Hatred and Forgiveness

In distinguishing hatred from aggressiveness, keeping in mind that hatred is older than the love erected on top of it and that the object of hatred (unlike the object of love) never disappoints, Freudian psychoanalysis introduces two fundamental mutations in the exploration of the speaking being, the measure of which we have perhaps not yet taken. On the one hand, in contrast to religious or humanist moralism, the psychoanalytical experience reveals that hatred—in its multiple variants—is coextensive to human destiny. On the other hand, simultaneously, psychoanalysis assigns itself the redoubtable privilege of accompanying and untangling this destiny.

These two mutations continue to provoke misunderstanding and resistance.

By saying the exciting word, hatred, we are still confining the incontrovertible psychical event to symptom or pathology. I will take a different path, which, however provocative it may appear, is no less intrinsically faithful to the negativity Freud considers the motor of psychical life; its complex genealogy remains our only recourse in the face of the many (destructive and constructive) destinies of hatred. I would submit that multifaceted hatred is inseparable from human destiny, and from the speaking being, in other words, the human drive as energy and sense. To support this, I will take you from the original repression, where the first indications of neotenous demarcation are manifested with desire for the other and desire of the other (through the other and the other’s meaning), which I call abjection, to the most intolerable symptoms of psychical negativity that explode in paranoid hatred. What I would like to suggest is that there is no other way to approach an outburst of hate except to conduct an anamnesis of it, to the point of the abjection it is repressing. But, if this is the analytical attitude in the face of hatred, what about the fate of hatred in interpretation? Does hatred disappear in interpretation or does it operate there as well?

In my earlier clinical work, attributing to neoteny the co-presence of hatred and desire indissociable from speaking humanity, I called abjection the initial and foundational experience of the newborn confronted with separation from the uterine container, and then from the maternal body, making every object of speech and thought a prototypical object.¹ As an intertwining of affect and meaning, abjection has no definable object, strictly speaking. Between an object not yet separated as such and the subject I have yet to become, abjection is one of those violent and obscure revolts of the being against what is menacing it and what appears to come from an outside as well as an exorbitant inside, an “abject” cast beside the tolerable and the thinkable: close, but inassimilable. The abject that I experience in abjection is not an ob-ject in front of me, which I might name or imagine much later. Nor is the abject an ob-jeu (the term is Francis Ponge’s) or a transitional object (could Winnicott’s term be a synonym for the poet’s playful objeu?). The abject is not a correlate of the ego (as the ob-jeu or transitional object is), which, by offering me support concerning someone or something, would allow me to be fairly detached and autonomous in the long run. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of opposing the I. But while the ob-jeu or the transitional object, by opposing me, gives me equilibrium in the fragile web of desire for meaning, the abject excludes me and pulls me to where meaning collapses. “Something” I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of nonsense that has nothing significant about it and yet crushes me.

Fascinating and unsettling, it solicits desire, but desire is not seduced: frightened, it turns away; disgusted, it rejects. Not that!

Aversion to food is the most basic, most archaic form of abjection: it sends us back to the expelling body of the expelled baby. Spasms and vomiting protect me. I use them throughout my life, in my repugnance—the intermittent retching that will distance me from, and allow me to avoid, objects and extreme situations that I experience as menacing and dangerous: defilement, sewage, sordidness, the ignominy of compromise, in-between states, betrayal. Fascination and rejection at the same time, abjection is the jolt that leads me into the abject but also separates me from it.

When the skin on the surface of milk—inoffensive, as thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, as inconsequential as a nail trimming—is presented to my sight or touches my lips, a gagging and a spasm lower still, in the stomach, in the belly, in all my viscera, makes my body tense up, bringing tears and bile, making my heart beat and causing beads of sweat to form on my forehead and palms. Vertigo blurs my vision, and nausea rises up against this creamy film, separating me from the mother and/or father who present it to me. This perhaps insignificant detail, which they appreciate and impose on me, this trifle turns me inside out, eviscerates me: they see I am in the midst of becoming another at the price of my own death. In the path of abjection I give birth to myself through the violence of sobbing and vomiting. The silent protest of the symptom, the noisy violence of a convulsion, immediately inscribed in the symbolic system of the family triangle, but in which, not wanting or being able to be integrated and respond, it reacts, abreacts: it abjects.

If I am offering this very unliterary phenomenology of abjection, it is to persuade you that abjection is the “degree zero” of hatred, present well before the so-called paranoid-schizoid position described by Melanie Klein. By soliciting both the subject and object, not yet separated from each other, and revealing that external objects disgust the subject on the path toward constitution to the point of a loss of self, abjection is a recognition of loss, the basic lack of all being, sense, language, and desire. Therefore I prefer not to use the term paranoid-schizophrenia to refer to these outposts of the infantile psyche, but to describe the psychical dynamic that may subsequently end in a “paranoid-schizoid” structure by the more connotative term of abjection. It has the advantage of linking the intertwining of love and hate to the trauma of separation as well as to original repression and of suggesting its structuring role in the course of psychic autonomy, before the subject has the means to deal with the subsequent pathological realizations of love/hate fusion/defusion.

We have gotten used to slipping too quickly over a concept in psychoanalysis that is now a fetish: the object is an “object of lack.” Yet if we imagine (and I’m using the word imagine on purpose, because it is the work of the imagination that establishes the interpretation of transference and countertransference), if we imagine, then, that the experience of lack, which follows separation, is logically and chronologically prior to the being of the object and correlatively to the being of the subject, then we understand that the only psychosexual significance of lack (a noble, ascetic term) is abjection. That is, abjection is the only possible narrative of the experience of lack. Isn’t this precisely what literature, religion, and mysticism tell us?

By situating abjection this way, as logically and chronologically anterior to the paranoid-schizoid position, I am not forgetting the mother or the father. On the contrary, I imagine the infans of human beings as having swallowed its parents too early, before being crystallized into a subject in the face of objects: it scares itself “all by itself” in this ultraprecocious oedipal stage and, in order to find a way out, it rejects and vomits all gifts, all objects. Essentially different from “unsettling strangeness,” and also more violent, abjection is constructed on the impulse of revolting against one’s family in order to posit them as such: it is the psychosomatic avant-garde of the future oedipal revolt. I am driven to expel my progenitors and in this way I begin to create my own territory, bordered by the abject.

It could be that, in place of maternal love, I swallow a void or rather a wordless maternal hatred for the words of the father: then I will try endlessly to purge myself of both of them in anorexia—an extreme figure of abjection that will be fatal to me. Or it could be that the inaugural abjection of the neotenous is fixed in phobia. Fear then cements its enclosure around the phobic ego; a prison is built, dividing the world of others, which in reality will never come about except as a fleeting, hallucinatory, ghostly world in my foggy, fugitive, shadowed speech. Or, finally, it could be that the inaugural abjection of the subject ends in paranoid hatred: the most redoubtable, most deadly of all.

For now let’s turn our attention to these borders of one’s own that are the abject and abjection. If we agree that the abject and abjection manifest the “degree zero” of what will be perceived later as variants of hatred, and that they continue to underlie these variants, we may be better able to understand why it is difficult to find an antidote to the symptoms of hatred themselves.

The logic of abjection places us at the border of the nonexistence of the subject and the hallucination of an inassimilable object: apprehension of a reality that would annihilate me if I recognized it, the abject can appear as the most fragile sublimation (from a synchronic point of view) or the most archaic sublimation (from a diachronic point of view) of an object still inseparable from drives. A pseudo-object, the abject would be the object of original repression. What is original repression? I will simplify: it is the capacity of the speaking being to divide, reject, repeat, without a division, separation, the constitution of subject/object (this will occur with secondary repression). In other words, starting with neoteny, a psychosomatic negativity fashions the human being, where mimesis (which makes me homologous to another so that I can become myself) occurs secondarily. Before being like, I am not, but I am content to separate, reject, abject. A precondition of narcissism, abjection nevertheless accompanies psychic diachrony and its evolutions throughout psychic life, to which it is coextensive and that it constantly renders fragile. The rather beautiful image in which I am mired or recognize myself, for example, is based on an abjection that cracks when the permanent watchman repression eases up.

To go a step further: the abject, in which subsequent manifestations of hatred lie dormant, and which constitutes original repression, confronts me with my earliest attempts to demarcate myself from the maternal entity, even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. Why this hiatus between primary and secondary repressions, why this time, this slowness that fixes the drive in abjection, latching it to the body, to the unnameable, making it resistant to analysis? Neuronal maturation requires it, biology has often said. Let’s add maternal anxiety (“maternal madness”), which cannot be appeased in the triangle of the oedipal symbolic and overexcites and maintains my abjection. I come about as a subject through a violent and awkward demarcation, always threatened by a relapse into dependency on a mother struggling to recognize the paternal symbolic agency and to be recognized by it. In this hand-to-hand combat the symbolic light of a third party helps the future subject continue the war, reluctantly, with what, from the mother, will become an abject. I become this subject by pushing away, by rejecting: by pushing myself away, by rejecting myself, by ab-jecting. The abject and abjection are my guardrails, the beginnings of my culture, my beginning of culture.

Here we are at the borders of the human universe in formation. At this threshold there is no unconscious; it will be constructed when representations and the affects linked to them (or not) form a logic. Consciousness has not yet transformed the fluid demarcations of still unstable territories into signifiers, where an I in formation is constantly losing its way. If the abject is already the beginning of a sign for a nonobject at the borders of original repression, we understand that it exists alongside the somatic symptom, on the one hand, and sublimation, on the other. The symptom: language that forfeits, structures an inassimilable foreigner in the body—a monster, a tumor, a cancer. Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing other than the ability to name the prenominal, the preobjectal, which, in fact, are only the transnominal and the transobjectal. In the symptom the abject invades me; I become it. In sublimation I hold it: the abject is bordered by the sublime.

Pierre was a difficult patient I hesitated taking on. His raging hatred, which would one day necessarily be turned against me, scared me less than his narcissistic closed-mindedness: it made his “insights” (which at first seemed quite intelligent) superficial, bookish, and insignificant in fact—clever defenses that prevented any questioning of the self. At times he hated himself as much as he hated others, but he never questioned himself. He had been “at war,” “since birth,” with “people,” he said—a category he grimly detested because he found it stifling. Besides, “people” were constantly plotting—against him, no doubt—at the office but also in newspaper articles and on television shows, where he recognized himself without being named, and, needless to say, at home with the “manipulative complicity” of his wife, he was sure. The passionate description of various strategies constructed by “people” against him occupied every session, and Pierre took lively pleasure in denouncing the hatred of which he was the object, by pouring out torrents of pure hatred—by which I mean hatred without a trace of ambivalence—against these haters. His wife could no longer stand this “permanent state of war”—she, too, quite naturally, was assimilated to these hateful, hate-filled “people”—and, tired of being accused of conspiring against him, started analysis and ultimately divorced him. She told him that he “needed his enemies,” that his “hatred of others allowed him to live,” and that he “sought out this hatred and would invent it if it didn’t exist.”

The systematic determination of Pierre’s stories, which detailed the real or imaginary “people” fueling his hatred, may have confirmed Freud’s diagnosis on the subject of President Schreber (“what lies at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of loving a man.”² Pierre’s history and discourse led me to think that this obvious “center” concealed a genealogy and destiny of the “love-hatred” that transference with a female analyst would uncover. More than an erotic appeal to a dangerous man thought to be compensating for the weakness of his own father, this passionate hatred, to which my patient seemed to be attached like a drug, revealed a much more inaccessible dependence.

I felt persecuted in turn: not only did Pierre end up convincing me of the ugliness of “people” and of the world in which we lived, but his wife had already made the interpretations that were on the tip of my tongue! Did he come to consult me in order to prevent me from speaking, out of hatred of analysis? Or else was he revealing the unbearable truth of the speaking being whose hatred uncovers what was concealed? Having made a few fruitless attempts to publish his work, “Reflections on World Politics,” Pierre nevertheless began to shield his transference with me in a temporary idealization of my status as an “envied intellectual,” which allowed us a certain degree of working through.

The persecuting hatred that inhabited him then revealed its alchemy: faced with a father who “went from failure to failure,” Pierre had never had the chance to confront an identifiable adversary. He was convinced that his father was part of the mass of ugly and uninteresting “people” and that his mother, who was entirely focused on her only son, reserved her concern and anger only to castrate him. The affect was then displaced, for many years, from men (“people”) to the mother, an “abject character,” Pierre asserted; Pierre’s assertions, however, did not convince me; the more he condemned his mother, the more his erotic desires became focused on a cousin his mother’s age who became his mistress. This incestuous relationship was revealed to be a partial narcissistic reparation that allowed him to express his hatred toward the analytic cadre, against my colleagues and against me, though he did not appear to be conscious of it. After particularly violent sessions, Pierre would calm down, become quiet, and, before leaving, confide: “Analysis is one of the rare places I feel I become peaceful, like a newborn.” Was analysis becoming less stifling to him?

Eventually, the failed political scientist took up painting. Pierre expressed himself outside the sessions, then, by means of a different language, with “unclean” (improper), “dirty” materials that finally allowed him to appropriate what was “proper” to him: his “dirty nature,” he said. He spoke to me of his paintings, describing them as “sort of portraits” of “people” whose hatred he hated, “horrible characters,” who would finally lead him to paint himself, he said, laughing, “as a horror,” “a tender horror, after Francis Bacon.” Aspiration to greatness had taken another form, apparently less hateful but no less megalomaniacal. Pierre could now begin another phase of his analysis; he could begin to speak of his disgust for women, his homosexual fantasies, his rivalry with me, his digestive and intestinal symptoms, and even his memories as a vomiting baby and as a little boy who was made fun of because he was still not potty trained, which made his mother laugh, while his father called him “disgusting.” He could begin to speak of the shame he felt about his body and the shame he felt due to his liaison, though restorative, with his older cousin. His paranoia was infiltrated by a perverse pleasure, showing itself in the way he actively experienced his abjection and that of others: naming it, sharing it with me, attacking me with it, and perhaps contaminating me.

In transference I was alternately solicited, in place of the abject mother, to become an object from which Pierre would finally be able to separate, and in the role of the oedipal father, from whom he sought the symbolic support his own father had not given him. When we terminated analysis, the “hatred of people” had not ceased to persecute him; he did not deprive himself of “waging war on the human race,” as was now said complacently by his … mistress! The state of hatred nevertheless seemed less invasive, an epiphenomenon among others on the waves of a psychic life that was now vaster and therefore more painful, closer to personal secrets, old wars, rejections, jouissance, and archaic defenses. Thinking of him, I was able to write Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. A few years later, having come across and read this book, which made no explicit reference to him, Pierre sent it to me for a dedication.

The paranoid hatred seemed to be a defense against maternal control, making the subject regress to the point of abjection, where the borders between the ego and the other are erased. Against this abjection in which the “I” tries desperately to merge with the maternal feminine, hatred—in the guise of defense—crystallizes two objects (not two subjects) that are dangerous for each other. “‘I’ am, only if I am dangerous for a dangerous other—a fellow creature,” says the paranoiac. “I am dangerous,” the apotheosis of negative narcissism, makes narcissism safe. But it does not guarantee “my” autonomy (the other before me is just as dangerous as I am; attacking and attackable, we are inconsistent, men reduced to “people,” like Pierre’s devalued father). Paranoid hatred has transformed the uncertainty of abjection into a reversible dyad, sadomasochistic communicating vessels, but it does not assure any lasting independence in terms of identity. The armor of the hateful warrior is the temporary hiding place for a nonsubject who—if he finds the path of analysis—asks only to be born.

This patient awoke many negative affects in me, even the “theme” of abjection itself; I borrowed the term from his vocabulary. And yet, beyond the trap of the “crazy truth” into which he led me, I had the feeling I had given him something, too, through interpretation and the transferential link. And this gift, which was neither love nor hate but simply a patient interpretation of the psychical movements subjacent to his “state of war,” broke the chain of persecutions in which his psychical negativity had been stuck and inserted it into the openness of psychical time—the gift of a new way of being.

That is what led to my conception of psychoanalytical interpretation as a postmodern version of forgiveness.

When Freud claims that he “succeeds where the paranoiac fails,”³ he surely means that psychoanalysis dismantles the persecuting hatred the paranoiac devotes to the other and that comes back to him like a boomerang. But the founder of psychoanalysis does not ignore the privileged link a psychoanalyst has to the other, in transference and countertransference. I succeed there: I’m there, too, but I succeed. In addition to this triumphant claim, the entire Freudian oeuvre allows us to understand that, if there is success, it is rooted not in the evacuation of the hatred inherent in the link to the object, but in the patient dismantling of various cogs of drive-related, imaginary, and symbolic negativity that sweep away the subject’s links to the other: from sadomasochism built on repressed homosexuality, by way of the horror of the maternal feminine, to the borders of the “proper” and the “improper” where the self, fascinated and repellent, is confused with the parental container.

Religions were constituted precisely as “catharses” or “purifications” of variants of “evil,” which were nothing other than various destinies of hatred. In fact, if we consider the religious experience over the course of history, we see that, when religious man is not strangled by fundamentalism (and even when he is), he is invited to purify himself of his defilements. These involve various “substances” at the limits of the “proper” (clean) and the “foreign” (strange)—ultimately referring to the maternal body and blood of primitive religions; purification may be sought through food taboos (in Buddhism as well as Judaism and Islam); one may be purified of murderous hatreds, whether sacrificial or fratricidal (“Thou shalt not kill”). A veritable archaeology of the negativity that constitutes psychical life comes into view through religious history, which can offer the gift of pacifying meaning, but, under an ideological superego, generate hateful conflicts.

If we think of the destiny of hatred this way, from the emergence of the human to the original repression complicit with abjection and the various symptoms that constitute hatred of the self and our ties to others, we see that it cannot be altered by love, for hate and love are bundled in coexistence. Love cannot be the antidote to this fascicle where love and hate coexist. Once again, old religions already found another solution: forgiveness. Not “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” or judgment, or even love, but forgiveness. Through forgiveness, time for vengeance is suspended, allowing a rebirth for men, always already petrified by hate, before the metamorphoses of abjection begin again.

Contrary to what the uninitiated might imagine, the forgiveness of theologians does not erase the horror of hatred, much less the horror of the ultimate variant of hatred, which is murder, anymore than it judges them. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, forgiveness is neither sorrow (meaning: it does not imply a complacency with abjection and horror) nor loving tribunal, but the act of “bestowing a gift” that “prevails over judgment.”⁴ It is about temporarily suspending the time of the ego, which is the time of hatred, by applying a sinful meaning to hateful acts, referring to the mercy of the Absolute Being: God. Pascal says the same thing in his own way: “The self is hateful… . Only God should be loved.”⁵ To pardon the self that remains in destructive negativity consists not of allowing it to “work through” this negativity indefinitely but giving it sense and nonsense, provided it is in the Name of God Almighty.

If psychoanalysis succeeds where the paranoiac fails, it is not because it teaches us to “love the Self,” or even to “love others” (as we say so lightly) under a godless sky—which is already not that easy. The Freudian revolution consists of replacing this forgiveness, through the interpretation of variants of hatred that feed a symptom, invented to stop the time of judging in the name of the dogma of love (of God or our fellow man). Indeed, Freudian vigilance in the face of the multiple destinies of hatred has revealed that the imperative of the Supreme Being, like the moral imperative, is maintained by the dogma of absolute Love as a defense against its double, Hate. It also discovered, as a result, that forgiveness—which forgives in the name of a Supreme Being free of hate—inevitably and inexorably catches the forgiven subject in the nets of the defusion of drives, sadomasochism and abjection, by which fundamentalisms and their inevitable clashes are sustained. It is only through the endless analysis of the lack of being, of the asymptote between sexuality and language, and the defenses mobilized against them, that analytical interpretation, including transference and countertransference, can give sense to the successive and stratified stages of negativity, from abjection to hysterical “love-hatred,” or paranoid “pure hatred,” and vice versa, endlessly: that is the message of “analysis terminable and interminable.”

If we try to situate this Freudian legacy in a broader cultural context, we see that the analytical ambition of succeeding where the paranoiac fails (untangling the “crazy truth” of hatred) is inseparable from another ambition: succeeding where theological forgiveness promises the rebirth of the subject in a new temporality. Religion “fulfills” this promise only by subordinating the faithful to its dogmas and/or referring them to the beyond. Yet this promise of forgiveness gives faith that forgives its greatest appeal.

I do not think religion fascinates only because it maintains illusions. More than that, religion that forgives, that claims to guarantee the psychical rebirth of forgiven believers, corresponds to a vital need in the speaking being: that of opening up psychical time. Religion that forgives is greeted as a promise that assures psychical life. In the modern age, this is what afflicts individuals whose psychical space is threatened with destruction by the rise of technology and sexual liberation (to which the “new maladies of the soul” attest).⁶

And so I say that Freud succeeded where the paranoiac fails, because he set in motion the modern, endless, postmoral variant of forgiveness, which is nothing other than interpretation. Let’s call it pardon to (par, through, don, a gift) highlight the giving of sense to the senselessness of unconscious hate. Interpretation is a pardon: a rebirth of the psychical apparatus, with and beyond the hatred that bears desire, which religion is and is not aware of and from which it defends itself. Interpretation is a pardon whose ambition, through the refinement of its models and formulations, is to make psychical rebirth possible. The gravity of this pardon is perceptible in analytical listening that neither judges nor calculates, but is content to untangle and reconstruct. Its spiraled temporality is realized in the intersecting times of transference and countertransference. This pardon renews the unconscious, because its temporality inscribes the right to narcissistic regression in History and in the Word; thus, only this pardon confronts the other side of desire—hate. It does so without fighting it or submitting to it but also without ceasing the deconstructive elucidation of “love-hatred.” There is no transcendental authority, just the interminable variants of transference-countertransference and, ultimately, the immanence of transcendence here on earth.

In these postmodern times of religious clashes, which are times of endless war, it might be useful to remember that psychoanalytical interpretation, by revealing multifaceted hatreds, offers itself as the ultimate lucidity of pardon, which psychical life needs in order to continue living, quite simply, without necessarily absolutely ceasing to hate.