ABSTRACT
How do emotions such as hate work to secure collectives through the way in which they read the bodies of others? How does hate work to align some subjects with some others and against other others? In this chapter, I consider the role of hate in shaping bodies and worlds through the way hate generates its object as a defence against injury. We can see such defensive uses of hate within fascist discourse. It is a common theme within so-called hate groups to declare themselves as organisations of love on their web sites. This apparent reversal (we do and say this because we love, not because we hate) does an enormous amount of work, as a form of justification and persuasion. In the instance above, it is the imagined subject of both party and nation (the White nationalist, the average White man, the White housewife, the White workingman, the White Citizen and the White Christian farmer) who is
hated, and who is threatened and victimised by the law and polity. Hate is not simply present as the emotion that explains the story (it is not a question of hate being at its root), but as that which is affected by the story, and as that which enables the story to be affective.
