The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse

2. The Political Unconscious

Chapter two outlines the concept of the political unconscious. It is argued that national conflicts are a symptom of unrecognized and refused desire of the other. The perspective of desire suggests that we must ask questions about the forces that hatred hides. Desire becomes the "blind spot" of conflict around which injurious acts are constituted and carried out. Hence, a "community of unconsciousness" is built around shared denials and discursive projections of disavowal. From Foucault's criticism of the human sciences, through Zizek's concepts of ideology and "the symptom," to Butler's analysis of melancholia and forms of subjection we learn that violent effects within the discourse of nationalism often work in veiled ways as the political unconscious of hatred.