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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.
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
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 re-
staging 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 provision-
ally) 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
– 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
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 undiffer-
entiated 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 exist-
ence 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 trans-
forms 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
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
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 co-
mingle, 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 over-
determined. 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 dis-
organised 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 organisa-
tion 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
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 exper-
iences 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).
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 fetish-
ises 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.
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.