Here we are,
back in the Humanities Forum
to continue with our theme
dedicated to violence.
This time we're going to
devote ourselves to a book,
Carolin Emcke's work
called Contre la Haine (Against Hate):
Plaidoyer pour l'impur. 
(Making a plea for the impure)
It is a book that was published
recently, in Germany,
and has been translated into French.
The book has been a great success
in Germany, where it has
won a prestigious award,
the booksellers' peace prize.
It is really a book about militant action
since we are dealing with a plea
that is neither quite an essay
nor yet a work of philosophy
and not a work of
journalism either.
This is genuinely
a plea,
that is to say, a defence
or an accusation against
it is a book advocating action
a militant book taken on by
Carolin Emcke, a
trained journalist,
and war reporter, which also
says something about her background.
She has studied
and trained in philosophy
and so she has devoted this book
to the question of hatred.
And who better than she to do this
since she’s a woman,
educated in the West,
to speak about an issue
that dumbfounds and stuns,
that outlaws those who are stricken
by the phenomenon of hate.
So providing a counter-discussion
against hate speech
through a rational discourse,
measured, to try
to deconstruct its logic.
Yes, in fact Carolin Emcke says that
that of course there has always been hatred,
but this is something particular,
in Germany and Europe,
on the one hand because it is a
completely uncomplicated hatred,
which is expressed shamelessly
and without embarrassment,
that is the first thing.
That it is collective, that it
is not sporadic episodes
of hatred like that, but that
it is
an ideologically fabricated hatred
and a violence that is planned.
So in fact,
to counter this hatred,
we must first
grasp the mechanisms
that build it,
that make up this hatred,
we must understand them
to know how to do things differently.
That is to say,
where there is hatred,
there may also be something else.
We can always do something else,
something different, and that's what
she's trying to open up.
Indeed, on the
question of silence,
because it is central and
it runs through her entire text,
hatred actually stuns
those who are the object of it,
those who are the object of hatred
because it robs them
completely of confidence.
It prevents them from speaking,
that’s the first thing,
but there are also all those who
remain silent in the face of hatred.
Those who are, in a way,
complicit in the hatred
and therefore we must break this silence
and that, I think, is what she
wanted to do with this text.
That’s a very important
point that you just made,
above all, is that
hatred is not natural.
Some people tend to normalise hatred,
and that is a mistake, she says.
It is socially manufactured
and there is ideological and social
ground that will be ready
for violence or hatred.
Moreover, there is a real
affinity, unfortunately,
between the two phenomena;
hatred is a violence
that strikes with social invisibility
those who are affected by it,
who are its object
as you have said.
There is a chapter,
one part of the work
on the issue of invisibility
and visibility.
Obviously, as an erudite
Western woman
playing a role in the public arena,
she is visible.
Those who are affected,
struck by hatred
are rendered invisible,
it is an issue that is
part of social theory,
and I think of Axel Honneth
of the School of Frankfurt
who dealt with this issue.
So, the issue of invisibility
has to do with social recognition.
It is socially organised
- this invisibility.
- Yes.
So, she takes an example:
there is a little black boy
who is jostled around on the Metro,
and who falls and in fact
no one helps him get up
because no one sees him.
There we have extreme violence
because it denies the
existence of the ‘other’.
So, how can we arrive at a point 
where some individuals
are invisible?
Well, because hatred
fashions its object
but also conceals reality.
In other words, it will,
in fact transform
reality through another narrative.
There are several emotions which
lead to this, including love.
She takes as an example Shakespeare’s
a Midsummer Night’s Dream
and the love between Titania and Bottom.
Titania doesn’t love
Bottom for what he is
but she will project upon him
certain qualities,
certain characteristics
so she can love him.
That is to say,
there is no longer any coincidence
between the cause and the object
of the emotion that is love.
So love will shape the object
to make it lovable.
that is exactly the same
things that hate does.
The other emotion that makes
the object like that, that shapes it
into something other than it really is,
it is hope
and another emotion that is even
more pernicious than the other two,
his anxiety.
Anxiety because its object
it is not necessarily real
and Carolin Emcke takes an example,
the example of the flat earth.
Let’s imagine a citizen
who thinks the earth is flat.
Of course he will be afraid of falling off.
And that is an anxiety
that is rational
and he will not understand at all
why the other citizens
are not worried about falling off.
He will wonder why
the politicians
not doing anything about the issue
of the flat earth
to protect the citizens.
So, all that is perfectly rational,
except that the earth is not flat.
There, that’s an example that
Carolin Emcke uses to show
that there is a category of citizens
whom she calls worried citizens
who mask their hatred
with anxiety,
that is to say, in fact, they
take the object of that anxiety
and end up hating it,
but they don’t really hate it
because anxiety acts like
a screen for sentiment,
that is, no one will
claim to be racist,
Will say they are racist.
No, they say they are rationally worried
and in fact this anxiety
often masks xenophobia,
but works is the fact that
this anxiety is unassailable.
And here again we are
faced with the silence
that hatred can engender
in the end.
We are...
And she underlines it very clearly,
people are experiencing something
that is of the order of
the democracy of emotion,
especially with anxiety.
She establishes a correlation
between the rise
of anxiety and
the rise of extreme
right-wing parties.
As you said,
in a democracy
that would be rational
with a space for public debate,
anxiety should not
have a place
because it is not the subject
of discussion where after deliberation,
I can agree with another’s opinion.
Once I have expressed my anxiety,
the conversation is at an end.
I am afraid of falling
if the Earth is flat,
you will not be able to reassure me
by imposing rational arguments on me,
I will still have that fear.
And that no one can discuss.
Yes, because it is
rational in form,
but in reality it is a fiction.
Except that it is a fiction
hidden in a certain way...
Which brings us even closer
to the feelings of love and hate
so we see these feelings,
which may seem antagonistic
have in common that they manufacture
the object on which they will crystallise,
whether that is love, anxiety,
hatred or hope.
So perhaps we are
coming to a manifestation
of this anxiety
which becomes violent.
This is also one of the features
of Carolin Emcke’s book,
it is that she also looks at
today’s news stories.
I would almost say miscellaneous
news, but they are much more,
they are news items in that
they have resonance in the media
to try to analyse
them with the tools
used in the social sciences
and philosophy,
particularly through this perspective
of interpreting anxiety.
In Germany, as we know,
Angela Merkel had a very
favourable migration policy
initially with Syrian
migrants who were
welcomed with a
real sense of hospitality,
who were welcomed with kindness
and how quickly that changes
that is to say, we have one
section of the German population
which is anxious about this
flow of immigration
which seemed, from their perspective
of anxiety, to be uncontrolled
and we have seen manifestations
of hatred reflecting this anxiety
such as in Clausnitz, which is
a village with 850 inhabitants
in the south of Germany, not
very far from the Czech republic
where migrants from war zones
had been transferred, transferred
from another part of the country 
to find accommodation
and at the moment they got off the bus,
there were people to welcome them,
but in a very unpleasant way
because they were chanting:
“Out, out,
we are the people! ”
And somehow seeking to
send them back to who knows where,
but making it clear
they were not welcome.
What is terrible about these images
which you can find on social networks,
they went viral,
is seeing the expression of brutality
with an absence of bad conscience.
Basically they were
within their rights.
While people who were suffering
were crying, afraid,
and not daring to get off the bus
and it is very embarrassing for the
spectator and external observer.
Yes, so effectively,Carolin
Emcke took this video
and analysed it in depth.
So, what happens is, we have
refugees, who are in a bus.
They are confined to the bus because
they are prevented from getting off the bus.
In fact it is not that they are not
seen or that they are invisible,
but they become
object of hatred.
And monsters.
- That’s it.
- What she says,
people can be socially invisible
and have some peculiarity
that will be magnified in a way
that makes them monstrous,
another form of crystallisation.
Actually, it is a double movement.
that is, they are invisible
in the sense that they are denied
the right to be an individual
with a story,
- emotions, etc.
- A way of life.
That’s it exactly.
They are denied the right
to be individuals,
but at the same time they are taken
and turned into
monstrosities.
And so they are different: ‘other’,
disturbingly ‘other’, monstrous.
These are in fact the two modalities
of the perception of ‘otherness’:
where that which is real is rendered invisible,
that is, the individual,
or renders monstrous that which is false.
That’s it, so it is a double movement.
The other thing
that Carolin Emcke points out,
is that, obviously, they have done nothing
to provoke such an
outpouring of hatred.
But it is precisely because
hatred doesn’t correlate with reality
it feeds only on itself
and from its own energy
which leads to violence
at some point because
it must either spill out or implode.
And Carolin Emcke thinks to herself:
“but how is this possible…
How does it come to this? ”
Always the same question.
So she’s starting from…
Because there is a whole context
around Clausnitz,
especially the social networks,
discussion forums
on the Internet and so on,
that transform the individuals
that the refugees represent.
That is to say people go to these forums,
take a monstrous exception,
and make it the norm.
What happens at that moment?
Well, they can only
envisage refugees
in this modality.
And so, finally, there is
a narrowing of the vision
that prevents any imagination,
but also prevents us from imagining
what life might be like for them
and thus prevents empathy.
Then of course we can say to ourselves:
“Anyway, these forums are just
marginal and so on”
Yes, but those who gravitate
around these forums,
that is to say, ideologues,
men and women in politics,
will provide ideological material
to these forums by constructing a story
that will feed on
the forum is in its turn.
So those who gravitate
around these forums
obviously dissociate themselves
publicly from hatred
or violence but
they draft the rhetoric
in these discussion forums.
There is another category
of person which is very worrying
and Carolin Emcke raises this,
these are all the people
who assist there on the scene
and they do nothing.
And they don’t hate themselves
but there some kind of secret
tolerance, as Carolin Emcke says
because in a way
they also despise the refugees,
they also despise the object of the hatred.
That’s terrible, because they don’t hate
but they let hatred happen.
That’s how Carolin Emcke puts it
even though one objection,
one gesture could make
a common basis possible again
and could counter hatred,
and that is what is terrible.
And such protestation is absolutely
fundamental and essential and for that,
Carolin Emcke makes reference
to another video, which is the one
about the death of Eric Garner
in 2014 in New York.
So here is a black man who
sells untaxed cigarettes.
He is stopped by the police.
He says he has done nothing wrong.
Then, the police officers
placed him in a choke hold.
He has asthma and warns the police
that he cannot breathe:
“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. ”
And he’s going to die, but before he dies,
even before this whole scenario,
what strikes Carolin Emcke most
is that he said:
“it stops today. ”
It stops today,
it ends today.
This kind of harassment,
the inevitability of being treated as the
eternal object of hatred,
unable to do anything about it
unless one does something
as Eric Garner did,
that is to say
to protest,
or speak out against a fact
that seems to be inevitable.
It is exactly that
says Carolyn Emcke,
everyone should be able to do that,
should do that,
for themselves or for another.
The description of the arrest
of Garner, who is going to die
is absolutely mind-boggling,
the video exists too,
there were testimonies
that were given,
she said something that
is completely in line with what
you are saying about reality
the representation is the representative.
One cannot have
empathy for the representative.
These policeman are killing a man
who is black.
She says they have essentialised
black and the violence of black.
We come back to what we said
in another video about Frantz Fanton
and the violence of the colonised man.
what is incredible,
is that the body
of the black man is perceived
as a violent body.
And a white man would
react by withdrawing,
retreating, and that would not
be seen as an aggression.
So these men,
these policemen 
are no longer seeing the man
who is in front of them
but are seeing the Black man
with all the imagery carried in that
and therefore, in this case,
a terribly racist imagery.
We see in the movement
that you have described,
we are almost returning
to the first question
it is hatred that takes hold,
it has an external cause,
and hatred, when it feeds on itself,
we see it clearly in
that moment in Clausnitz that...
The phenomenon of the pack
that she, herself, describes,
that is to say, at some point,
the objective is just to get bigger.
Hatred grows,
it feeds on itself.
It needs nourishment,
fuel to feed itself.
It is almost too late so
we have to deconstruct it beforehand,
we have to stop
the movement beforehand.
And in exactly this movement
which seeks to grow hatred,
to create favourable conditions,
we find all the xenophobic,
racist movements.
And perhaps also part of
the populist discourse.
By that I mean the expression
she uses in the text:
“We are the people. ”
She underlines something,
she’s not the only one,
she invokes other authors.
She says this is expression ”we are
the people” is disturbing
because it means there are no
other people outside of these people.
This expression is often used
to denounce oligarchs,
the people who grant
the power they have in their hands:
people faced with power for example.
But...
That leaves no room for anyone.
She says that perhaps
a more appropriate expression would be:
“We are also the people. ”
When we say that,
the approach is inclusive,
we add, we build,
we allow communities,
we allow others to become
a part of who we are.
If I say we are the people,
I am a people, just one,
and the others are excluded.
We can see how this
is the very basis of
a discourse that will be racist,
where we will add to this element 
xenophobic, racist justification,
they are not like us
they are the others.
And we are going to have a dialectic,
finally, not even a dialectic,
for the moment, just a dualism
indigenous/foreigners,
Christians/Muslims etc.
So opposing pairs.
Yes, in fact what
Carolin Emcke is demonstrating,
is that for extreme
right-wing propagandists,
it is a necessity to…
- To oppose
- To oppose ourselves to the others
that is, one homogenous people
against the others because behind
the idea of a homogenous people
there is also the idea
of an authentic people.
This is because it is very much linked
to the notion of authenticity,
of something that would be original
and that would be distorted today.
But it goes back in fact
to the French Revolution,
she says that already this
notion of people does not exist,
that there have never been
free and equal individuals,
even at the time of
the French Revolution
since in fact the sovereign people
constitute themselves against, by
differentiating themselves from others,
that is, those who have the privileges.
But the interesting thing is,
is that it shows that from that period
onwards the idea emerged
that the sovereign people are a body.
So there is going to be some sort of
biologisation of political language.
So the sovereign people
constitute one body, one
which is, in a way,
subject or submissive to certain
external aggressions.
So something that would be different
it is not only different
but can also be threatening to
the organism that is the body.
With this idea of body comes also
the idea of health, hygiene,
of the health of the people,
which makes it,
as she says quite amusingly
to use the metaphor,
a hypochondriac society.
However, this idea
of a homogenous people does not exist,
it is a fiction
because, in fact, she returns,
although that is much further on,
and explains this vision
of the black man we just spoke of
with Eric Garner and so on,
she raises the word Shibboleth
which was a password, in fact.
It is partly told in the Bible.
The Gileads are building a ford
to prevent the people
of Ephraim from passing.
And the surviving Ephraim
when they wish to pass
must say the word Shibboleth.
And depending on
how they say it,
they may either pass
or they may be killed
simply based on the way
that they enunciate the word,
which gives away
the tribe they belong to,
and what is their culture,
simply because of
the way that they say this word
shows which tribe they come from,
and into which category they fall.
And that’s exactly…
Well, exactly…
It is the residue of that,
or of similar mechanisms
that is happening here,
that is,Tzvetan Todorov
from this story,
it is he whom Carolin Emcke quotes,
says that the problem is, in fact, when
the difference becomes inequality,
and equality becomes identity.
And the far-right propagandists
want to deconstruct
the community of the right.
In fact, this community, for them,
must be of ethnic origin only
with people who share
the same culture, the same religion, etc.
But obviously it is impossible
as Benedict Anderson says:
outside the community
of the archaic village,
this idea of homogeneity
is totally false,
that is to say that people who
part of the same community
do not share religion,
culture and so on,
but the imagination
of a common belonging.
And that’s quite different.
Which means that obviously
to advocate this homogeneity,
the ‘other’ must be excluded.
So one has to exclude the one
who is not German,
the one who is not Western etc.
to be able to manufacture
this idea of homogeneity.
It is extremely interesting.
You have enlightened me and
shed new light upon
the quotation from Todorov
which I had analysed
and interpreted
completely differently.
So I thank you for that.
There is something in that sentence,
as I had understood it
and therefore reworked,
which brings us to
another question:
when the difference
becomes inequality,
the path that I analysed then
was that inequality must
build itself into an identity.
And now we have a movement
for example that we can
identify in the doctrinaires,
ideologues and strategists
of the Islamic state when you see the
inequality in treatment, especially
between communities,
Christian, Muslim,
in any case its
the rhetoric employed,
there is this inequality
in treatment,
especially in the West, which
means it will be necessary to create
a transnational Muslim community,
a kind of ‘us’, opposed to ‘others’,
Westerners,
who have this misguided lifestyle,
soiled and impure.
We also return to this logic
of purity against impurity,
it is not a logic
only of the extreme right.
As a result, we understand better
how to implement terrorist strategy
and also because it is true, 
that if we look from the inside,
we can tell ourselves that they are
attacking our way of life.
That’s what happened during the
November attacks on Le Bataclan
for example with people going out,
going to have a few drinks,
girls in skirts,
they are attacking our way of life.
But at the same time they
cause collateral damage
since Muslims are dying.
But except that these Muslims, by
adhering to a Western lifestyle,
are leaving the community of us
and joining the others.
So the terrorist act is an act
to awaken the Muslim community
and to confront them with
their own contradictions
and invite them to choose their camp.
But it is the same rhetoric
as that analysed for the extreme
right, us against the others.
Exactly, it’s the same thing,
that is to say, it is
a segregation objective.
The Islamic State,
when an attack is perpetrated,
obviously, it reactivates
fear of Muslims, etc.
and so in a way it forces
the segregation of Muslims
in a pluralist Europe.
That is the first thing.
Why also Carolin Emcke
seeks to describe
the mechanisms of Islamic State.
That’s because today we are
almost in a kind of inevitability,
of not being surprised
there is an attack today,
as if it were a natural thing
for the Islamic State to kill people,
to carry out attacks, etc.
Hence, in fact, the need to again
understand what the mechanisms are.
What is the ‘us’ of the Islamic State?
Why is it so attractive?
Well, the first thing is that
there is a promise of inclusion,
it is a little
like you have already said.
That is to say,
it is a little bit contradictory
in the very idea of the Islamic State,
since it is a state
with a flexible territory.
But a real state,
they claim to be
a true state,
but with a flexible territory,
which is not respect the
borders of nation states
and therefore has the power
an extremely strong attraction.
That is the first thing.
There is…
Also a promise of equality.
That is to say, all those…
It is essential to be united
to be able to fight,
all those who come to join
the Islamic State will be equal.
But at the same time
it is an instrument of distinction
because in coming,
in joining the Islamic State,
they are better Muslims
because they will advocate an Islam
which is a pure Islam,
so there is still
the idea of purity,
that of the pious ancestors,
here again the idea of original Islam,
authentic, not denatured,etc.
And so, obviously, not
only will they achieve
a superior status,
but they will become powerful.
So there is this promise of inclusion,
this promise of
distinction which are really
very important elements.
Besides we can understand why those
who are able to rally the Islamic State
come from socially
disadvantaged environments,
precisely because they themselves have
been objects of hatred and despised
and so now are going to rise to
a superior status.
So Carolin Emcke
wonders what the tools are
which allow the Islamic State to
spread its ideology
and above all to attract
people to its ideology.
Well, of course,
there are videos,
they get across a great deal
through videos which go viral,
which are extremely didactic and
where violence plays an essential role.
Because violence has a meaning.
Violence is never contingent,
it is absolutely fundamental.
It is really invested
in a specific sense in these videos.
So, for two reasons:
First of all because for the outside,
that is, for those who are not
members of the Islamic State,
it is to show that it is not
a small, disorganised gorilla group,
but that it is a very powerful state
and the second thing,
so the destination
of Islamic State members,
is to show that autonomy
and individuality cannot exist
in that space.
It means, in fact, you could say
that recourse to violence can be used
to unite the community,
the community around
the Islamic State,
which is also almost a kind
of threat to the members of the
community that
would like to extract
and recover their individuality.
It almost feels as if
it is a ritual violence
where, by participating in this act, you
become a member of the community,
which becomes a community
of blood really.
There is an almost archaic message
behind the order of the violence.
Yes, that is to say, it is not
individual violence
in the same way as the hatred
it is not an individual hatred.
It is not me who hates you,
Olivier Jacquemond.
No, its:
I hate what you represent.
I am not violent because
I have a violent impulse.
I am going to show violence
because it is a violence
that is completely beyond me.
Me, my individuality absolutely
does not matter in this context.
We come back to the
question of the representative.
- Absolutely
- The one who dies, that’s not me
as a being,
that is the representative of something.
- Exactly
- All right.
We see with the…
The horizon we have crossed all
the threats to democracy.
So, clearly, terrorism,
the terrorist menace,
the hate messages that can be
broadcast on social networks,
the ideological climate
that is currently in effect,
and fake news, which also create
a relationship with reality, where reality
it is no longer that important,
so all kinds of fantastical
crystallisation’s are allowed…
Yet Carolin Emcke remains optimistic
and in particular she remains optimistic
about the capacity of democracy
not to regenerate,
but to learn,
that is, to adapt
to the circumstances
and to its environment.
So, what all the tools,
what are the solutions,
what are the paths to follow
to counter this hate speech?
Well, she mentioned several of them
and that is the reason for the subtitle
Plea for the impure,
it is precisely that the fact
of advocating ambivalence, the hybrid,
anything that doesn’t exactly
resemble something homogenous,
anything of the order of doubt,
but of enlightened doubt,
of a play on words,
in fact, anything is going to
restore individuality,
the singular at the heart of democracy,
that would counter hatred.
That’s a first thing.
The other thing, the other element,
is to build
an imaginary ‘other’,
to construct the stories,
stories which are not
driven by ideological resentment,
but that could perhaps
put back the histories of the lives,
the histories of the individuals
at the heart of the story.
So doing the opposite,
that is to say, starting from the
representative to the individual
precisely to open up the imagination
and open up to empathy again.
And then it is speaking the truth,
that is, seizing the facts,
of that which is real,
looking it in the face just as it is
and making a pact with the truth.
Which requires a certain courage,
since there is courage in the truth,
especially when describing scenes as
we’ve been able to describe them, and
the public stands back and witnesses,
and by saying nothing becomes
complicit in the acts of hatred.
So there comes a time
when you have to stand up straight,
to stand as a singular individual
which necessitates and requires
a certain degree of courage
that we sometimes have to search
deep inside ourselves to find
and that leads us back to a book
by Cynthia Fleury, a contemporary
French philosopher
who wrote a book, Le Fin de Courage,
on the end of courage
and who wondered about this
cowardice in each of us
which makes it difficult
to find that true courage
that allows us to tell the truth.
Delphine Chaume thank you very much
- for this interview.
- Thank you very much.
