Problems of hate and emancipation: Some considerations for liberation psychology.

Abstract

Hatred, understood as a kind of negative attachment, circulates in different ways within a global capitalist economy premised on the degradation and expropriation of lives, labors, and lands. At the same time, psychoanalysis shows that hateful instincts are often repressed or worked through in an attempt to develop loving identifications and attachments. Thus, love functions together with hate in a conflictual dialectic. Although we cannot trust hatred, hate remains a part of human subjectivity. This somewhat curious position that hate occupies raises important questions for activists committed to building emancipatory political power. On the one hand, hateful annihilation cannot be relied on as a basis for progressive politics, yet on the other hand, piously refusing to engage with hatred in progressive politics is likely to result in the repression of hate, and thus the emboldening of a hateful unconscious. In this article, I interrogate the place of hate in social movements, drawing from the liberation psychology paradigm to do so. Specifically, I consider what hate might mean for psychological work concerned with recovering historiographical fragments, interrogating comradeship, and embracing radical democracy. It is because hate is so dangerous that we must take seriously its influence on emancipatory political programmes committed to opposing—and, indeed, hating—capitalism’s systematised hatred.