Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Verges

A defense lawyer claiming he is "not able of hating" reads less like a confession of tenderness than a tactical creed. Jacques Verges made a career out of representing the unrepresentable - Nazi collaborator Klaus Barbie, militants tied to anti-colonial violence - and this doubled sentence works the way his famous "rupture" strategy worked in court: it refuses the audience's preferred moral script. Hatred is what the public demands from you when the client is a monster. Verges' line denies that demand and, in doing so, grabs control of the frame.

The repetition matters. The first "I am not able of hating" could be a slightly awkward second-language phrase, a personal limitation. The second turns it into an incantation, a preemptive defense against the inevitable suspicion: if you can't hate, do you excuse? If you won't hate, do you secretly admire? Verges' subtext is that hatred is intellectually lazy. It keeps you from seeing the machinery: the state, colonialism, war, the institutions that manufacture villains and then sanctify punishment. His posture isn't saintly; it's forensic. He is claiming the emotional distance necessary to do the job - and, not incidentally, the emotional distance that allows a provocateur to keep walking into the fire.

Context sharpens the edge. In postwar France, in decolonization, in the televised era of "monsters" and "terrorists", refusing hatred is a radical affront. It doesn't make him moral; it makes him dangerous to consensus. The line is less about love than about power: who gets to decide which humans are beyond representation, and what that decision says about the society doing the judging.