Ania Szremski
In her manifesto-like text, Şeyda Kurt advocates for the use of “strategic hate” in the fight against oppression.
Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion, by Şeyda Kurt, translated by Jackie de Pont, Verso, 192 pages, $24.95
• • •
German writer Şeyda Kurt’s best-selling first book, Radical Tenderness: Why Love Is Political (2021), calls for a “radically tender society” in which all political conditions foster equitable relationships of mutual recognition and people thrive in their interdependence. The summer of its publication, Kurt presented a Zoom reading from that work to college students, one of whom asked, during the Q and A, “If we support a tender society, does that then mean that we also have to show tenderness towards Nazis?” Kurt, astonished and wounded that this could be the takeaway from her argument, replied “we have every reason to hate fascists. And we have to hate them.” She relates this anecdote in the prologue to the tract she began writing shortly thereafter, Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion, which appeared in German in 2023 and is now being released in English translation by Jackie de Pont.
The title is as provocative as its message: in this manifesto-like text, Kurt advocates for a “strategic hate” pointed at those malignant forces that thwart the possibility of a radically tender society, a strategic hate those of us in opposition to such forces can cling to in order to strengthen our resolve and orient our actions. Her thesis is a corrective to what scholars like Sherene Razack have described as “liberal” societies’ naturalization of hate as a human emotion that is individually produced and thus can be isolated, condemned, and swept away as aberrant—a hate crime, in this paradigm, is interpreted as a psychological problem, the action of one poisoned, contemptible individual. Razack et al. recognize instead that hate is politically produced, collective, and interrelational, engineered by colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the other nested systems of fascistic power. Kurt takes this line of thought a step further, claiming, justly, that the ability to hate is denied members of oppressed groups, who are only seen as “decent” when they are passive victims; to fight back against oppression, they must claim their right to hate—hate becomes a force that “can be both legitimately motivated and strategically targeted.”
Her brief study begins with the inevitable question of what hate actually is, a question that plagues all thinkers in the burgeoning field of hate studies. Is it an emotion, an affect, or is it a set of attitudes, an intellectual state, a social phenomenon, a neuropathology? Kurt, after offering an elliptical definition from the German dictionary, does not propose an answer to the question of what hate is, as she does not propose answers to many of the questions raised in her book (“Should we actually hate the people or the system?” “Where does conflict end and violence begin?” “Which conflicts should be tolerated?” “Tenderness, but to what point? Tenderness, but for who?”). Amid this vacillation, the definition of hate that she seems to land on is the will to destroy, and the desire for vengeance.
Kurt goes on to take us through a cursory history lesson, starting with Aristotle’s and Plato’s discourses on hate and ugliness (as she points out, the German word for “hate” is related to the latter), advancing through Christian moral attitudes (Kurt writes that prohibitions against hatred are steeped in Western Christian colonial thought, ignoring the fact that most of the world’s religions in fact have prohibitions against hatred and destructive anger), and ending up in modern case studies like the revolt of enslaved people in Haiti and often overlooked examples of Jewish and Roma armed resistance against the Nazis.
As one of the scaffolds for her argument, she invokes philosopher Elsa Dorlin’s notion of “dirty care,” laid out in her work Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence (2020). The term refers to positions of gentleness, docility, and tenderness as politically forced upon people of minoritarian identities, who inhabit them not out of love but out of fear, and as necessary for survival. For Kurt, in order to enact change, this falsely loving role must be vanquished in favor of strategic hate.
Perhaps inevitably, Kurt’s argument can grow confused. She defends vengeance, citing examples like the Jewish Old Testament as sources legitimizing retribution. But she seems to backtrack when discussing the conflicts that arise within activist groups, which raises another set of pressing questions: If you intentionally grow a hateful heart, how well can you control how that hatred overspills, and in what direction? Is a hate swelling from the ground up really qualitatively different from a hate engineered by top-down systems? If the enemy you hate vanishes, where does the hatred go? Couldn’t it be that hate will just engender more hate? Are there not countless examples of how this has unfolded in history?
Kurt seems satisfied that the answer to the penultimate question is “no,” which she tries to illustrate at the end of her book by holding up the example of Rojava, “the autonomous administration in . . . North and East Syria,” which she argues is “a positive alternative to those revenge politics that later evolved into violent nationalistic movements. . . . Rojava shows us that . . . cycles of hate and revenge can be broken, and transformed.” She had planned, when she was writing Hate in 2022, to visit Rojava herself to do fieldwork, but it was quickly too late: foreign powers, led by Turkey, using German weapons, had laid brutal siege to the area under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State. Instead, she sends her questions via email to the press department of the Rojava Information Centre. The emails she gets back do not belie any particular interest in hate as a paradoxically positive force, but rather focus on how feelings of hate and revenge can be overcome through restorative justice. But Kurt, to her credit, admits there might be some fantastical thinking here—around the same time, a resident of Rojava DMs her on Instagram, writing, “The peaceful coexistence of different peoples doesn’t work . . . some groups are prioritised over others. Those who criticise the system are silenced or imprisoned.”
Hate is a passionate and, in ways, brave reckoning with the question of what is to be done?—particularly in terms of Kurt’s unflinching support of the Palestinian people, which can bring up criminal charges in today’s Germany, and which she notes, in the introduction to the English translation, has harmed her career. But Hate is also as misdirected as it is confused. I am interested in hate because I am interested in love, and because I am convinced that hate is one of the most dangerous threats faced by humanity—and Kurt’s polemic did not convince me otherwise. The book was to a degree effective in that it prompted me to interrogate my resistance to her promulgation of strategic hate—as a white person raised Catholic (if nonbelieving) in the Christian-majority nation of the US, are my judgments clouded by deeply ingrained cultural messaging around hate? As a woman, am I also culturally conditioned by patriarchy into performing dirty care, into a liberal service of gentleness? Probably yes, to both queries—but my thought, and my care, are not only subservient to prevailing systems of power, are not only dominated by them. And it’s not only hate, and vengeance, that can orient us in the fight against those systems. I, too, cringe, as Kurt does, at hackneyed phrases like “love is stronger than hate”—but it is still the case that love, also, is a propulsive and active force, and our love for each other can fuel our resistance just as well as its opposite.
Ania Szremski is the senior editor of 4Columns.