The ideology of hatred: The psychic power of discourse

The Ideology of Hatred advances a new socio-psychoanalytical framework for understanding the politics of national hatred as a discourse which characterizes today's many national, ethnic and religious conflicts by interrogating the unconscious within national discourse. It opens new and timely venues for thinking about the paradoxes of love and hate, while raising questions of social attachment and otherness. The book offers a critique of hatred as an ideological apparatus of power that operates within discourse as a defence strategy. A key term in The Ideology of Hatred is the "political unconscious," a concept signifying the transformation of the unthinkable into a language that is not itself. Hence, the book suggests that at the heart of all national conflicts lies a riddle: the enigma of desire. What this suggests is that untying and recognizing relations of intimacy and dependency can, under certain circumstances, change the discourse of hatred into relations of peace and even friendship.