Hate Speech as the Action of Inequality: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Democracy and Social Power

This essay proposes that hate speech merits political consideration beyond society’s usual efforts to either banish or restrict, or alternatively, (as in the US context) to impose few restrictions on it. Leveraging psychoanalytic, and most especially, Winnicottian theory, it explores the paradoxical role of hate speech: how it can perpetuate oppression (and serve anti-democratic ends) but also act as a political force pressing for equality, democratic inclusivity, and social renewal. In Winnicott, we find that hate originates and thrives in the context of power relations but is also key to the dismantling and material redistribution of that power—in the clinic and in society. The semiotic conflations that structure hate speech enable its rapid reproduction and contagion in digital and public forums, which are exploited by a politics of grievance but countered by the psychoanalytic praxes of translation (of hate) and nonretaliatory survival, commitments generally absent in the democratic sphere. Contemplating the movement from hate speech to “free” speech” — or a “speech of desire,” — both as part of the work of analysis and a goal for the public sphere, the essay identifies hate’s contradictory motions, repudiating but also inconveniently requiring the (trinitarian) feminine as key to hate’s transformation. Finally, this essay considers Winnicott’s interrelated conceptions of hate, destruction, and breakdown, interpreting in contemporary political calls for drastic structural change, the unconscious social longing for a collective/ spiritual reawakening of the repudiated Maternal, along with an emergent readiness for the shared remembrance of, and embodied reckoning with, archaic repressed traumatic truths, ancestral legacies, and ecstatic possibilities.