Sara Heinämaa: „Hate Speech and its Double Function“

VORTRAG in englischer Sprache anlässlich der Finissage der Ausstellung Sewing von Hannah Hallermann in der Miettinen Collection. Anschließend folgt ein Gespräch zwischen Hannah Hallermann und Anna Miettinen.

The lecture will show that hate speech has two different but mutually related aims. On the one hand, it attacks a group of people that it names as „evil“ or particular individuals that it takes to represent this group. The aim is to silence these people and exclude them from the common sphere of public affairs. On the other hand, hate speech also has another target, a more secretive one: it also attacks and aims at destroying reasoned discourse as such. In the latter function, hate speech is destructive, whatever its named targets are, and it victimizes us all as political subjects.

Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specializes in phenomenology, existentialism and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially on emotion, embodiment, intersubjectivity and normativity. She is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (2010,) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), and has co-edited several volumes, including Husserlian Legacies I-II (2025–2026) and Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity (2021). At the moment she is finishing a new book titled The Politics of Emotions (forthcoming).

Professor of Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä
Vice President of the Philosophical Society of Finland
Member of the Finnish Academia of Sciences and Letters

https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Phenomenologies-of-Normativity-Norms-Goals-and-Values/Heinamaa-Hartimo-Hirvonen/p/book/9781032017136

https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenology-as-Critique-Why-Method-Matters/Aldea-Carr-Heinamaa/p/book/9781032043326