between inside and outside in the first
place. This distinction is intimate; it touches the pores of the skin. Indeed, it
is precisely how subjects are touched by others that affects the constitution
of the borders between selves and others. In other words, rather than saying
hate involves pushing out what is undesirable within the self onto others,
we need to ask: why is it that hate feels like it comes from inside and is
directed towards others who have an independent existence? What does
the intimacy of this feeling of extimacy do?
To consider hatred as an intimate extimacy in this way is certainly to
suggest that hatred is ambivalent; it is an investment in an object (of hate)
whereby the object becomes part of the life of the subject even though (or
perhaps because of) its threat is perceived as coming from outside. Hate
then cannot be opposed to love. Certainly, within psychological theories of
is likely to stir up racial hatred). Hence, hate speech laws tend to criminalise hate as effect,
and hate crime laws to criminalise hate as origin; both of them fail to recognise the role
played by hate in an economy of affects and effects.
11 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, supra n. 4 at 352.
352
SARA AHMED
prejudice, hate is seen as tied up with love. Or, to put it more precisely, love
is understood as the pre-condition of hate. Golden Allport in his classic
account The Nature of Prejudice considers that ‘symbiosis and a loving
relation always precedes hate. There can, in fact, be no hatred until there
has been long centred frustration and disappointment’.12 Allport draws on
Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate, which suggests that hatred
‘owes all its meaning to a demand for love’13 and is bound up with ‘the
anxiety of the discovery of the not-self’.14 Such arguments allow us to
consider the ambivalence of hate. If the demand for love is the demand
for presence, and frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure of
that demand, then hate and love are intimately tied together, in the intensity
of the negotiation between desire and loss, presence and absence. To some
extent, hate is an affect/effect of the impossibility of love; the impossibility
that the subject can be satisfied. Hate, then, is tied in with the lack that is
concealed by presence and revealed in the demand for presence.
However, there are significant problems here. Firstly, these arguments
involve a naturalisation of the forms of love and hate by presenting them
as necessary components in the constitution of a universal and undifferentiated subject. Moreover, they involve a psychobiography that assumes
manifestations of love and hate originate in the child’s own relation to
persons and things, especially the mother. They assume, hence, the existence of a primary scene from which later behaviours (including hate crime)
derive. Such models are instances of what I would call psychologisation of
emotion; they suggest that emotions begin within an individual psyche and
then reach out towards objects and others.
But, at the same time, the notion that hate involves the frustration of
the demand for love can take us somewhere in thinking through what it is
that hate is doing. These arguments suggest that hate involve processes of
othering; hate is an effect of the difficulty precisely of being with others
that cannot satisfy any demand for presence. As David Holbrook puts it
in The Masks of Hate, ‘indifference would manifest our lack of need for
the object. Where there is hate there is obviously excessive need for the
object’.15 In other words, hate is an indifference to indifference: in hate,
the object makes a difference, but it cannot satisfy the subject, whose need
goes beyond it (an excess that makes the object an object in the first place).
12 G.W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesly
Publishing Company, 1979), 215.
13 I.D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book, 1963),
37.
14 Ibid.
15 D. Holbrook, The Masks of Hate: The Problem of the False Solutions in the Culture
of an Acquistive Society (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972) 36.
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
353
However, it is not that the object is needed. Rather, what is needed is the
very process of either digesting the object or pushing that object away,
an incorporation or expulsion that does not seek the disappearance of the
object, but that requires the object to appear (again and again). Hate transforms this or that other into an object whose expulsion or incorporation is
needed, an expulsion or incorporation that requires this other to survive,
so that it can be pushed in or out, again and again. Hate is involved in the
very negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, and between
communities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or our
existence as a site of both excess and negation. This other presses against
me/us; this other threatens my existence by his or her presence, demands,
excess. The constant demand that I be rid of this other (by eating, crushing
or pushing it away – there are different techniques possible here) is what
allows me to define myself as apart from that other. What is at stake in hate
is a turning away from others that is lived as a turning towards the self. We
can now see why stories of hate are already translated into stories of love.
Of course, it is not that hate is involved in any demarcation between me and
not-me, but that some demarcations come into existence through a hate that
is felt as coming from within and moving outwards towards others who are
always approaching me and my loved others. If hate is felt as belonging
to me but caused by an-other, then the others (however imaginary) are
required for the very continuation of the life of the ‘I’ or the ‘we’. To this
extent, boundary formations are bound up with anxiety, not as a sensation
that comes organically from within an individual or community, but as
the effect of this ongoing constitution of the apartness of the individual or
community.
However, it is insufficient to posit the story of the ‘I’ and ‘we’ as parallel
or homologous. Rather, what is at stake in the intensity of hate as a negative
attachment to others is how hate creates the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ as utterable
simultaneously in a moment of alignment. At one level, we can see that an
‘I’ that declares itself as hating an other (and who might or might not act in
accordance with the declaration) comes into existence, by also declaring
its love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, the
community and so on). But at another level, we need to investigate the ‘we’
as the very affect and effect of the attachment itself; such a subject becomes
not only attached to a ‘we’, but the ‘we’ is what is affected by the very
attachment the subject has to itself and to its loved others. Hence in hating
an other, this subject is also loving itself; hate structures the emotional life
of narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation of the image
of the self in the faces that together make up the ‘we’. The attachment to
others becomes divided as negative and positive (hate and love) precisely
354
SARA AHMED
through imaging the faces of the community made up of other ‘me’s’, of
others that are loved as if they were me.
When Freud suggests in Group Psychology16 and The Ego and the Id17
that we identify with those we love, he went some way to addressing this
relationship between ego formation and community. The ego is established
by imitating the lost object of love; it is based on a principle of likeness or resemblance or of becoming alike. However, I would argue that
love does not pre-exist identification (just as hate does not pre-exist disidentification); so it is not a question of identifying with those one loves
and dis-identifying with those one hates. Rather, it is through forms of
identification that align this subject with this other, that the character of
the loved is produced as ‘likeness’ in the first place.18 Thinking of identification as a form of alignment (to bring into line with oneself – the subject
as ‘bringing into line’) also shows us how identifications involve disidentification or an active ‘giving up’ of other possible identifications.19
That is, by aligning myself with some others, I am also aligning myself
against other others. Such a ‘giving up’ may also produce the character
of the hated as ‘unlikeness’. What is at stake in the emotional intensities
of love and hate, then, is the production of the effect of likeness and
unlikeness as characteristics that are assumed to belong to the bodies of
individuals.
This separation of others into bodies that can be loved and hated is
part of the work of emotion; it does not pre-exist emotion as its ground
– ‘I love or hate them because they are like me, or not like me’. So hate
works by providing ‘evidence’ of the very antagonism it effects; we cite
the work that it is doing in producing the characteristics of likeness and
unlikeness when we show the reasons for its existence. And hate may be
tied up with fear precisely because the fantastic nature of likeness and
unlikeness always threatens to be revealed (so the fantasy of the other
16 S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, J. Strachey, trans. (London:
International Psychoanalytical Press, 1922).
17 S. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, J. Strachey, trans. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964).
18 We can think some way now about the trauma of identifying with those whom one
is constructed already as ‘unlike’. Fanon discusses this for the Black subject. The Black
subject becomes the body against which the white subject defines itself (apartness). And yet
the Black subject identifies with the white subject; this is the mask or imitation of whiteness
demanded by the colonial predicament (where white is being). Hence the Black subject is
caught within a contradictory position; the Black subject identifies with that which it is
already recognised as not being (like). F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto
Press, 1986).
19 J. Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,
1997).
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
355
as unlike myself must be repeated, again and again). We can recognise
a link between the production of stereotypes and the emotional labour of
hate. As Homi Bhabha20 has suggested, the stereotype is a fixed image of
the other that must be repeated, precisely because it has no origin in the
real. This repetition comes with its own risks: it is always possibility that
the sign will be repeated with a difference. The question is not about the
content of the stereotype (what the other is perceived as being);21 rather the
repetition that produces the stereotype works to confirm the difference or
‘unlikeness’ of the other from the self and community. The very necessity
of this reconfirmation exercises the possibility that it seeks to exclude, the
possibility that such another may not exist as ‘not me’, as negation. It is
the transformation of some others into unlikeness (‘not like me’) and other
others into likeness (‘like me’) that is produced through the intimate labour
of love and hate, but this transformation never quite takes form; it is always
being worked for or towards.
By suggesting that there is an intimate proximity in the emotional
labour of love and hate, or at the very least that they cannot be opposed, we
need to take care, as Gail Mason has shown us in her contribution to this
volume. The very notion that some forms of hate are expressions of love
can be used as a justification of violence – or even, as a concealment of
violence, within the intimate sphere of domesticity (‘he loves me really’).
I am not suggesting, of course, that hate and love are the same thing, as
the separation of love and hate has effects, in the sense that this separation is what aligns some bodies with and against others, an alignment that
produces objects and figures that appear to have a life of their own. Rather,
both hate and love are forms of emotional labour, or forms of investment that appear to endow objects and others with meaning and power.
Both hate and love involve intensifications of feeling that bring others into
existence as objects (that we love, that we hate); they both are fascinated
with the texture of this or that other, they both are a form of attention or
fixation in which an other seems to appear for and before the subject. And,
indeed, insofar as hate and love involve such a passionate but contingent
attachment to others, then they are both bound up with the materialisation
20 H. Bhabha The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1997).
21 Whatever a hated other is perceived as being at any given cultural moment depends
upon what is already de-valued or negated: sometimes an other might be too hardworking,
have too much pleasure, and so on. The other we imagine has what I do not have, so we
must transform ‘my’ or ‘our’ lack into the other’s shame. However, this does not mean the
place of the other is empty or transferable. The particularity of which other is the object
of a hate fantasy will make a difference to the fantasy; the fantasy will re-open histories of
representations that over-determine the body of the other that is its object.
356
SARA AHMED
of bodies, with the very ‘effect of surface, boundary and fixity’.22 Indeed,
my argument suggests that materialisation takes place through a process
of intensification; it is through the intensities of emotions such as love and
hate that we come to have a sense of the borders that appear to separate us
from others, and the surfaces that appear to contain us.
H ATED B ODIES
How can such an approach to intensification as bound up with materialisation help us in a reflection on the organisation of hate? I want to
suggest that hate works to organise the world through dis-organising and
re-organising bodies. Take the following quote from Audre Lorde:
The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch my mother’s sleeve, her arms full of shopping
bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the train’s lurching. My mother
spots an almost seat, pushes my little snowsuited body down. On one side of me a man
reading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches as
she stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it. Her leather-gloved hand
plucks at the line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She jerks
her coat close to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seat
between us – probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. It must be
something very bad from the way she’s looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me away
from it, too. When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes
huge. And suddenly I realise there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she
doesn’t want her coat to touch. The fur brushes my face as she stands with a shudder and
holds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child, I quickly
slide over to make room for my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. I’m afraid
to say anything to my mother because I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of
my snow pants secretly. Is there something on them? Something’s going on here I do not
understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.23
In this encounter Audre Lorde ends with ‘the hate’. This bodily
encounter, while ending with ‘the hate’, also ends with the re-constitution
of bodily space. The bodies that come together, that almost touch and comingle, slide away from each other, becoming re-lived in their apartness.
The particular bodies that move apart allow the re-definition of social as
well as bodily integrity. The emotion of ‘hate’ aligns the particular white
body with the bodily form of the community – the emotion functions
to substantiate the threat of invasion and contamination in the body of a
particular other who comes to stand for, and stand in for, the other as such.
22 J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge,
1993), 9.
23 A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: The Crossing Press,
1984), 147–148.
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
357
In other words, the hate encounter aligns, not only the ‘I’ with the ‘we’
(the white body, the white nation), but the ‘you’ with the ‘them’ (the black
body, Black people).
Does Audre’s narrative of the encounter involve her self-designation
as the hated; does she hate herself? Certainly, her perception of the cause
of the woman’s bodily gestures is a misperception that creates an object.
The object – the roach – comes to stand for, or stand in for, the cause of
‘the hate’. The roach crawls up between them; the roach, as the carrier
of dirt, divides the two bodies, forcing them to move apart. Audre pulls
her snowsuit, ‘away from it too’. But the ‘it’ that divides them is not the
roach. Audre comes to realise that, ‘it is me she doesn’t want her coach
to touch’. What the woman’s clothes must not touch, is not a roach that
crawls between them, but Audre herself. Audre becomes the ‘it’ that stands
between the possibility of their clothes touching. She becomes the roach
– the impossible and phobic object – that threatens to crawl from one to
the other: ‘I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of my snow
pants secretly. Is there something on them?’ Here, the circulation of hate
brings others and objects into existence; hate slides between different signs
and objects whose existence is bound up with the negation of its travel. So
Audre becomes the roach that is imagined as the cause of the hate. The
transformation of this or that other into an object of hate is hence overdetermined. It is not simply that any body is hated: particular histories
of attachment are re-opened in each encounter, such that some bodies are
already encountered as more hateful than other bodies. Histories are bound
up with attachments precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of
what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer
to the skin.
Importantly, then, the alignment of some bodies with some others and
against others take place in the physicality of movement; bodies are disorganised and re-organised as they face others who are already recognised
as ‘the hate’. So the white woman loses her seat to keep the black child at a
distance, in the ‘hurting’ or hurling movements of the train. The organisation of social and bodily space creates a border that is transformed into an
object, as an effect of this intensification of feeling. So the white woman’s
refusal to touch the Black child does not simply stand for the expulsion of
Blackness from white social space, but actually re-forms that social space
through the re-forming of the apartness of the white body. The re-forming
of bodily and social space involves a process of making the skin crawl;
the threat posed by the bodies of others to bodily and social integrity is
registered on the skin. Or, to be more precise, the skin comes to be felt as a
border through the violence of the impression of one surface upon another.
358
SARA AHMED
But, of course, it is the white woman’s skin we imagine is crawling;
it is the white woman’s hate that leads to the re-organisation of bodily
and social space. Perhaps we need to reflect more on the effect of hate
on the bodies of those who are produced as objects of hate. Such effects
are affects, for sure. Going back to Audre’s story, we can ask: how is
the black body re-formed in the encounter? How are the effects of the
encounter registered as affective responses of the body that is hated? What
happens to those bodies that are encountered as objects of hate, as having
the characteristic of ‘unlikeness’? In my previous reading of the story in
Strange Encounters, I emphasised the effect of the encounter on the white
body that becomes lived as apart.24 What I failed to ask was the role of
hate, as a social encounter between others, on those who are designated as
hated (a designation that disappears in the transformation of hate into an
event: ‘the hate’). It is this failure that I would take as symptomatic of a
tendency to think of hate and hate crime from the point of view of those that
hate rather than those that are hated. The (temporary) disappearance of the
bodies of the hated is, of course, what is often sought in hate crime itself.
To allow such bodies to disappear in our own analysis would hence be to
repeat the crime rather than to redress its injustice. But can we make the
bodies of the hated appear? What would this mean, if we consider that hate
is involved in the very constitution of the apartness of this or that body?
Are the affects of the hate encounter on the ones that are transformed into
object of hate always determined?
In the case of Audre’s story, Audre’s gestures mimic the white
woman’s. Her gaze is ‘pulled down’, following the gaze of the white
woman. This pulling down of the gaze and the transformation of the black
body into an object of its own gaze seems crucial. The hated body becomes
hated, not just for the one who hates, but for the one who is hated. This
‘taking on’ of the white gaze is central to Frantz Fanon’s argument in Black
Skin, White Masks, where he describes how the Black body ‘is sealed into
that crushing objecthood’.25 When Audre’s gaze is pulled down with the
white woman’s, she feels ‘afraid’ as she comes to recognise herself as the
object of the woman’s hate: she is ‘hailed’, in Althusser’s sense, as the
hated. What does it mean to be hailed as the hated? What can it mean?
Such questions invite us to think about what hate does, and about the chain
of effects (which are at once affects) it puts into circulation. I would argue
that bodies that are hated become (temporarily) sealed in their skin. Such
bodies are seen as having the character of the negative, or unlikeness, and
the hate that is ‘directed’ towards the body works to negate the negative; it
24 S. Ahmed, supra n. 10 at 38–54.
25 F. Fanon, supra n. 18 at 109.
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
359
says no to what is perceived as not (like me). That transformation of this
body into the body of the hated, in other words, leads to the compression
or sealing of the other’s body into the traumatic not of the ‘not here but not
yet there’. That is, the signs of hate say, at least in part: ‘stay here so I can
say to you that do not belong here – stay here so I can push you away’.
Being hailed as the hated may function as a form of fixation in which the
bodies of others are (at least temporarily) fixed, or forced to be or stand for
‘the not (like) m(w)e’ before and for the ‘m(w)e’.
If hate works to align an ‘I’ with a ‘we’ by fixing or negating others,
then hate has an important role in organising the world in which we live.
But it is not a case of saying, ‘well, everybody hates somebody’, which
makes us equally apart from each other. Such a liberalism works to empty
the place of the other, such that it can filled by anybody. Rather some enactments of hatred transform this hate into ‘the hate’: they do so precisely
because subjects become aligned with communities, whereby the latter
is formed by ‘extending’ the reach and mobility of some bodies and not
others. So some forms of hate work precisely to transform others into
‘the hated’, a transformation that never quite takes place, but is repeatedly
daily, and with force. This does not mean that relations of power cannot be
transformed, but that any transformation will be difficult, precisely because
of the way in which subjects become invested in its reproduction through
the emotional labour of love and hate.
If hate is part of the production of the ordinary, rather than simply
about ‘extremists’ (perhaps we should say that emotional extremes are
part of the production of the ordinary), then when does hate become a
crime? What use or relevance will hate crime have as a legal and indeed
political category? My argument has implied that hate crime may be useful
as a category precisely because it can make explicit the role of hate as an
intense and negative attachment to others in the formation of identity and
community. In other words, hate is structuring of Law as well as of the
crimes that are designated as crimes by the Law. Of course, not all subjects
hate in the same way. While it might be important to challenge the narrative
which sees hate as something extremists do (which saves the ordinary
nation, or ordinary subjects, for any responsibility for its violence), it is
equally important to see that the over-determination of hate means that it
is not fully determined. In other words, particular acts (including physical violence directed towards others, as well as name calling and abusive
language) do not necessarily follow from the uneven effects of hate. This
lack of determination gives us the resources to show how hate crime can
be the responsibility of the one who enacts hate through such forms of
violence. Hence, undermining the distinction between hate and hate crime
360
SARA AHMED
in the non-opposition between the ordinary and criminal does not mean an
emptying out of responsibility for the affects and effects of hate crime.
But it is the terms of my argument about the usefulness of hate crime as
a category that also suggest its limits: hate crime does not refer to a discrete
set of enactments that stand apart from the uneven effects that hate already
has in organising the surfaces of the world (though neither does it simply
follow from them, as I suggested above). The limits of hate crime may
partly then be the limits of the Law that seeks to designate the criminal as
an ontological category. Of course, to say something is limited is not to say
it does not have its uses. Indeed, insofar as hate enacts the negation that is
perceived to characterise the existence of a social group, then I would link
hate to injustice, an injustice that is, of course, irreducible to the Law, at
the same time as it has a relation to it.26 If hate is always directed to others
as a way of sealing their fate, then hate is precisely about the affect it has
on others. Given this, the introduction of hate crime as a category should
be used as a way of making visible the effects of hate, by listening to the
affective life of injustice, rather than establishing the truth of Law.
Mari Matsuda’s work emphasises the importance of the affects of hate,
and hate crime, on the bodies of the victims. She writes: ‘The negative
effects of hate messages are real and immediate for the victims. Victims of
hate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotion distress
ranging from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing,
nightmare, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis and
suicide’.27 (1993: 24) The enactment of hate through verbal or physical
violence, Matsuda suggests ‘hits right at the emotional place where we
feel the most pain’.28 Now, I want to suggest here that the lived experiences of pain need to be understood as part of the work of hate, or as
part of what hate is doing. Hate produces affects on the bodies of those
that are its objects. Hate is not simply a means by which the identity of
the subject and community is established (through alignment); hate also
works to unmake the world of the other through pain29 (see Scarry 1985).
26 J. Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, in D. Cornell, M.
Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London:
Routledge, 1992), 3–67.
27 M.J. Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story’,
in Matsuda et al., eds., Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaulative Speech and
the First Amendment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 17–52.
28 Ibid., at 25.
29 See E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and S. Ahmed, ‘The Contingency of Pain’, Parallax
(forthcoming).
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
361
Or hate crimes seek to crush the other in what Patricia Williams has called
‘spirit murder’.30
If the effect of hate crime is affect, and an affect which is visceral
and bodily, as Mari Matsuda’s work has emphasised, then this means the
body of the victim is read as testimony, as a means by which the truth
of hate crime is established in Law. This poses a particular problem for
the incitement to hatred laws as they relate to hate speech. The affects
must be seen as fully determined by the crime, a determination that, in
a strict sense, is very difficulty to establish, without evidence that can be
described as bruised skin or other traces of bodily violence. So critics such
as Raj Jureidini have mentioned the ‘subjectivity’ of hate speech laws as
a problem: ‘Some people are affected by ethnic jokes and name calling as
a problem, others not’.31 If the affect and effects of hate speech are not
fully determined, then to what extent can harm as affect and effect become
evidence for the injustice of hate speech? To what extent can listening to
the victim’s story become a means of delivering justice?
We can consider here the important critiques made by Wendy Brown32
and Lauren Berlant33 of what we can call wound culture, culture that fetishises the wound as proof of identity. Wound culture takes the injury of the
individual as the grounds, not only for an appeal (for compensation or
redress), but as an identity claim, such that ‘reaction’ against the injury
forms the very basis of politics, understood as the conflation of truth and
injustice.34 What must follow from such critiques is not a refusal to listen
to histories of pain as part of the histories of injustice, whereby pain is
understood as the bodily life of such histories. The fetishising of the wound
can only take place by concealing these histories, and the greater injustice
would be to repeat that fetishisation by forgetting the processes of being
wounded by others. I am suggesting the importance of listening to the
affects and effects of hate and hate crime as a way of calling into question,
rather than assuming, the relationship between violence and identity. To
say these affects and effects are not fully determined, and to say that do
30 Supra n. 27 at 24.
31 R. Jureidini, ‘Origins and Initial Outcomes of the Racial Hatred Act 1995’, People
and Place: http:elecpress.monash.edu.au/pnp/pnpv5nl/jurediin.htm. Web page accessed on
November 28th 2000, 13.
32 W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princetown:
Princetown University Press, 1995).
33 L. Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics’, in S. Ahmed,
J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil and B. Skeggs, eds., Transformations: Thinking Through
Feminism (London: Routledge, 2000), 33–47.
34 W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princetown:
Princetown University Press, 1995).
362
SARA AHMED
not congeal into an identity, is not to suggest that the affects and effects
don’t matter, and that they are not a form of injustice, even if they cannot
function in a narrow sense as evidence or an identity claim. Indeed, to
treat them as evidence would perform its own injustice: the language and
bodies of hate do not operate on the terrain of truth, they operate to make
and unmake worlds, made up of other bodies. To hear your story of being
hurt simply as true or untrue would not be a just hearing. Indeed, listening
to the affects of hate crime must involve recognising that the affects are not
always determined: we cannot assume we know in advance what it feels
like to be the object of hate. For some, hate enactments may involve pain,
for others, rage. So if pain is an ‘intended affect’ of hate crime, then hate
crime is not always guaranteed to succeed. We have to have open ears to
hear the affects of hate.
But what does the failure of hate to fully determine its affect or effects
mean for politics? In Excitable Speech,35 Judith Butler considers the
impossibility of deciding in advance the meaning of hate speech for the
debates about crime. She suggests that any signifier can be mobilised in
different ways and in new contexts, so that even signs we assume stand
for hate (and can only stand for hate), can operate otherwise, such as the
burning cross.36 She hence criticises the work of Matsuda, amongst others,
which she suggests assume that hate resides in particular signs and that the
effects of such sign are already determined in advance of their circulation.
To some extent I am in agreement with Butler; as I have argued in this
paper, hate is economic, and it does not reside positively in a sign or
body. But Butler overlooks the relationship between affect and effect that is
crucial to Matsuda’s own work. Following Matsuda, we need to relate the
question of the effect of hate speech with affect, with the feelings of those
who have been enacted upon. Following Butler, we might recognise that
the affects are not determined in advance. But if they are not determined in
advance, then how do they come to be determined? We need to ask: how
is it that certain signifiers produce affective responses? Or, to return to my
discussion about stereotypes, we can ask: why are some signs repeated and
not others? Is it because such signs are over-determined; is it because they
re-open a history which is affective, which has affects?
The fact that some signs are repeated is precisely not because the signs
themselves contain hate, but because they re-open such histories. Words
like ‘Nigger’ or ‘Pakis’, for example, tend to stick; they hail the other
precisely by bringing an other into a history whereby such names assign
the other with meaning in an economy of difference. Such words and signs
35 J. Butler, supra n. 19.
36 J. Butler, supra n. 19 at 19.
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
363
tend to stick, which does not mean they cannot operate otherwise. Rather,
they cannot simply be liberated from the history of this use as insult, even
if they cannot be reduced to that history. Another way of putting this is to
say that some words stick because they become attached through particular
affects. So, for example, someone will use racial insults (the white woman
who retreats from Audre may mutter under her breath to a compliant
witness, ‘Nigger’, ‘roach’: an insult that is directed against an other, but
mediated by a third party) precisely because these are affective, although
it is not always guaranteed that the other will be ‘impressed upon’ or hurt in
a way that follows from the affective history of that signifier. It is precisely
the affective nature of hate speech that allows us to understand that whether
it works or fails to work is not really the important question (here I part
from Butler). Rather, the important question for me is: what affects do hate
encounters have on the bodies of others who become transformed into the
hated, and how do those affects attach this encounter to a past that cannot
be left for dead? Such a question can only be asked if we consider how
hate works as an affective economy, how hate does not reside positively
in signs, but how hate circulates or moves through fixing others into the
category of ‘the hated’, a fixation which does not necessarily hold the other
into one place.
H ATRED AND THE NATIONAL B ODY
As we have seen, hate is not inherent in a sign; its affect is a clustering
effect, which involves attaching signs to histories that surround bodies but
do not reside in them. In other words, emotions are in circulation; never
quite residing in a sign or body, rather they become attached to signs and
bodies, an attachment that can and does involve violence and fixation for
some and movement for others. How do these attachments allow hate to
circulate as an affective economy within the nation? I want to take as
an instance William Hague’s speeches on asylum seekers that he made
between April and June 2000 when he was still the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. At the same time, other speeches were in circulation
that became ‘stuck’ or ‘attached’ to the ‘asylum seekers’ speech through
this temporal proximity, but also through the repetition, with a difference,
of some sticky words and language. In the case of the asylum speeches,
Hague’s narrative is somewhat predictable. Words used like ‘flood’ and
‘swamped’ work to create associations between asylum and the loss of
control and, hence, work by mobilising fear, or the anxiety of being overwhelmed by the actual or potential proximity of others. Typically, Hague
differentiates between those others who are welcome and those who are
364
SARA AHMED
not, by differentiating between genuine and bogus asylum seekers. Partly,
this works to enable the national subject to imagine its own generosity in
welcoming some others. The nation is hospitable as it allows those genuine
ones to stay. And yet at the same time, it constructs some others as already
hateful (as bogus) in order to define the limits or the conditions of this
hospitality.
The construction of the bogus asylum seeker as a figure of hate also
involves a narrative of uncertainty and crisis, but an uncertainty and crisis
that makes that figure do more work. How can we tell the difference
between a bogus and a genuine asylum seeker? It is always possible that
we might not be able to tell, and that they may pass, in both senses of
the term, their way into our community. Such a possibility commands us
(our right, our will) to keep looking, and justifies our intrusion into the
bodies of others (to try and get underneath their skin to decide whether they
are genuine). Indeed, the possibility that we might not be able to tell the
difference swiftly converts into the possibility that any of those incoming
bodies may be bogus. The impossibility of reducing hate to a particular
body, allows hate to circulate in an economic sense, working to differentiate some others from other others, a differentiation that is never ‘over’,
as it awaits for others who have not yet arrived, a waiting that justifies the
repetition of violence against the bodies of other others.
But Hague’s speeches also worked to produce certain affects and effects
through its temporal proximity to another speech about Tony Martin, a
man accused and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a 16-year
old boy who had attempted to burgle his house. Hague uses one sentence,
which circulates powerfully. Hague argued (without reference to Martin
or asylum seekers) that the law is ‘more interested in the rights of criminals than the rights of people who are burgled’. Such a sentence evokes
a history that is not declared (this is how attachment can operate as a
form of speech, as a form of resistance to literalisation) and, in doing so, it
positions Martin as victim and not as a criminal. The victim of the murder
is now the criminal: the crime that did not happen because of the murder
(the burglary) takes the place of the murder, as the true crime, and as the
real injustice. This reversal of the victim/criminal relationship becomes an
implicit defence of the right to kill those who unlawfully enter one’s property. Now, the coincidence of this speech with the speech about asylum
seekers is affective. That is, through its very detachment from a particular object or body, it becomes attached as a form of affect. It works to
align some figures or bodies with others and against other others. Here, the
figure of the burglar collapses into the figure of the bogus (note the similar
sound) asylum seeker, whose entry into the nation space becomes defined
THE ORGANISATION OF HATE
365
as an act of theft, as well as intrusion. At the same time, the body of the
murderer/victim becomes the body of the nation; the one whose property
and well being is under threat by the other, and who has authorisation, as a
question of moral duty (protection) to make this other disappear, to will this
other out of existence, whatever the means, or whatever that means. Such
a narrative of defending the nation against intruders is formed through
the relationship between words and sentences: it is symptomatic of how
hate circulates, to produce a differentiation between me/us and you/them,
whereby the ‘you’ and ‘them’ is constituted as the cause or the justification
of my/our feelings of hate.
In an interesting episode during this period, William Hague went on
the Jonathon Dimbleby programme on April 28th 2000. Here, William
Hague repeated his comments about asylum seekers to a heterogeneous
and engaged audience. One Black woman stood up and said she was
intimidated by his language of ‘swamped’ and ‘flooded’. Hague used the
dictionary as his defence: ‘a flood is a flow which is out of control . . . I am
giving these words their true and full meaning’. We might note here that the
meaning given by Hague as true and proper is precisely the meaning that
makes these words intimidating (‘out of control’). Aside from this, what is
happening here is a denial of those histories, those words that surround
other words and produce affects through their very transformation into
narratives. It is a denial of how words work to produce ripples that seal the
fate of some others, by enclosing them into figures that we then recognise
as the cause of this hate. The contingent attachment of hate – how it works
to connect words, with bodies and places through an intensification of
feeling – is precisely what makes it difficult to pin down, to locate in a
body, object or figure.
This difficulty is what makes hate work the way that it does; it is not
the impossibility of hate as such, but the mode of its operation, whereby it
surfaces in the world made up of other bodies. It is this very failure of hate
to be located in a given body, object or figure, that allows it to produce
or generate the effects that it does. Hate, then, is organised, rather than
random; it involves the spatial re-organisation of bodies through the very
gestures of moving away from others that are felt to be the ‘cause’ of our
hate.
Institute for Women’s Studies
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YN
UK