The Jew, the Arab, the Black: La Haine and the Structure of Anti-Black Violence

Abstract:This essay places Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and psychoanalysis in conversation with critical Black studies through an interrogation of the film La Haine (1995, France), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. I argue that while the action and dialogue that construct La Haine convey a progressive, perhaps even apparently radical, critique of race and policing towards the embrace of a multiracial coalition politics, the cinematic structure of La Haine administers what Deleuze calls a shock to thought that reveals the anti-Black structure of not simply European civil society, but the anti-Black relations among its historical and timeless Others—the Jew, the Arab, and the Black—such that the political desires and aspirations portrayed in the dialogue are rendered untenable through the cinematic structure. In other words, the critique of civil society La Haine offers on the level of structure and composition is one that exceeds and undermines any conscious desire for love, reparation, or coalition. By problematizing ethno-religious categories deployed by Kassovitz, the essay briefly asks how the representation of “religious” and “racial” bodies in La Haine operates within the same biocentric logic of the modern state to the extent that it represses the historico-material and psycho-affective origins of Jewish, Arab, and Black Enmity with regard to secular civil society and the Human. If so, then while Kassovitz’s best efforts to create a narrative arc and recuperative gesture toward reconciliation and redemption between the multiracial coalition of people and the police ultimately collapse into the flatline of anti-Blackness, the impossible reconciliation between the Black and secular civil society does not foreclose, following Selamawit Terrefe, the confluence and unflinching embrace of monstrosity, hatred, and enmity among the human’s familiar and radical Others—the so-called Jew, Arab, and Black.