Undoing the Ordinary Epic of Contempt: Literary Reading, Neurodiversity, and thePrevention of Hate Speech in Moroccan Higher Education
Abstract
This article examines the didactic value of a micro-teaching device based on literary reading forpreventing hate speech in Moroccan higher education. It argues that hate does not only appear throughexplicit insult or verbal aggression, but also through an ordinary grammar of judgment: hastycategorization, generalization, separating pronouns, naturalization of difference, humiliating pity, andthe reduction of a person to a single trait or behavior. Drawing on Hugo Horiot’s L’empereur, c’est moi,a literary narrative centered on a neurodivergent voice, the study explores how guided reading of avulnerable anti-hero may transform students’ discourse from verdict to caution, from labeling tocontextualization, and from distance to perspective-taking. The device was implemented with twenty-five undergraduate students in semester 4 at the École Supérieure de l’Éducation et de la Formation inKénitra, primary education Amazigh specialization, group 5, Ibn Tofaïl University, during two sessionsheld on April 6 and April 13, 2026. It combined literary reading, philosophical framing, analysis ofimplicit meanings, reformulation and reflective writing. The analysis relies on a pilot corpus composedof pre-test texts, post-test texts and reading journals, examined through a grid of micro-discursiveindicators: essentialization, modality of certainty, depreciative presuppositions and separating pronouns,on the one hand; modalization, singularization, concession, enunciative responsibility and perspective-taking, on the other. The results show clear qualitative shifts: fewer globalizing statements, theemergence of interpretive caution, greater attention to the other’s interiority, and increased awarenessof symbolic violence before explicit insult. The article therefore argues for an operational conception ofprevention: not only condemning hate speech, but also learning to recognize the subtle linguisticgestures through which discourse classifies, diminishes, or restores the other’s complexity.Keywords: hate speech; prevention; literary reading; neurodiversity; anti-hero; discourse analysis;empathy; Moroccan higher education; inclusive didactics