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Please reference as: Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Verses on Hate', https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home/research-projects/soundscapes-and-echoes/kassia/verses-on-hate
Kassia’s verses on Hate can first be situated within the tradition of monastic affectivity, where emotion was neither a mere disturbance of reason nor a private interior state, but a field of discernment and transformation. In Byzantine ascetic theology, the passions (pathē) were energies of the soul to be ordered and attuned rather than extinguished. In this sense, monastic affectivity was already a practice of rhythmic regulation, a tuning of the heart’s intensities (see Krueger 2014).
Kassia’s repeated avowal—“I hate a murderer condemning the hot-tempered. I hate the liar affecting a solemn air with words”—thus emerges from an ascetic lineage that treats affect as ethical work. Yet her handling of hate departs from the silent interiority of apophatic mysticism. Rather than subduing affect, she amplifies it, translating discernment into repetition and rhythm. The poem’s anaphoric structure transforms aversion into pattern, performing what Henri Lefebvre calls the measured difference of rhythm, the alternation through which order and deviation coexist (2004, 8).
From the perspective of affect philosophies, Kassia’s incantatory use of “I hate” can be read as what Brian Massumi describes as intensity: “a state of suspense, potentially of disruption,” where affect precedes and organizes signification (2002, 26). Hate here is not a personal emotion but a modulation of energy, a rhythmic sorting of ethical dissonance. Each repetition marks a vibration of discernment—a moment where affect moves before it means. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth write, affect “arises in the midst of in-between-ness […] in those intensities that pass body to body” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). Kassia’s “I hate” inhabits precisely such in-between space: not confession, not doctrine, but vibration.
The verses' catalogue of aversions—“the rich man complaining as a poor man,” “the poor man boasting as in wealth,” “the drunk drinking and thirsting”—reveals that what Kassia detests is not sin itself but affective incongruity: the mismatch between disposition and condition, between being and doing. Her hatred diagnoses misalignment within the moral sensorium. In this, she anticipates what Sara Ahmed terms an affective economy, where emotions “do not reside in subjects or objects, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the distinction between them” (Ahmed 2014, 8). Hate circulates as a force of differentiation—it binds and excludes, it marks the contours of the ethical field.
The rhythmic pulse of “I hate” thus becomes a mode of negative attunement, an affective practice of purification. In Spinoza’s sense, each utterance registers a decrease in the body’s power to act (Ethics III, prop. 11; Spinoza 1994, 160), a contraction through which discernment becomes possible . Yet in Kassia’s monastic register, this contraction is not nihilistic: it is a recalibration. The poem enacts what Roland Barthes (1977, 179) called the grain of the voice—the texture of speech as vibration, not just meaning. Through repetition, hate becomes the sound of discernment itself, the audible rhythm of ethical tuning.
Affect, rhythm, and ethics converge here. I Hate is neither a confession of sentiment nor a litany of moral condemnation, but an experiment in affective rhythmanalysis—a poetics of repulsion where aversion functions as the interval through which clarity emerges. As Ahmed reminds us, “emotions do things” (Ahmed 2014, 209): they move bodies, shape communities, delineate worlds. Kassia’s hate does precisely that. It moves as rhythm, orders as feeling, and in doing so transforms the ascesis of passion into a choreography of discernment.
In this light, I read Kassia’s verses not as moral aphorisms but affective compositions—experiments in how aversion might sustain relation. Her “I hate” marks the ethical beat of attunement, the pulse by which the self learns to feel its way toward the divine through the vibrations of difference.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Barthes, Roland (1997). Image–Music–Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Krueger, Derek (2014). Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.
Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) The Ethics and Other Works, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. New Jersey: Prinston University Press.
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