The discursive making of hatred. Affects, fascist agitation and the ‘politics of resentment’

The most common response to the proliferation of hate speech online is content moderation, speech regulation, and the development of digital protocols to automatically identify and exclude hateful statements. This text proposes to go back upstream of this process by examining the way in which hate speech transfigures real affects by impulsing a specific trajectory to them through the manufacture of an hatred-object. Based on a corpus of discourses of “online agitators” officiating on Youtube, the analysis shows that these discourses proceed by an excitement of affects, a diversion of the latter and an avoidance of the objective world. The disappearance of the world, coupled with the hatred of specific targets, results from this trajectory of hatred which is specific to a “politics of resentment” at the antipodes of democratic agency. The characteristic of the latter consists, in fact, in transfiguring affects into discursive objects constituting the basis of a troubled world destined to become the object of deliberations within the public sphere. Therefore, an other response to the proliferation of hate speech is, to nurture the material and social conditions that enables “taking care of” and to expand the public sphere for experience, inquiry and deliberation.