SARA AHMED

THE ORGANISATION OF HATE

ABSTRACT. In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in theorganisation 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 comesfrom within a psyche and then moves out to others – the paper suggests that hate works toalign individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Suchalignments are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, objector body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects thatit 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 papershows 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 extremeright wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doingcan precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designatedas 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, noform of ‘hate’ could even begin to compare. At least, not a hate motivated by ungroundedreasoning. It is not hate that makes the average White man look upon a mixed race couplewith a scowl on his face and loathing in his heart. It is not hate that makes the Whitehousewife throw down the daily newspaper in repulsion and anger, after reading of yetanother child-molester or rapist sentenced by corrupt courts to a couple of short years inprison or parole. It is not hate that makes the White working class man curse about thelatest boatload of aliens dumped on our shores to be given job preferences over the Whitecitizen who built this land. It is not hate that brings rage into the heart of a White Christianfarmer when he reads of billions loaned or given away as ‘aid’ to foreigners when he cannotget the smallest break from an unmerciful government to save his failing farm. Not, it’s nothate. It is Love (Aryan Nations Website).1

It is a common theme within so-called hate groups to declare them-selves as organisations of love on their web sites. This apparent reversal(we do and say this because we love, not because we hate) does anenormous amount of work, as a form of justification and persuasion. Inthe 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.

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White nationalist, the average White man, the White housewife, the Whiteworking man, the White Citizen and the White Christian farmer) who ishated, and who is threatened and victimised by the Law and polity. Thenarrative works precisely as a narrative of hate, not as the emotion thatexplains the story (it is not a question of hate being at its root), but asthat which is affected by the story, and as that which enables the story tobe affective. What it so significant in hate stories is precisely the way inwhich they imagine a subject that is under threat by imagined others whoseproximity threatens, not only to take something away from the subject(jobs, security, wealth and so on), but to take the place of the subject. Inother words, the presence of this other is imagined as a threat to the objectof love. It is this perceived threat that makes the hate reasonable ratherthan prejudicial: ‘it is not a hate motivated by ungrounded reasoning’. Thestory functions as a narrative of entitlement (it names those who worked tocreate the nation and who work on the Land to make the nation) as well asa narrative of displacement (it names those who seek to take the benefitsof that work away). There is an alignment of the imagined subject withrights and the imagined nation with ground. This alignment is affectedby the representation of both the rights of the subject and the grounds ofthe nation as already under threat. It is the emotional response of hate thatworks to bind the imagined White subject and nation together. The averagewhite man feels ‘fear and loathing’; the White housewife, ‘repulsion andanger’; the White workingman ‘curses’; the White Christian farmer feels‘rage’. The passion of these negative attachments to others is re-definedsimultaneously as a positive attachment to the imagined subjects broughttogether through the capitalisation of the signifier, ‘White’. It is the love ofWhite, or those that are recognisable as White, which supposedly explainsthis shared ‘communal’ visceral response of hate. Together we hate andthis hate is what makes us together.

This narrative, I would suggest, is far from extraordinary. Indeed, whatit 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 themobilisation of hate, as a passionate attachment closely tied to love. Theemotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasyto life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinaryperson as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is alreadyunder threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crimeagainst person as well as place. Hate is distributed in such narratives acrossvarious figures (in this case, the mixed racial couple, the child-molester orrapist, aliens and foreigners) all of which come to embody the danger ofimpurity, or the mixing or taking of blood. They threaten to violate the

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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 onefigure, but works to create the very outline of different figures or objectsof hate, a creation that crucially aligns the figures together, and constitutesthem as a ‘common’ threat. Importantly, then, hate does not reside in agiven subject or object. Hate is economic; it circulates between signifiersin relationships of difference and displacement.

If hate involves a series of displacements that do not reside positivelyeither in a sign or symbol, then it also does not belong to an individualpsyche; it does not reside positively in consciousness. So the economicnature 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 mydebt to psychoanalytical understandings of the subject. However, I need toclarify how my argument will exercise a concept of the unconscious, whichis not a term that I will use throughout. In his paper on the unconscious,Freud introduces the notion of unconscious emotions, whereby an affectiveimpulse is perceived but misconstrued, and which becomes attached toanother idea.2 What is repressed from consciousness is not the feeling assuch, 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 bothof these could exist in a singular form), these reflections are neverthelesssuggestive. Psychoanalysis allows us to see that emotions such as hateinvolves a process of movement or association, whereby ‘feelings’ take usacross different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted inthe present. This is what I would call the rippling effect of emotions; theymoves sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures andobjects) as well as forwards and backwards (repression always leaves itstrace in the present – hence ‘what sticks’ is also bound up with the ‘absentpresence’ of its historicity). In the opening quote, we can see preciselyhow hate ‘slides’ sideways across signifiers and between figures, as wellas backwards and forwards, by re-opening past associations whereby somebodies are ‘already read’ as more hateful than others. This re-opening ofpast associations also imagines a different future (where ‘they’ will not be‘here’).

Where my approach will involve a departure from psychoanalysis isprecisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic one (althoughneither 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 PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15, J. Strachey, trans. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964).

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difference and displacement to the signifier of ‘the subject’. This ‘return’ isnot 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 isin ‘a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles’.4 Thisconstitution of the subject as ‘settlement’, even if what settles is preciselylacking in presence, means that the suspended contexts of the signifier arede-limited by the contours of the subject. In contrast, my account of hateas an affective economy will show that emotions do not positively inhabitany-body or any-thing, meaning that ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal pointin the economy, rather than its origin and destination. This is extremelyimportant: it suggests that the sideways, forwards and backwards move-ment of emotions such as hate is not contained within the contours of asubject, 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 toreflections on hate crime? We might note that hate has been most stronglydebated within the context of hate crime in the United States, and inresponse to the violence committed by members of hate groups such asthe one from which I have quoted above. But within some of the criticalliterature on hate crime there has been a distrust expressed with the useof hate to understand those forms of violence that involve a performativemeans by which relationships of structural equality are ensured (violenceagainst Black people, gays, lesbians and transgendered people, thoughnot, we might note violence against women, at least when directed towomen as women). Theo Goldberg, for example, argues that the use ofhate turns racist expression into a psychological disposition.5 AnnjanetteRosga argues that the use of hate crime as a category has ‘a suscepti-bility to individualised models of oppression through its mobilisation ofpersonal, psychological notions of prejudice and hatred’.6 These critiquesare powerful and persuasive. What I want to do here is to supplement thesecritiques of the psychologising of power and inequality by arguing that weneed to understand hate as an emotion in ways that resist its very psycholo-gisation. 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.

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– or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of theirattachments, even when (or indeed through) that alignment is called intoquestion 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, tomediate the relationship between the psychic and the social.

Partly this argument will be developed as a critique of a model ofsocial structure and power that neglects the emotional intensities that allowsuch structures to be reified as forms of being. Attention to modalitiesof love and hate allow us to address the question of how subjects andothers become invested in particular structures such that their demise isfelt as a kind of living death. In other words, while we need to take care toavoid psychologising power and inequality, we also need to avoid reifiyingstructures and institutions. To be invested means to spend time, money andlabour on something as well as to endow that something with power andmeaning. To consider the investments we have in structures is precisely toattend to how they become meaningful – or indeed, are felt as natural –through the emotional work of labour, work that takes time, and that takesplace in time.

BOUND UP BY HATE

It is possible, of course, to hate an individual person because of what theyhave done or what they are like; this would be a hate that is broughtabout by the particularity of engagement. This would be a hatred thatmakes it possible to say, ‘I hate you’ to a face that is familiar, and toturn away, trembling. It is this kind of hate that is described by Bairdand Rosenbaum when they talk of ‘seething with passion against anotherhuman being’.7 And yet, classically, Aristotle differentiated anger fromhatred in that ‘anger is customarily felts towards individuals only, whereashatred may be felt towards whole classes of people’.8 Hate may respondto the particular, but it tends to do so by aligning the particular with thegeneral; ‘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. Thisis 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, NewYork: Prometheas Books, 1992), 31–34.

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with meaning or power as a member of a group that is imagined as a formof 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 definedwhen the crime is committed because of that individual’s perceived groupidentity (defined in terms of race, religion, sexuality):

if a person intentionally selects the person against whom the crime . . . is committed orselects 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 orthe owner of the property, the penalties for the underlying crime are increased [Wisconsinv. Mitchell] (emphasis added).9

What is at stake in hate crime is the perception of a group in the body ofan individual. However, the way in which it is perception that is at stake isconcealed by the word ‘because’ in hate crime legislation, which impliesthat 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 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.

10 There are some difficulties around cause and effect here. I would argue, with Rosga inA. 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 thatgroups are sealed entities that hate is then directed towards. At the same time, I wouldquestion the work of critics such as Jacobs and Potter see J.B. Jacobs and K. Potter HateCrimes: 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 legislationitself 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 exacerbatedthrough hate crime legislation. I cannot go along with this. Rather, I would argue thathate crimes (which I would define as forms of violence directed towards others that areperceived to be a member of a social group, whereby the violence is ‘directed’ towards thegroup) 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 theviolence. In other words, the enactment of hate through violence does not ‘invent’ socialgroups out of nothing. Rather, such enactments function as a form of enforcement; hatecrimes 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 iseffected by, the sealing of others into group identities. This is why some bodies and notothers become the object of hate crimes: hate ties the particular with the group only byre-opening a past history of violence and exclusion that allows us to recognise the bodiesof some others as out of place. See S. Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others inPost-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 38–54. Of course, the relevant laws withinthe 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 hatredis not described as the origin of crime, but as the effect (there is criminal liability if a personuses or publishes words of behaviour that is theatening, abusing or insulting, and where it

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involves a perception of a group in the body of the individual does notmake the violence any less real or ‘directed’; this perception has materialeffects insofar as it is enacted through violence. That is, hate crime worksas a form of violence against groups through violence against the bodiesof individuals. As I will argue later, violence against others is one way inwhich the other’s identity is fixed or sealed; the other is forced to embodya particular identity by and for the perpetrator of the crime, and that forceinvolves 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 somethingor somebody does not necessarily pre-exist the hate. To this event, hate asan emotion involves the negotiation of an intimate relationship between asubject and an imagined other, an other that cannot then be relegated to theoutside. Indeed, one of the psychoanalytical models that is often used toexplain the force of hatred is projection: here, the self projects all that it isundesirable 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 Toseek to harm this other would then be to seek to eliminate the part of one’sself that one does not like. However, this model is problematic to the extentthat it repeats the commonly held assumption that hate moves from insideto outside (pushing what is undesirable out), even if it then underminesthe objectivity of this distinction. I want to suggest instead that the circu-lation of hate takes place between bodies, and it is this circulation whichaffects/effects the very distinction between inside and outside in the firstplace. This distinction is intimate; it touches the pores of the skin. Indeed, itis precisely how subjects are touched by others that affects the constitutionof the borders between selves and others. In other words, rather than sayinghate 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 isdirected towards others who have an independent existence? What doesthe intimacy of this feeling of extimacy do?

To consider hatred as an intimate extimacy in this way is certainly tosuggest 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 (orperhaps because of) its threat is perceived as coming from outside. Hatethen 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 roleplayed by hate in an economy of affects and effects.

11 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, supra n. 4 at 352.

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prejudice, hate is seen as tied up with love. Or, to put it more precisely, loveis understood as the pre-condition of hate. Golden Allport in his classicaccount The Nature of Prejudice considers that ‘symbiosis and a lovingrelation always precedes hate. There can, in fact, be no hatred until therehas been long centred frustration and disappointment’.12 Allport draws onIan 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 ‘theanxiety of the discovery of the not-self’.14 Such arguments allow us toconsider the ambivalence of hate. If the demand for love is the demandfor presence, and frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure ofthat demand, then hate and love are intimately tied together, in the intensityof the negotiation between desire and loss, presence and absence. To someextent, hate is an affect/effect of the impossibility of love; the impossibilitythat the subject can be satisfied. Hate, then, is tied in with the lack that isconcealed by presence and revealed in the demand for presence.

However, there are significant problems here. Firstly, these argumentsinvolve a naturalisation of the forms of love and hate by presenting themas necessary components in the constitution of a universal and undiffer-entiated subject. Moreover, they involve a psychobiography that assumesmanifestations of love and hate originate in the child’s own relation topersons 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 ofemotion; they suggest that emotions begin within an individual psyche andthen reach out towards objects and others.

But, at the same time, the notion that hate involves the frustration ofthe demand for love can take us somewhere in thinking through what it isthat hate is doing. These arguments suggest that hate involve processes ofothering; hate is an effect of the difficulty precisely of being with othersthat cannot satisfy any demand for presence. As David Holbrook puts itin The Masks of Hate, ‘indifference would manifest our lack of need forthe object. Where there is hate there is obviously excessive need for theobject’.15 In other words, hate is an indifference to indifference: in hate,the object makes a difference, but it cannot satisfy the subject, whose needgoes 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-WeslyPublishing 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.

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However, it is not that the object is needed. Rather, what is needed is thevery process of either digesting the object or pushing that object away,an incorporation or expulsion that does not seek the disappearance of theobject, but that requires the object to appear (again and again). Hate trans-forms this or that other into an object whose expulsion or incorporation isneeded, 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 thevery negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, and betweencommunities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or ourexistence as a site of both excess and negation. This other presses againstme/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, crushingor pushing it away – there are different techniques possible here) is whatallows me to define myself as apart from that other. What is at stake in hateis a turning away from others that is lived as a turning towards the self. Wecan 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 andnot-me, but that some demarcations come into existence through a hate thatis felt as coming from within and moving outwards towards others who arealways approaching me and my loved others. If hate is felt as belongingto me but caused by an-other, then the others (however imaginary) arerequired for the very continuation of the life of the ‘I’ or the ‘we’. To thisextent, boundary formations are bound up with anxiety, not as a sensationthat comes organically from within an individual or community, but asthe effect of this ongoing constitution of the apartness of the individual orcommunity.

However, it is insufficient to posit the story of the ‘I’ and ‘we’ as parallelor homologous. Rather, what is at stake in the intensity of hate as a negativeattachment to others is how hate creates the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ as utterablesimultaneously 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 inaccordance with the declaration) comes into existence, by also declaringits love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, thecommunity 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 becomesnot only attached to a ‘we’, but the ‘we’ is what is affected by the veryattachment the subject has to itself and to its loved others. Hence in hatingan other, this subject is also loving itself; hate structures the emotional lifeof narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation of the imageof the self in the faces that together make up the ‘we’. The attachment toothers becomes divided as negative and positive (hate and love) precisely

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through imaging the faces of the community made up of other ‘me’s’, ofothers 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 thisrelationship between ego formation and community. The ego is establishedby imitating the lost object of love; it is based on a principle of like-ness or resemblance or of becoming alike. However, I would argue thatlove does not pre-exist identification (just as hate does not pre-exist dis-identification); so it is not a question of identifying with those one lovesand dis-identifying with those one hates. Rather, it is through forms ofidentification that align this subject with this other, that the character ofthe loved is produced as ‘likeness’ in the first place.18 Thinking of identifi-cation as a form of alignment (to bring into line with oneself – the subjectas ‘bringing into line’) also shows us how identifications involve dis-identification or an active ‘giving up’ of other possible identifications.19

That is, by aligning myself with some others, I am also aligning myselfagainst other others. Such a ‘giving up’ may also produce the characterof the hated as ‘unlikeness’. What is at stake in the emotional intensitiesof love and hate, then, is the production of the effect of likeness andunlikeness as characteristics that are assumed to belong to the bodies ofindividuals.

This separation of others into bodies that can be loved and hated ispart 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 hateworks by providing ‘evidence’ of the very antagonism it effects; we citethe work that it is doing in producing the characteristics of likeness andunlikeness when we show the reasons for its existence. And hate may betied up with fear precisely because the fantastic nature of likeness andunlikeness 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 PsychologicalWorks 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 oneis constructed already as ‘unlike’. Fanon discusses this for the Black subject. The Blacksubject becomes the body against which the white subject defines itself (apartness). And yetthe Black subject identifies with the white subject; this is the mask or imitation of whitenessdemanded by the colonial predicament (where white is being). Hence the Black subject iscaught within a contradictory position; the Black subject identifies with that which it isalready recognised as not being (like). F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: PlutoPress, 1986).

19 J. Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,1997).

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as unlike myself must be repeated, again and again). We can recognisea link between the production of stereotypes and the emotional labour ofhate. As Homi Bhabha20 has suggested, the stereotype is a fixed image ofthe other that must be repeated, precisely because it has no origin in thereal. This repetition comes with its own risks: it is always possibility thatthe sign will be repeated with a difference. The question is not about thecontent of the stereotype (what the other is perceived as being);21 rather therepetition that produces the stereotype works to confirm the difference or‘unlikeness’ of the other from the self and community. The very necessityof this reconfirmation exercises the possibility that it seeks to exclude, thepossibility that such another may not exist as ‘not me’, as negation. It isthe transformation of some others into unlikeness (‘not like me’) and otherothers into likeness (‘like me’) that is produced through the intimate labourof love and hate, but this transformation never quite takes form; it is alwaysbeing worked for or towards.

By suggesting that there is an intimate proximity in the emotionallabour of love and hate, or at the very least that they cannot be opposed, weneed to take care, as Gail Mason has shown us in her contribution to thisvolume. The very notion that some forms of hate are expressions of lovecan be used as a justification of violence – or even, as a concealment ofviolence, within the intimate sphere of domesticity (‘he loves me really’).I am not suggesting, of course, that hate and love are the same thing, asthe separation of love and hate has effects, in the sense that this separa-tion is what aligns some bodies with and against others, an alignment thatproduces 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 invest-ment that appear to endow objects and others with meaning and power.Both hate and love involve intensifications of feeling that bring others intoexistence as objects (that we love, that we hate); they both are fascinatedwith the texture of this or that other, they both are a form of attention orfixation in which an other seems to appear for and before the subject. And,indeed, insofar as hate and love involve such a passionate but contingentattachment 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 wemust transform ‘my’ or ‘our’ lack into the other’s shame. However, this does not mean theplace of the other is empty or transferable. The particularity of which other is the objectof a hate fantasy will make a difference to the fantasy; the fantasy will re-open histories ofrepresentations that over-determine the body of the other that is its object.

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of bodies, with the very ‘effect of surface, boundary and fixity’.22 Indeed,my argument suggests that materialisation takes place through a processof intensification; it is through the intensities of emotions such as love andhate that we come to have a sense of the borders that appear to separate usfrom others, and the surfaces that appear to contain us.

HATED BODIES

How can such an approach to intensification as bound up with materi-alisation help us in a reflection on the organisation of hate? I want tosuggest that hate works to organise the world through dis-organising andre-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 shoppingbags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the train’s lurching. My motherspots an almost seat, pushes my little snowsuited body down. On one side of me a manreading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches asshe stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it. Her leather-gloved handplucks at the line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She jerksher coat close to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seatbetween us – probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. It must besomething very bad from the way she’s looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me awayfrom it, too. When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyeshuge. And suddenly I realise there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me shedoesn’t want her coat to touch. The fur brushes my face as she stands with a shudder andholds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child, I quicklyslide over to make room for my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. I’m afraidto say anything to my mother because I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side ofmy snow pants secretly. Is there something on them? Something’s going on here I do notunderstand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.23

In this encounter Audre Lorde ends with ‘the hate’. This bodilyencounter, while ending with ‘the hate’, also ends with the re-constitutionof 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 aswell as bodily integrity. The emotion of ‘hate’ aligns the particular whitebody with the bodily form of the community – the emotion functionsto substantiate the threat of invasion and contamination in the body of aparticular 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.

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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 blackbody, Black people).

Does Audre’s narrative of the encounter involve her self-designationas the hated; does she hate herself? Certainly, her perception of the causeof 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 carrierof dirt, divides the two bodies, forcing them to move apart. Audre pullsher snowsuit, ‘away from it too’. But the ‘it’ that divides them is not theroach. Audre comes to realise that, ‘it is me she doesn’t want her coachto touch’. What the woman’s clothes must not touch, is not a roach thatcrawls between them, but Audre herself. Audre becomes the ‘it’ that standsbetween the possibility of their clothes touching. She becomes the roach– the impossible and phobic object – that threatens to crawl from one tothe other: ‘I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of my snowpants secretly. Is there something on them?’ Here, the circulation of hatebrings others and objects into existence; hate slides between different signsand objects whose existence is bound up with the negation of its travel. SoAudre becomes the roach that is imagined as the cause of the hate. Thetransformation of this or that other into an object of hate is hence over-determined. It is not simply that any body is hated: particular historiesof attachment are re-opened in each encounter, such that some bodies arealready encountered as more hateful than other bodies. Histories are boundup with attachments precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, ofwhat connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closerto the skin.

Importantly, then, the alignment of some bodies with some others andagainst others take place in the physicality of movement; bodies are dis-organised and re-organised as they face others who are already recognisedas ‘the hate’. So the white woman loses her seat to keep the black child at adistance, in the ‘hurting’ or hurling movements of the train. The organisa-tion of social and bodily space creates a border that is transformed into anobject, as an effect of this intensification of feeling. So the white woman’srefusal to touch the Black child does not simply stand for the expulsion ofBlackness from white social space, but actually re-forms that social spacethrough the re-forming of the apartness of the white body. The re-formingof 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 isregistered on the skin. Or, to be more precise, the skin comes to be felt as aborder through the violence of the impression of one surface upon another.

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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 bodilyand social space. Perhaps we need to reflect more on the effect of hateon the bodies of those who are produced as objects of hate. Such effectsare affects, for sure. Going back to Audre’s story, we can ask: how isthe black body re-formed in the encounter? How are the effects of theencounter registered as affective responses of the body that is hated? Whathappens to those bodies that are encountered as objects of hate, as havingthe characteristic of ‘unlikeness’? In my previous reading of the story inStrange Encounters, I emphasised the effect of the encounter on the whitebody that becomes lived as apart.24 What I failed to ask was the role ofhate, as a social encounter between others, on those who are designated ashated (a designation that disappears in the transformation of hate into anevent: ‘the hate’). It is this failure that I would take as symptomatic of atendency to think of hate and hate crime from the point of view of those thathate rather than those that are hated. The (temporary) disappearance of thebodies 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 torepeat the crime rather than to redress its injustice. But can we make thebodies of the hated appear? What would this mean, if we consider that hateis 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 intoobject of hate always determined?

In the case of Audre’s story, Audre’s gestures mimic the whitewoman’s. Her gaze is ‘pulled down’, following the gaze of the whitewoman. This pulling down of the gaze and the transformation of the blackbody into an object of its own gaze seems crucial. The hated body becomeshated, 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 BlackSkin, White Masks, where he describes how the Black body ‘is sealed intothat crushing objecthood’.25 When Audre’s gaze is pulled down with thewhite woman’s, she feels ‘afraid’ as she comes to recognise herself as theobject of the woman’s hate: she is ‘hailed’, in Althusser’s sense, as thehated. 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 chainof effects (which are at once affects) it puts into circulation. I would arguethat bodies that are hated become (temporarily) sealed in their skin. Suchbodies are seen as having the character of the negative, or unlikeness, andthe 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.

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says no to what is perceived as not (like me). That transformation of thisbody into the body of the hated, in other words, leads to the compressionor sealing of the other’s body into the traumatic not of the ‘not here but notyet there’. That is, the signs of hate say, at least in part: ‘stay here so I cansay 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 thebodies 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’, whichmakes us equally apart from each other. Such a liberalism works to emptythe place of the other, such that it can filled by anybody. Rather some enact-ments of hatred transform this hate into ‘the hate’: they do so preciselybecause subjects become aligned with communities, whereby the latteris formed by ‘extending’ the reach and mobility of some bodies and notothers. So some forms of hate work precisely to transform others into‘the hated’, a transformation that never quite takes place, but is repeatedlydaily, and with force. This does not mean that relations of power cannot betransformed, but that any transformation will be difficult, precisely becauseof the way in which subjects become invested in its reproduction throughthe emotional labour of love and hate.

If hate is part of the production of the ordinary, rather than simplyabout ‘extremists’ (perhaps we should say that emotional extremes arepart of the production of the ordinary), then when does hate become acrime? What use or relevance will hate crime have as a legal and indeedpolitical category? My argument has implied that hate crime may be usefulas a category precisely because it can make explicit the role of hate as anintense and negative attachment to others in the formation of identity andcommunity. In other words, hate is structuring of Law as well as of thecrimes that are designated as crimes by the Law. Of course, not all subjectshate in the same way. While it might be important to challenge the narrativewhich sees hate as something extremists do (which saves the ordinarynation, or ordinary subjects, for any responsibility for its violence), it isequally important to see that the over-determination of hate means that itis not fully determined. In other words, particular acts (including phys-ical violence directed towards others, as well as name calling and abusivelanguage) do not necessarily follow from the uneven effects of hate. Thislack of determination gives us the resources to show how hate crime canbe the responsibility of the one who enacts hate through such forms ofviolence. Hence, undermining the distinction between hate and hate crime

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in the non-opposition between the ordinary and criminal does not mean anemptying 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 asa category that also suggest its limits: hate crime does not refer to a discreteset of enactments that stand apart from the uneven effects that hate alreadyhas in organising the surfaces of the world (though neither does it simplyfollow from them, as I suggested above). The limits of hate crime maypartly then be the limits of the Law that seeks to designate the criminal asan ontological category. Of course, to say something is limited is not to sayit does not have its uses. Indeed, insofar as hate enacts the negation that isperceived to characterise the existence of a social group, then I would linkhate to injustice, an injustice that is, of course, irreducible to the Law, atthe same time as it has a relation to it.26 If hate is always directed to othersas a way of sealing their fate, then hate is precisely about the affect it hason others. Given this, the introduction of hate crime as a category shouldbe used as a way of making visible the effects of hate, by listening to theaffective 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 negativeeffects of hate messages are real and immediate for the victims. Victims ofhate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotion distressranging from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing,nightmare, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis andsuicide’.27 (1993: 24) The enactment of hate through verbal or physicalviolence, Matsuda suggests ‘hits right at the emotional place where wefeel 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 aspart of what hate is doing. Hate produces affects on the bodies of thosethat are its objects. Hate is not simply a means by which the identity ofthe subject and community is established (through alignment); hate alsoworks 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 andthe 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).

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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 visceraland bodily, as Mari Matsuda’s work has emphasised, then this means thebody of the victim is read as testimony, as a means by which the truthof hate crime is established in Law. This poses a particular problem forthe incitement to hatred laws as they relate to hate speech. The affectsmust be seen as fully determined by the crime, a determination that, ina strict sense, is very difficulty to establish, without evidence that can bedescribed as bruised skin or other traces of bodily violence. So critics suchas Raj Jureidini have mentioned the ‘subjectivity’ of hate speech laws asa problem: ‘Some people are affected by ethnic jokes and name calling asa problem, others not’.31 If the affect and effects of hate speech are notfully determined, then to what extent can harm as affect and effect becomeevidence for the injustice of hate speech? To what extent can listening tothe 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 theindividual as the grounds, not only for an appeal (for compensation orredress), but as an identity claim, such that ‘reaction’ against the injuryforms the very basis of politics, understood as the conflation of truth andinjustice.34 What must follow from such critiques is not a refusal to listento histories of pain as part of the histories of injustice, whereby pain isunderstood as the bodily life of such histories. The fetishising of the woundcan only take place by concealing these histories, and the greater injusticewould be to repeat that fetishisation by forgetting the processes of beingwounded by others. I am suggesting the importance of listening to theaffects and effects of hate and hate crime as a way of calling into question,rather than assuming, the relationship between violence and identity. Tosay 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 onNovember 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 ThroughFeminism (London: Routledge, 2000), 33–47.

34 W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princetown:Princetown University Press, 1995).

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not congeal into an identity, is not to suggest that the affects and effectsdon’t matter, and that they are not a form of injustice, even if they cannotfunction in a narrow sense as evidence or an identity claim. Indeed, totreat them as evidence would perform its own injustice: the language andbodies of hate do not operate on the terrain of truth, they operate to makeand unmake worlds, made up of other bodies. To hear your story of beinghurt simply as true or untrue would not be a just hearing. Indeed, listeningto the affects of hate crime must involve recognising that the affects are notalways determined: we cannot assume we know in advance what it feelslike 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 hatecrime is not always guaranteed to succeed. We have to have open ears tohear the affects of hate.

But what does the failure of hate to fully determine its affect or effectsmean for politics? In Excitable Speech,35 Judith Butler considers theimpossibility of deciding in advance the meaning of hate speech for thedebates about crime. She suggests that any signifier can be mobilised indifferent ways and in new contexts, so that even signs we assume standfor hate (and can only stand for hate), can operate otherwise, such as theburning cross.36 She hence criticises the work of Matsuda, amongst others,which she suggests assume that hate resides in particular signs and that theeffects 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 thispaper, hate is economic, and it does not reside positively in a sign orbody. But Butler overlooks the relationship between affect and effect that iscrucial to Matsuda’s own work. Following Matsuda, we need to relate thequestion of the effect of hate speech with affect, with the feelings of thosewho have been enacted upon. Following Butler, we might recognise thatthe affects are not determined in advance. But if they are not determined inadvance, then how do they come to be determined? We need to ask: howis it that certain signifiers produce affective responses? Or, to return to mydiscussion about stereotypes, we can ask: why are some signs repeated andnot others? Is it because such signs are over-determined; is it because theyre-open a history which is affective, which has affects?

The fact that some signs are repeated is precisely not because the signsthemselves contain hate, but because they re-open such histories. Wordslike ‘Nigger’ or ‘Pakis’, for example, tend to stick; they hail the otherprecisely by bringing an other into a history whereby such names assignthe 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.

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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, evenif they cannot be reduced to that history. Another way of putting this is tosay that some words stick because they become attached through particularaffects. So, for example, someone will use racial insults (the white womanwho retreats from Audre may mutter under her breath to a compliantwitness, ‘Nigger’, ‘roach’: an insult that is directed against an other, butmediated by a third party) precisely because these are affective, althoughit is not always guaranteed that the other will be ‘impressed upon’ or hurt ina way that follows from the affective history of that signifier. It is preciselythe affective nature of hate speech that allows us to understand that whetherit works or fails to work is not really the important question (here I partfrom Butler). Rather, the important question for me is: what affects do hateencounters have on the bodies of others who become transformed into thehated, and how do those affects attach this encounter to a past that cannotbe left for dead? Such a question can only be asked if we consider howhate works as an affective economy, how hate does not reside positivelyin signs, but how hate circulates or moves through fixing others into thecategory of ‘the hated’, a fixation which does not necessarily hold the otherinto one place.

HATRED AND THE NATIONAL BODY

As we have seen, hate is not inherent in a sign; its affect is a clusteringeffect, which involves attaching signs to histories that surround bodies butdo not reside in them. In other words, emotions are in circulation; neverquite residing in a sign or body, rather they become attached to signs andbodies, an attachment that can and does involve violence and fixation forsome and movement for others. How do these attachments allow hate tocirculate as an affective economy within the nation? I want to take asan instance William Hague’s speeches on asylum seekers that he madebetween April and June 2000 when he was still the leader of the Conser-vative Party in the UK. At the same time, other speeches were in circulationthat became ‘stuck’ or ‘attached’ to the ‘asylum seekers’ speech throughthis 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 ofcontrol and, hence, work by mobilising fear, or the anxiety of being over-whelmed by the actual or potential proximity of others. Typically, Haguedifferentiates between those others who are welcome and those who are

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not, by differentiating between genuine and bogus asylum seekers. Partly,this works to enable the national subject to imagine its own generosity inwelcoming some others. The nation is hospitable as it allows those genuineones to stay. And yet at the same time, it constructs some others as alreadyhateful (as bogus) in order to define the limits or the conditions of thishospitality.

The construction of the bogus asylum seeker as a figure of hate alsoinvolves a narrative of uncertainty and crisis, but an uncertainty and crisisthat makes that figure do more work. How can we tell the differencebetween a bogus and a genuine asylum seeker? It is always possible thatwe might not be able to tell, and that they may pass, in both senses ofthe term, their way into our community. Such a possibility commands us(our right, our will) to keep looking, and justifies our intrusion into thebodies of others (to try and get underneath their skin to decide whether theyare genuine). Indeed, the possibility that we might not be able to tell thedifference swiftly converts into the possibility that any of those incomingbodies may be bogus. The impossibility of reducing hate to a particularbody, allows hate to circulate in an economic sense, working to differen-tiate 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 therepetition of violence against the bodies of other others.

But Hague’s speeches also worked to produce certain affects and effectsthrough its temporal proximity to another speech about Tony Martin, aman accused and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a 16-yearold boy who had attempted to burgle his house. Hague uses one sentence,which circulates powerfully. Hague argued (without reference to Martinor asylum seekers) that the law is ‘more interested in the rights of crim-inals than the rights of people who are burgled’. Such a sentence evokesa history that is not declared (this is how attachment can operate as aform of speech, as a form of resistance to literalisation) and, in doing so, itpositions Martin as victim and not as a criminal. The victim of the murderis 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 thereal injustice. This reversal of the victim/criminal relationship becomes animplicit defence of the right to kill those who unlawfully enter one’s prop-erty. Now, the coincidence of this speech with the speech about asylumseekers is affective. That is, through its very detachment from a partic-ular object or body, it becomes attached as a form of affect. It works toalign some figures or bodies with others and against other others. Here, thefigure of the burglar collapses into the figure of the bogus (note the similarsound) asylum seeker, whose entry into the nation space becomes defined

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as an act of theft, as well as intrusion. At the same time, the body of themurderer/victim becomes the body of the nation; the one whose propertyand well being is under threat by the other, and who has authorisation, as aquestion of moral duty (protection) to make this other disappear, to will thisother out of existence, whatever the means, or whatever that means. Sucha narrative of defending the nation against intruders is formed throughthe relationship between words and sentences: it is symptomatic of howhate circulates, to produce a differentiation between me/us and you/them,whereby the ‘you’ and ‘them’ is constituted as the cause or the justificationof my/our feelings of hate.

In an interesting episode during this period, William Hague went onthe Jonathon Dimbleby programme on April 28th 2000. Here, WilliamHague repeated his comments about asylum seekers to a heterogeneousand engaged audience. One Black woman stood up and said she wasintimidated by his language of ‘swamped’ and ‘flooded’. Hague used thedictionary as his defence: ‘a flood is a flow which is out of control . . . I amgiving these words their true and full meaning’. We might note here that themeaning given by Hague as true and proper is precisely the meaning thatmakes these words intimidating (‘out of control’). Aside from this, what ishappening here is a denial of those histories, those words that surroundother words and produce affects through their very transformation intonarratives. It is a denial of how words work to produce ripples that seal thefate of some others, by enclosing them into figures that we then recogniseas the cause of this hate. The contingent attachment of hate – how it worksto connect words, with bodies and places through an intensification offeeling – is precisely what makes it difficult to pin down, to locate in abody, object or figure.

This difficulty is what makes hate work the way that it does; it is notthe impossibility of hate as such, but the mode of its operation, whereby itsurfaces in the world made up of other bodies. It is this very failure of hateto be located in a given body, object or figure, that allows it to produceor generate the effects that it does. Hate, then, is organised, rather thanrandom; it involves the spatial re-organisation of bodies through the verygestures of moving away from others that are felt to be the ‘cause’ of ourhate.

Institute for Women’s StudiesLancaster UniversityLancaster LA1 4YNUK