Hate, a modern passion?

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By IGNACIO ECHEVERRIA*

A reflection on the anthropological and cultural roots of hatred

“Hatred can be aroused in two different ways: spontaneously or induced. No one needs to teach us to hate. […] It is part of the sentimental, emotional mechanism, and becomes part of the initiatory rite of incorporation into a group, a clan. […] Hating the same object that everyone else hates and in the same way as everyone else. The group is consolidated when all its members experience a common threat. Hatred is an excellent bond between the members of a group and, once you hate it like everyone else, you become one of the faithful. […] This is clearly observable in political factions.”

These words belong to the lecture with which Carlos Castilla del Pino introduced, in 1997, a seminar dedicated to hatred. The seminar was part of the series of seminars of anthropology of behavior, which Castilla del Pino himself led annually in San Roque, organized by the University of Cádiz. The interventions of this seminar on hatred were collected in 2002 in a volume entitled Hatred, published by Tusquets Editores. Its participants were, in addition to Castilla del Pino himself, the psychiatrist Carmen Gallano, the literature professor Túa Blesa, the psychoanalysis professor Carlos Gómez Sánchez, the professor of social anthropology Teresa del Valle, the professor of Greek Philology Carlos García Gual and myself.

Although the political and social situation that motivated this initiative has very little to do with that of those days (although the seeds of what is happening today were already being sown back then, as Antón Losada recently reminded us), it is perhaps not irrelevant, in the context of the debate sparked by the growing politics of hate, to reflect on the sociological background of this feeling, using some cultural and theoretical references. With this aim, I propose to revisit my intervention in that seminar mentioned, which I will abbreviate for this occasion. Much has happened since then; I have even moved on, but, although elementary, the general lines of that somewhat juvenile reflection still seem useful to me.

1.

“O witches, misery, hatred: to you was entrusted my treasure!” With this invocation, Arthur Rimbaud opens his collection of prose poems A Season in Hell. It is not easy to define the scope that this term – hell – has for Rimbaud, but it is worth remembering that modernity was at some point named as “the time of hell”. This is how perhaps its most insightful analyst, Walter Benjamin, refers to it. In any case, it is in A Season in Hell which is the famous phrase in which Rimbaud declares that “you have to be absolutely modern”. And he himself is considered the model of the modern artist: one in whom, successively, the revolutionary impulse, solipsism, transgression and escape manifest themselves in a premonitory way, to finally succumb to the cult of the commodity.

At the gates, therefore, of a hell that is not unreasonable to identify with modernity, one of its emblematic poets, Arthur Rimbaud, invokes hatred as one of its patrons. It is interesting to ask whether, beyond its poetic reach, it is possible to extract from it the intuition of hatred as a passion characteristic of modernity. More than that: as a feeling specific to it, to the extent that it is accepted that, beyond their timeless substance, feelings acquire, in each era, a particular content (as Ortega y Gasset suggested with regard to love).

It is already commonplace to characterize modernity as a fracture in the consciousness of the historical individual, a fracture that alters his relationship with the world, with the society that surrounds him and even with himself. This fracture determines a new perception of his own individuality, highlighting his radical estrangement from all the instances in which he used to find shelter.

Modernity, writes Octavio Paz in The children of clay (Cosac & Naify), “is synonymous with criticism and is identified with change; it is not the affirmation of a timeless principle, but the unfolding of critical reason that, without ceasing, questions itself, examines itself and destroys itself in order to be reborn again. We are not governed by the principle of identity nor its enormous and monotonous tautologies, but by otherness and contradiction, criticism in its dizzying manifestations […]. Modernity is a separation. I use the word in its most immediate sense: to move away from something, to disunite. Modernity begins as a detachment from Christian society. True to its origin, it is a continuous rupture, an incessant separation from itself.”

These words are enough, with the emphasis they give to the categories brought to the discussion (underlined), to connect what they say to the claim that hatred is a feeling specific to modernity. And this is because this feeling is rooted in the aforementioned categories and constitutes, par excellence, one of the typical derivations of that estrangement to which Octavio Paz refers.

Closely linked to love – which is often wrongly judged as its opposite –, the feeling of hate appears related, in psychoanalytic theory, to the recognition of external reality, that is, to the recognition of otherness, and, as such, is considered a decisive agent in the construction of individual identity.

According to Freud, in the most primitive phases of the psyche, “the self does not need the outside world as long as it is autoerotic”. During this phase, and always “under the rule of the pleasure principle”, the self welcomes within itself “the objects that are offered to him insofar as they constitute sources of pleasure and he internalizes them, on the other hand, pushing away from himself that which, within himself, constitutes a source of displeasure”.

During this stage, which Freud himself describes as narcissistic, “the external world divides itself for him [the self] into a pleasurable part, which is incorporated, and a remainder, foreign to him”. The feeling associated with this "rest" of the outside world that remains strange is, initially, that of indifference. But to the extent that the reality alien to the self, with its incessant stimuli (which constitute so many sources of displeasure), imposes itself on the subject's experience, indifference gives way to hatred, which thus appears linked to the recognition of the outside world as an object, that is, as a reality independent of the subject. According to Freud, “the external world, the object and the hated would have been, initially, identical”. And this to such an extent that it can be said that “hate makes the object” (referring, of course, to the object in the sense of non-self, external to the Self).

2.

It is tempting – even though it may seem abusive in many ways – to extrapolate Freud’s observations on the function of hatred to the behavior of social bodies and recognize a similar dynamic in them. This seems simple when it comes to racist or nationalist feelings, which generate hatred that effectively acts as agents of differentiation and identity. In fact – as Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio has insistently illustrated – in the formation of peoples and nations, or more generally of social groups, hatred plays an ancestral role, comparable to the one it plays in the construction of individual self-awareness.

For a long time, the rooting of individual consciousness in a solidly founded social structure ensured that hatred, in addition to its particular manifestations, played an important social role, reinforcing the collective consciousness. A good example of this is the decisive role that religious struggles played in the consolidation of modern European nations, and especially anti-Semitic sentiment or hatred of the Turk.

The specificity of modernity would be that, when the individual's relationship of belonging to his own social environment becomes conflictual, this integrative function of hatred is problematized. Through the force of critical reason, modernity inaugurates a process of “radical strangeness” between the individual and his environment, which calls into question the set of collective values ​​on which both interpersonal relationships and the image that the subject had of himself were based. Making it clear that the present analysis is limited to the individual as a social subject, it is worth remembering that the rupture of the theocentric model, later continued by the geocentric and anthropocentric models, inaugurated from the Renaissance onwards a process of estrangement that acquired its full intensity with the Enlightenment.

The Europe of revolutions, in the long journey that goes from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, can be briefly explained as a result of this process, one of the consequences of which is hatred, which, from then on, begins to oppose the different social classes, since the bonds that supported their hierarchical articulation were questioned. From this point of view, the class struggle, in the dialectical interpretation that Marxism makes of it, would come to constitute, to a large extent, a strategic rationalization of this hatred, with the objective of reestablishing, for the benefit of the proletarian class, a new social pact.

However, leaving aside the ideological plane, perhaps the clearest way to illustrate the disruptions that the new times inflict on individual consciousness consists in exploring the sentiment of the multitude. Such, according to Walter Benjamin, is the new sentiment that takes root in the citizenship of the 19th century; a sentiment determined by the modern phenomenon par excellence: the emergence of large cities and the new living conditions that they provide.

Walter Benjamin himself brings up, in this regard, an expressive quote from the young Engels, which is worth transcribing here: “A city like London, where one can walk for hours without ever reaching the beginning or the end, without encountering the slightest sign that would allow one to deduce the proximity of open ground, is a very peculiar thing. This colossal centralization, this gathering of three million men in a single spot, has increased its strength a hundredfold […]. But only later do we discover the victims that […] this has cost. When one wanders for a day or two through its paved streets, one realizes that these Londoners have had to sacrifice the best part of their humanity in order to achieve all the wonders of civilization with which their city overflows […]. Even the swarming of the streets has something repugnant, something against which human nature is indignant. These hundreds of thousands who jostle one another, are they not all men with the same properties and capacities and with the same interest in being happy? And yet they run, avoiding each other, as if they had nothing in common, nothing that united them, with a single tacit pact between them: that each one stays on the right side of the sidewalk, so that the two streams of the crowd, which advance in opposite directions, do not block each other. It certainly does not occur to anyone to deign to cast a single glance at the other. The brutal indifference, the insensitive isolation of each one in his private interests, stands out even more disgustingly, hurting even more, given that everyone is compressed into a small space.”

The feeling expressed here goes beyond the profound disgust that arouses, in so many 19th century artists, the configuration of the new social order, of the new living conditions – a disgust that finds its most precise and radical formulation in Flaubert and his reiterated “hatred of the bourgeoisie”. Its object is something much more extensive and imprecise, in any case not connoted by the class perspective nor by ideological positions: the multitude.

3.

After this quote, Walter Benjamin recalls the classic texts of Poe and Baudelaire, and he himself notes, with regard to them, how “the crowd of the big city aroused fear, repugnance, terror in the first people who looked at it head on”. From this terror, this repugnance and this fear, a corresponding feeling of hatred arose, which in many cases expressed itself as a reflex of aggression. Revolutionary ideologies redirect this feeling towards a redemptive utopia. But, outside the channel determined by these ideologies, the development of critical reason leads many consciences to nihilism. In the scenario formed by this, perhaps the most characteristic of modernity, the man of the crowd to whom Poe and Baudelaire refer becomes either the tormented misanthrope who stars in the Underground Memories (1864), by Dostoevsky, or in the fierce anarchist who embodies the character of the professor in The secret agent (1907), the novel by Joseph Conrad.

As you will recall, this last character walks with impunity through the same streets of London described by Engels, but he does so carrying a bomb. Here is one of the passages in which Joseph Conrad describes him: “Lost in the crowd, miserable and tiny, he meditated confidently on his power, without taking his hand out of his left trouser pocket and lightly holding the rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a while he felt unpleasantly affected by the spectacle of the street crammed with vehicles and the sidewalk crowded with men and women. He was on a long, straight street, occupied by a mere fraction of an immense crowd; but all around him, on all sides, incessantly, up to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of humanity, powerful in its dimensions. It swarmed like innumerable locusts, industrious like ants, unconscious like a natural force, advancing blindly and in order, absorbed, impervious to feeling, to logic, perhaps also to terror.”

Here again, what causes astonishment is not so much the crowd itself, but its indifference. In the void that this indifference opens in individual consciousness, modern consciousness is constructed. But in the passage just quoted, a new notion is almost imperceptibly insinuated, which determines a significant change in the process opened by this consciousness: the notion of “mass”. It is worth dwelling on it.

The mass alludes to a notion related to, but absolutely identical to, that of the crowd. Joseph Conrad is right to intuit this when he expresses how the mass makes itself felt beyond the immense crowd that surrounds his character, beyond – he says – “from the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks”.

Unlike the “man of the crowd” referred to by Poe and Baudelaire, the “man of the masses” is indifferent to the terror inspired by the specter itself. And this occurs because the mass constitutes a transmutation of the multitude, through which its multiple entity dissolves into a higher unity, in which the atavistic gregariousness that gave impetus to human societies is renewed.

It is crucial to differentiate the feeling of the crowd from the feeling of the masses in order to distinguish, in turn, two successive stages in the development of modern individual consciousness. The perception of the crowd marked practically the entire 19th century and was dominated by the disturbing impact that the new living conditions, resulting from the industrial revolution, had on the individual. In this context, the phenomenon of the crowd, a consequence of human concentrations on a scale unknown until then, has – as has already been said – an essential role.

The terror that the individual experiences before the crowd gives way, throughout the first stage of modernity, to different attitudes: revolutionary conspiracy, aesthetic solipsism, flight, resentment, hatred... The latter arises, first of all, from the repudiation of what, due to its imposing heterogeneity, is unexpectedly recognized as strange and, therefore, threatening.

The determining factor, in any case, is the anguish provoked by the sudden revelation that the environment previously perceived as one's own – the fabric of human relations that supported and reinforced the individual's sense of self – has acquired a hostile consistency. Hatred arises here as a reaction to the isolation of one's own identity, to one's solitude, torn as it was from one's belonging to a more or less comfortable order. The repudiation of the crowd, according to this, would be a feeling dominated by strangeness and otherness.

The phenomenon of the mass has very different roots from those of the crowd. Its nature is not historical. The more or less spontaneous formation of human masses dates back to the origins of man and obeys a kind of instinct of indifference by which the individual dissolves his own identity in a superior entity. If the phenomenon of the mass has acquired such prominence throughout the 20th century, it is because this mass instinct acts with special insistence in situations of estrangement, such as those generated by the feeling of crowd.

In this sense, it can be said that the feeling of the masses acts as a revulsion against the feeling of the multitude. If the feeling of the multitude is a characteristic feeling of the process of individualization that culminates in the nineteenth century, the feeling of the masses is a feeling that acts precisely as a dissolver of individual consciousness. The repudiation of the masses has a sign opposite to the repudiation of the multitude. If the latter constitutes a reaction of the individual consciousness to the multiple and strange, the former consists of the reaction of this same individual consciousness to the formidable pressure of the identical. If the multitude intimidates by its diversity, the mass does so by its uniformity. And this is because the mass constitutes the crystallization of the multitude in a kind of transcended individuality.

The mass is the refuge of a traumatized individuality, which resolves its anguish at the price of dissolving itself. The mass offers the individual the consolation of the multiplication of his identity, through which he alleviates the feeling of otherness and strangeness that the crowd, understood as the multiplication of diversity, provoked in him. The feeling of mass dissolves, in a sublimated identity, the restlessness provoked by the crowd.

4.

Elias Canetti, who dedicated a good part of his life to the study and characterization of the mass – which he understood and explained like no other – highlights among its fundamental properties the fact that, within the mass, equality reigns. Elias Canetti observes: “This is an absolute and indisputable equality and is never questioned by the masses themselves. It is so fundamentally important that the state of the masses can be defined directly as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, the differences between them are unimportant. We become a mass seeking this equality. We ignore everything that might take us away from this objective.”

It is impossible to understand the twentieth century without at the same time understanding – as Elias Canetti did – the leading role played by the experience of the masses, which was decisive for the rise of totalitarianism. Along the lines of what has been argued, one could even, with a certain boldness, establish a correspondence between the relations of the masses with totalitarianism and those of the multitude with democracy. But it is enough here to record the mechanism that gives rise to the emergence of the masses: the tendency towards identity, a consequence of the reaction to the feeling of otherness and radical strangeness that, as we have seen, is at the basis of modern consciousness.

As a compact entity, the mass adopts behaviors similar to those of any subject. For it, hatred is a mechanism of affirmation that contributes to forging its own identity. But here we are dealing with hatred as a feeling of modern individuality, which is a critical individuality in relation to the social environment to which it belongs, and which, therefore, acts in a direction opposite to the hatred of the masses, which is a hatred, so to speak, "Social".

The absolutism of identity operates in the masses, which nullifies individuality to the extent that it acts in the sense of the commodity, that is, in the sense of the repetition of the identical for the purposes of instrumentalization, both on the part of the market and of the so-called factual powers.

More than any other critic of modernity, it was Theodor Adorno who, throughout his work, most passionately defended the value of culture as a field of resistance of the individual to the pressure of the identical. “The more society becomes totalized, the more perfectly it is reduced to a monochromatic system, the more the works of art, in which the experience of this process is accumulated, become its opposite.”, writes. In Theodor Adorno's theory, both art and philosophy are the two terrains in which a force still acts that “comes to the aid of the non-identical, of the oppressed in reality by our identifying pressure”.

In both cases, the deepest instances of the Self (which, in Theodor Adorno, takes on a distinctly Freudian physiognomy) are mobilized in favor of its preservation. And it is in this defensive movement that we can recognize the leading role of hatred as an agent of resistance of individuality, and, for this very reason, as a decisive factor in the dynamics of modernity.

Freud states that hatred “has its source in the instincts of self-preservation”. According to him, hatred comes from “of the struggle of the self for its conservation and maintenance”. Which invites, after the journey taken, to consider again how this feeling plays a determining role in modernity, so often understood and explained as “a culture of the Self”.

In fact, an entire current of modern art and thought, whose first manifestations can be traced back to Romanticism, directs its discourse towards a repudiation of the society that is the product of the industrial revolution, perceived as an instrument of alienation, of expropriation of the Self. A repudiation that becomes more aggressive and radical to the extent that the Self recognizes within itself entire territories that are under the jurisdiction of social forces and their powerful pressure.

5.

I would point out here a “humanitarian” dimension to the hatred that Theodor Adorno explored and defended insistently through his concept of negativity and his uncompromising defense of the avant-garde. But hatred as a defensive agent of individuality against the masses has little or nothing to do with the collective hatred that feeds the masses as transcended individuality. Mass hatred, fueled by racist, religious and nationalist feelings, is an atavistic hatred.

On the contrary, the hatred that animates much of the philosophical and aesthetic discourse of modernity, which determines much of the marginal, dissident or transgressive behavior within the current social order, is the expression of a resistance of individuality to being absorbed, an enclosure of the differentiated Self in the face of the totality. Jean Baudrillard was right to express it with exemplary forcefulness: “Hatred is perhaps that which subsists, which outlives every definable object […]. Hate remains as a kind of energy, albeit negative or reactionary. Today, there are only these passions left: hatred, disgust, allergy, aversion, disappointment, nausea, repugnance or repulsion. We do not know what we want. But we know what we do not want. The current process is a process of rejection, of disaffection, of allergy. Hate participates in this paradigm of reactionary passion: I reject, I do not want, I will not enter into consensus […]. At the same time that the universal is exalted, otherness, the true, that which does not fit into the universal and whose singularity persists, despite being disarmed and powerless, is discovered. I have the impression that the gap between a universal culture and what remains of singularities is hardening and deepening.”

These words expose a clear conception of hate as a residual feeling of a cornered individuality, for which the premise of universality hides a deadly trap. For this individuality, every social construction, every cultural consensus, ends up being a vehicle for market domination and, therefore, an instrument of indifference. Jean Baudrillard himself highlights the extent to which the primary function of media consists of the “production of indifference”. “Communication, by becoming universal”, declares Jean Baudrillard, “It implied a phenomenal loss of otherness. The other no longer exists. Perhaps people seek a radical otherness, and the best way to achieve it is through hatred, a desperate form of producing the other. In this sense, hatred would be a passion, a form of provocation and challenge […]. Currently, what energy remains is invested in a negative passion, a rejection, a repulsion. Identity today is found in rejection […].”

Jean Baudrillard does not avoid the desperate and sterile aspect of this “negative passion”, which arises from the absence of any constructive perspective and is projected onto the entire social system. Class hatred is left behind, which, as Jean Baudrillard observes, “it was, paradoxically, a bourgeois passion”: “It had a purpose; it could be theorized, and in fact it was. It was formulable, it had a possible action, it contained a historical and social passion. It had a subject, the proletariat, structures, classes, contradictions. The hatred we speak of has no subject; it has no possible action […].”

This is where its self-destructive potential emerges. For, as true as hatred constitutes the legitimate reflection of an individuality subjected to the growing pressure of the identical, it is also true that this individuality is only defensible to the extent that it is itself felt as a project. But it is here that contemporary versions of hatred fail, to the extent that the production of indifference, in which all the mechanisms of the current social system converge, penetrates the individual's feeling of himself, giving rise to the confinement of a self without content, that is, a self felt only as a rejection of everything that exists, including himself.

*Ignacio Echeverria is an editor and literary critic. Author of, among other books, A Vocation as an Editor (storm gray). [https://amzn.to/4hnAGPs]

Translation Rafael Almeida.

Originally published in CTXT.

References


Arthur Rimbaud, A season in Hell (1873); trans. by Ramón Buenaventura, Hiperión, Madrid, 1982;

José Ortega y Gasset, prologue from 1952 to The collar of the dove, by Ibn Hazm de Córdoba, in version by Emilio García Gómez (Alianza, Madrid, 1971);

Octavio Paz, «The tradition of rupture», en The children of the slime (1974), Seix Barral, Barcelona, ​​1981 (3rd corrected and expanded ed.);

sigmund freud, Instincts and their destinies (1915); Complete works, VI, trans. by José Luis López Ballesteros, Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, several editions and reprints;

Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klase in England (1848); quoted by Walter Benjamin in «About some themes in Baudelaire» (1939), Poetry and capitalism. Lightings 2, trans. by Jesús Aguirre, Taurus, Madrid, 1980;

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907); trans. by Jorge Edwards, The secret agent, Muchnik, Barcelona, ​​1980;

Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (1960); trans. by Juan José del Solar, Mass and power, Galaxia Gutenberg – Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, ​​2002;

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetist Theory (1970); trans. by Fernando Riaza: Aesthetic theory, Taurus, Madrid, 1980;

Jean Baudrillard, «Une ultime réaction vitale», interview by François Ewald, Literary Magazine, num. 323, dedicated to «La Haine» ('El odio'), July-August 1994, pp. 20-24.


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