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My reading and reviewing of this book coincide with various tragedies in a post-COVID world, including the terror of an unjustifiable war in Ukraine and the similarly unconscionable, heartbreaking death of Mahsa Amini. Although it always is difficult to give meaning to such horrifying events, the global trauma of a pandemic, and its ensuing economic and social turmoil, further strain our efforts to comprehend. How can we understand the hatred and destruction that seem to surround us?
This timely book not only attempts to address this very question from a psychoanalytic perspective, but also claims to bring a modern perspective to psychoanalytic theorizing about the external world: in the editors’ words, “The external world matters – full stop” (7). In their introduction the editors strongly criticize the traditional psychoanalytic approach attempting to keep the “external/material reality” at bay while prioritizing the “internal/psychic reality”. They argue that conventional psychoanalysis located the source of drives and demands inside our bodies without recognizing that the external world brings its own demands and invades us like our internal world. Although the editors assert that understanding human experience as located both inside and outside informs all of the book's essays, some succeed more than others in having this dual emphasis.
In the first of three parts, entitled “Hating in the First Person Plural”, five chapters address “systematized hatreds” (15), such as racism, fascism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, with chapters overlapping in discussions of such issues. Moss argues that racial hate is inherently a group/system phenomenon; he says, we hate “in the first-person plural” (13), which
offers a sense of unity with others by inventing mutual objects of hate. He argues that this kind of hate is a defence against difference and separateness. Pellegrini similarly contends that right-wing nationalism's hate discourse about the enemy “them” contain