Hatred can be understood as a persistent affect that stems from an experienced slight or injustice and is aimed at revenge against its author, in extreme cases at the destruction of the enemy. The dynamics and radicality of hatred result from the backwater of the affect, which is caused by the hater's own weakness or powerlessness. It is precisely this backwater that allows hatred to feed on and on until it can finally turn into acute destructive actions. The characteristic structure of hatred is a dialectic of self-enhancement and self-destructiveness. This individual dynamic is often found in potentiated form in the hatred of groups, which goes back to social and political experiences of grievance. The lecture examines the phenomenology of hate using literary examples, psychological disorders, and current social phenomena.

Thomas Fuchs holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Faculty of Philosophy of Heidelberg University.
He is the recipient of the prestigious Erich-Fromm-Prize 2023. In addition, Thomas Fuchs gave a lecture on "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" together with Mark Solms as part of the Horst Kächele Webinar in the winter semester 2021/22.

Selected book publications: "Das Gehirn - ein Beziehungsorgan" (Kohlhammer 6th ed. 2021) "Verteidigung des Menschen. Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie" (Suhrkamp 2020).