> May I immodestly recommend my own article 'Why Hate Speech?'
>
> http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM107/LM107_Speech.html
In the article, you wrote:
The point is that it is not words that hurt you, or help you. It is the people who act on those words. And those people are free to give them the weight that they deserve. Words are serious, not because they have any direct effect in their own right, but because words, and the ideas contained in them, are all we have to weigh up our own decisions, their likely effects, and our own responsibilities.
I stand a great risk of missing the point here. So I'll try to make some indirect comments...
Have you read Renata Salecl's piece of hate speech? She argues, explicitly, that words can hurt. Pretty much all violent activity, military or what have you, start with an exchange of words. Words are the cause of many forms of violence (and, of course, the surplus effect of the violence tends to make speech impossible). With a single sentence its possible to move someone to jump across a table and take a swing at you... to bring you to tears... to make you laugh... or convulse, paralized with anger and humiliation. Salecl also explores this in terms of transference and identification - voice as love object. What do you do when "voice" doesn't affirm your identity, but ruthlessly stabs at it, causing it to disintegrate or break down? The Conservative mistake is to set aside a kind of dictionary of hate - assuming that if certain words (or images) are banned that the voice will cease to be a love object (although it is never put this way). They locate the problem in external things, not with the way in which a person views the world. In other words, the strategy ignores the psychodynamics of the context. If Conservatives really want to put an end to hate speech they should outlaw identification, not rhetoric. And isn't *that* foolish? Salecl's point here is that it isn't speech that is the problem, rather, the way in which one approaches language itself - the dynamics of love and hate. To find oneself enraged at an utterance (both the words and the person) is to be a lover of language and forms (ironic isn't it - Plato - the master of the dialectic, the lover of forms, actually sets up the structural dynamics of hate speech). Her strategy is to find ways that lead people to break this identification ("traverse the fantasy") - so that regardless of what is said, one may choose how to receive them, rather that just blindly reacting to them (a violent reaction usually serves to affirm the identity of someone who intentially utters hate speech - so when a flamer flames... their identity is redeemed by a return volley - they derive their enjoyment from the anger and rage of others).
ken