Locating hatred: On the materiality of emotions

• The article probes the location of hatred.
• It highlights two current strands in scholarly thinking on the location of emotions.
• One strand offers nuanced descriptions of particular emotions, located in individuals.
• Another strand theorizes emotions as part of broader material and social fields.
• A more precise account of the location of hatred is provided by combining the two.

How do we locate hatred in the social fabric of human life? Where is it, and how do we detect it? Recent scholarly engagements with emotions have provided (at least) two rather separate kinds of answer to such questions. One, largely espoused by philosophers and psychologists, has sought to conceptualize emotions as complex conglomerates of cognitive processes, bodily sensations and dispositions to act, experienced by an individual human subject. Another path, more affiliated with anthropology and STS, has been occupied with transcending the boundaries of the personal body-mind as the limit of affects and emotions, locating them also beyond the individual: in spaces, atmospheres, objects – dispersed, across and in between. In this article, I explore what can be gained from a constructive dialogue between these different agendas when trying to make sense of the location of hate. The article suggests that we can use the more detailed outlines of the textures of specific emotions, found in the philosophy of emotions, as a basis for thinking about hate as an assemblage of particular narratives, evaluations, actions, and bodily configurations that can be distributed across different kinds of materiality. These considerations will be anchored in analytical reflections on hatred and its potential spatial and material manifestations in the context of the German Nazi state.