I recently came across this sentence, which I found puzzling and weirdly appealing:
“Without a deadly hatred of that which threatens what we love, love is an empty word for hippies, queers and cowards.”
The sentence is commonly attributed to George Lincoln Rockwell, who was an idiot (an American Nazi after World War II can only be described as such; or worse). Reading the sentence, which is so very much against the 21st century grain, with that awful, awful reference to “hatred,” I wondered to which extent Rockwell was right, though. Is love possible without its counterpart, hate?
In Smashing the Neighbor’s face, an essay available here, Slavoj Zizek argues that, erm, yes, Rockwell was kind of right:
In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence. The truth of the universal proposition “Man is mortal” does not imply the existence of even one man, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one man who exists (i.e., some men exist)” implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of – not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but – at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition
“I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “there is at least one whom I hate” – the thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the “truth” of universal love, in contrast to true love which can only emerge against the background – NOT of universal hatred, but – of universal indifference: I am indifferent towards All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love YOU, the unique individual who stands/sticks out of this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of the universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we
are dealing here again with the formulas of sexuation: “I do not love you all” is the only foundation of “there is nobody that I do not love,” while “I love you all” necessarily relies on “I really hate some of you.” “But I love you all,” defended himself Erich Mielke, the Secret Police boss of the DDR – his universal love was obviously grounded in its constitutive exception, the hatred of the enemies of socialism.
Zizek goes on to argue that one can “understand” everything, even the most hideous crime has an “inner truth and beauty” when observed from within:
Recall the refined spiritual meditations of the Japanese warriors. There is a weird scene in Hector Babenco’s The Kiss of a Spider-Woman: in the German-occupied France, a high Gestapo officer explains to his French mistress the inner truth of the Nazis, how they are guided in what may appear brutal military interventions by an inner vision of breath-taking goodness – we never learn in what, exactly, this inner truth and goodness consist; all that matters is this purely formal gesture of asserting that things are not what they seem (brutal occupation and terror), that there is an inner ethical truth which redeems them… THIS is what the ethical Law prohibits: justice HAS to be blind, ignoring the inner truth.
Che Guevara, Zizek reminds us, conceived revolutionary violence as a “work of love”:
“Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”
Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term, Zizek adds, the harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love.
Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”(Luke 14:26)) which point in exactly the same direction as another Che’s famous quote? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.”
Neotenianos 