Love without Hate?
It sounds odd I know- but there’s even a song about it! https://genius.com/Sunz-of-man-no-love-without-hate-lyrics.
More serious than the song though I’m here to elaborate on whether or not love can exist without hate.
In Sara Ahmed’s piece The Organisation of Hate she elaborates on this and I use her as my aid. it absolutely changed the way I view the intent behind my actions and can help me articulate the intent behind others’ actions as well. When analyzing why we hate something or someone, are we hating the actual body- or the concepts that body represents?
Sara Ahmed brings Aristotelian views into her piece- talking about differences between anger and hate; anger is directed toward an individual whilst hate is “felt toward whole classes of people”. More specifically (this really brought the concept into view for me as I hope it does for you as well) “Hate may respond to the particular, but it tends to do so by aligning the particular with the general; ‘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.” For example, a homophobic person does not hate the person - it is the concept of ‘gayness’ that is hated- the individual embodying that concept.The hardworking white american man hates the cheaply hired immigrant that threatens his job security. A country goes to war to protect itself against bodies that threaten it. It is in this context that “hate crime works as a form of violence against groups through violence against the bodies of individuals”.
So where does love come in?
“Love is the pre-condition to hate.”
Ahmed mentions Golden Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice elaborating that there can be no hatred until there has been frustration and disappointment and ultimately, as mentioned Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate hatred ‘owes all its meaning to a demand for love’ and embodies the anxiety of the ‘discovery of the ‘not self’
Such arguments allow us to consider the ambivalence of hate. If the demand for love is the demand for presence, and frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure of that demand, then hate and love are intimately tied together, in the intensity of the negotiation between desire and loss, presence and absence. To some extent, hate is an affect/effect of the impossibility of love; the impossibility that the subject can be satisfied. Hate, then, is tied in with the lack that is concealed by presence and revealed in the demand for presence.
We hate the things that threaten to take away the things we love. To fit this into the earlier context the white american man hates the immigrant because he loves his job and we go to war because we love our country.
Furthermore,
“…in hating another, this subject is also loving itself; hate structures the emotional life of narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation of the image of the self in the faces that together make up the ‘we’ ”
The attachments we create get divided into positive and negative relationships (love and hate) the ‘we’ and the ‘them’. Interestingly, it is when we align ourselves with the ‘we’ and discover who the ‘we’ are that we indirectly create the ‘them’ to which we oppose. So, by creating the ‘we’ we are creating the ‘them’. Creating the love ( of ‘me’ and thus ‘we’ ) creates the hate (‘them’).
Perhaps if we learn why we hate, then we can learn to un-hate and it is with this notion why I chose to elaborate on the possibilities of the love-hate dynamic. Can there be love without hate? This is an ongoing debate… and perhaps one dynamic cannot exist without the other.
