Abstract
This chapter presents a phenomenology of hate speech asking what people do when they speak. I argue that hate speech relies on magical thinking as described by Freud. It is performative‚ constituting acts of displacing unwanted aspects of oneself onto devalued others. Injurious speech acts, as Butler emphasises, are citational‚ reinforcing or reinserting a cultural pattern of domination. The lack of motivational and contextual transparency in human lives raises the issue of responsibility for unconscious discrimination. What a statement or word presupposes‚ rather than utters directly‚ may go beyond what a speaker or writer intends to express. I end by questioning the conditions for imaginative renewal—for change in discriminatory utterances.
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Auestad, L. (2017). Speech, Repetition , Renewal . In: Auestad, L., Treacher Kabesh, A. (eds) Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57502-9_2
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