2026-02-24 by wv – Last Updated on 26-04-26 by wv
English translation by Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), revised by wv.
What it is
2012, Michela Murgia is invited to teach a course: three lessons on hatred.1 The venue is the University of Aristan, in Sardinia — home territory for her — at the “Faculty of Happiness Sciences”, whose manifesto is an invitation to divergent thinking and engaged living.
Now collected in a posthumous volume, the lessons lend themselves to readings on multiple levels: eccentric, serious, provocative, ironic, nurturing. They are certainly an anthropological tribute to Sardinia and an invitation to build conscious identities.
What works and what doesn’t
Murgia opens her reflection with an assumption: we are accustomed to censoring ourselves rather than admitting hatred.2 We consider it inhuman,3 as foreign to us as a virus might be.4
Against this assumption — a psychoanalytic and religious “Taboo”5 — Murgia advances her counter-thesis: hatred is not inhuman at all. On the contrary, it is deeply human and liberating. Accepting one’s capacity to hate as natural is a mark of maturity.6
The repression of hatred (self-censorship) is what instead leads to physical and destructive violence. The mechanism is in itself straightforward: once the dam of censorship breaks, unprocessed violence erupts in crude forms.7
Conversely, as with any liberation, having recognised our similarity with others — the common humanity of feelings — and freed from censorship and inhibition, we could never commit human violence, human acts of destruction.
As an example of this work of recognition, Murgia recalls the art of Sardinian metalanguage: the art of su frastimu, the curse, a technique for admitting and defusing hatred.
Uttering the curse functions as a verbalisation of hatred and, as a feeling exposed through language, it opens the door to empathic relation, to the recognition of the other.
To the screaming child one says: ‘may you suffer a trauma equal to that which occurs in the soul when faced with the most terrifying of catastrophes’ — which, metalinguistically, means: ‘Your cry alarmed me; I feared something tragic had happened to you…’ Meanwhile I openly declare my hatred for what you do, say, etc.; meanwhile I declare the suffering, the worry, etc., that I feel because of you or for you; and in doing so I recognise you as an interlocutor, my equal in rights.8 9
The set of aggressive verbal techniques exemplified throughout the lessons recalls the ritualisation of conflict: the Haka, ritual in sport and beyond…
Murgia’s anthropological-cultural perspective is compelling. Murgia is always interesting. She is equally persuasive in revealing the mechanisms of dehumanisation through the denial of the name: to deny someone’s name is to deny their right to exist within one’s own horizon. “According to a culture to which we too are affiliated, if you deny something a name, that thing loses the right to exist. It does not cease to exist in itself, but for you it loses that right.”10
At bottom, Murgia sketches a monocausal criminological theory of violence, and the corresponding technique of social recomposition — mediation.11
Yet — it seems to me — if one adopts a historical perspective, or one drawn from the sociology of communities and groups, things become more complex. If hatred is understood as the outcome of an ongoing process rather than the expression of pre-existing mechanisms; if hatred is considered a socially desirable process, historically coherent, instrumental to a contingent and material end — then Murgia’s “monocausal” conjecture loses some of its grip. Partly because it is, precisely, reductionist; and partly because it does not account for, for example, Browning: “ordinary men” who literally exterminate other ordinary men, strangers to them, in pursuit of material wellbeing and status advancement.12 It does not explain the troubling Stanford experiment: certain structural contexts suffice to transform high-achieving students at prestigious universities into tormentors, devoid of empathy and driven by blind compliance.13 Nor Morin’s reflections on the historical processes by which “hysteria” and mass hatred are manufactured.14 Nor the necessity of politicising religion.15 Nor the mechanisms of dehumanisation — not so much as individual rhetoric aimed at casting the other as unworthy, waste, animal or object,16 but as the outcome of pre-war and wartime rhetoric: examples abound, from always… and from today.
Hatred motivated by material interests is presumably the psychic and social energy necessary — useful, absent the individual’s pathological affect-blindness — to commit crimes: the outcome of techniques of disciplining.17 A procedure by which one deliberately, not mechanically, not unwittingly, expels the victim from one’s field of vision.18 As indeed seems to happen frequently in crimes: from ideologically motivated massacres, to rape, to the denial of care, to hunger — all ordinary instruments of war.19 That is to say, what victims routinely tell us.20
NB — said in passing, since it is not an argument of the book but merely a digression: I suspect that, contrary to what Murgia believes (p. 40), those who blaspheme are for the most part believers, and not the reverse. It is difficult to blaspheme a deity one does not recognise. No one — believer or not — blasphemes the gods of other latitudes or eras. Cursing Artemis simply does not occur to anyone. And ultimately, no one should take offence: blasphemy makes no sense for a non-believer, except as a conventional expletive, carrying no particular hatred toward any deity — its meaning entirely different from the same word spoken by a believer, regardless of the equal unpleasantness it produces in both cases.
Murgia, Michela. (2026), Lezioni sull’odio, Einaudi, Torino. ISBN 9788858450468. €14,00 p. 66
Footnotes
- As Giammei recalls, A., ‘Note’, in Murgia, M. (2026), Lezioni sull’odio, Einaudi, Torino. The lessons were variously titled: ‘course on hatred’; … through to ‘starter kit for carcasses’. ↩
- The Treccani dictionary defines hatred (odio) as: “a feeling of strong and persistent aversion, whereby one desires the harm or ruin of another; more broadly, a feeling of deep hostility and antipathy. In Catholic theology, hatred is the act by which one opposes something and can be distinguished as odium abominationis (licit in itself, provided one does not exceed in manner), when one opposes something as one’s own harm; odium inimicitiae, when one desires the harm of another; odium Dei, insofar as one wills what God forbids, or opposes His very nature — the gravest of sins.” ↩
- Murgia, M., (2026), Lezioni… op. cit., p. 11. ↩
- Ibid., p. 15. Or, in Murgia’s second conjecture, not having learned to manage it, we fall victim to our own “organisational deficit” in handling emotions (ibid., p. 17). ↩
- Ibid., p. 11. ↩
- Ibid., p. 18. ↩
- Ibid., pp. 19 and 27. ↩
- Ibid., p. 41. ↩
- Ibid., p. 25. ↩
- Ibid., p. 32. Not coincidentally, under the Italian Constitution the name is an inalienable right (art. 22). ↩
- In the sense of theories of mediation as an alternative methodology to punitive exclusion. ↩
- Browning, C. R., (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, New York, 1992), ed. it. (2022, IIed.), Uomini comuni. Polizia tedesca e «soluzione finale» in Polonia, Einaudi, Torino. ↩
- Zimbardo, P., (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House, New York, 2007), ed. it. (2020), L’effetto Lucifero. Cattivi si diventa? Trad. M. Botto. R. Cortina, Milano. ↩
- Morin, E., (De guerre en guerre, Fayard, Paris, 2024), ed. it. (2024), Di guerra in guerra, vedi qui. ↩
- Schmitt, C., (Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932), ed. it. (2014), Le categorie del «politico». Saggi di teoria politica. Trad. G. Miglio. Il Mulino, Bologna. ↩
- Haslam, N. (2006), “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review”. Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, 252–264; see also Volpato, C., Deumanizzazione. Come si legittima la violenza, Laterza, Bari. On the distinction between disumanizzazione and deumanizzazione — effectively synonymous in current usage, though I hold a different view — see the post Under War. 06 Dehumanization. ↩
- Foucault, M., (Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Gallimard, Paris, 1975), ed. it. (1975), Sorvegliare e punire. Nascita della prigione, Einaudi, Torino. Cf. the chapter on military bearing. See also the opening of Full Metal Jacket. ↩
- On this point see also note 21 of Under War. 06 Dehumanization. ↩
- On these points see the review of Mazzinghi in Marchionni, S., (ed.), Mazzinghi, L., Di Maio A., (2025) Male, con “Introduzione” di Piccolo, G.. EDB, Bologna qui; the post Under War. 06 Dehumanization; and forthcoming posts in the ‘War’ category. ↩
- Cf. Lo strappo. Quattro chiacchiere sul crimine. ↩
– Last Updated on 26.04.26 by wv
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