ABSTRACT
When hate swarms communities leading to riots and genocide, universal love and communal amity are professed as cures. Hate too is an emotion of aversion. In hate, philosophers not only turn their face away, but also bring about or wish to bring about the destruction of the object. Euripides' Medea has two levels. At the first level, betrayed love turns into hate through rage and revenge. At another level, Medea, the barbarian, breaks free of a painful love by undergoing a difficult apprenticeship with hate. Apart from returning the blow, the revenge-taker can begin to accumulate hate towards the aggressor. This hate is not a private emotional response. It involves the suspension of the moral context of the interaction. Annihilation is the completion or concretisation of the blindness of hate. In destruction, hate shows off its own blindness to itself.
