Resentment : Reshad
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Resentment : Clover Reshad
In the second chapter of On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argues that the malheureux, the unhappy poor who took to the streets in revolutionary France, were driven by “the forces of nature herself,” their hunger, that is, over any political principle.1 Arendt imagines that the Revolution ceased to be about freedom once figures like Robespierre had exposed the social antecedents of suffering. She identifies a dangerous turning point here—the malheureux became the enragés. This was no virtuous, reasonable, Aristotelian anger, according to Arendt, but a delirious and unabating rage animated by the insatiable demand for bread. It named and blamed an enemy in the rich, a scapegoat for the very impossibility of resolving the social question. Although les enragés themselves invoked vengeance as the “only source of liberty,” Arendt characterizes their emotions as utterly irreconcilable with her loftier ideal of freedom.2 Having already written about revenge in The Human Condition as the natural, automatic response to an injury in contrast to forgiveness, “the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly,” here Arendt insists that the enragés’ resentment could never have been political.3 It was this “rage of impotence,” she concluded, that “eventually sent the Revolution to its doom.”4 I begin this entry with a short vignette from Arendt because her reflections on the social question lay bare the problem of resentment as it continues to be conceptualized in political theory. Resentment is generally taken to be an emotion contingent upon the experience of impotence. Unable to act, that is, the impotent brood over their negative feelings. This obsessive re-feeling possesses the resentful with the desire to identify an external cause for their suffering. This naming and blaming is in turn doomed to reproduce the impotence that gave rise to the emotion in the first place—or so this theory goes. We see the tell-tale vestiges of this concept in Arendt’s depiction of the malheureux, even though she does not directly invoke the term resentment here. In line with the dominant conception of resentment, Arendt’s malheureux appear impotent, unable to forgive, and therefore hostile to a life of political action as she imagines it. Indeed, Arendt is more explicit elsewhere in the book about her thoughts on resentment. Chafing at the idea that “those who belong to the lower classes of society have, as it were, a right to burst with resentment,” Arendt cordons off the possibility that this emotion might be a mode of appearance.5 For Arendt then, the concept works to condemn social suffering when it threatens to break onto the political scene. Resentment, in this framing, is an emotion that is destined to fail. A political concept, of course, is much more than a word. In this essay, I approach resentment as a constellation of meanings that perform a particular function with regard to an arrangement of power. As a political concept, resentment has historically demarcated those who lack proper forms of subjectivity, that is, those who only react as opposed to acting anew. It does so by coding this feeling as irrational, backward-looking, and, ultimately, ill-fated. While the concept of resentment may well be invoked using other, related emotional terms like anger, envy or hatred, I choose to take up resentment over other emotions that are more readily accepted as a form of legitimate protest.6 Resentment, that is to say, carries heavier baggage. This framing of resentment as reactionary is also typical of the way that we tend to employ the concept today. Now a key weapon in the liberal rhetorical arsenal, resentment is regularly used to explain the rise of the far right and condemn its supporters as dangerous, deplorable, and easily manipulated. A number of scholars have gone as far as to argue that resentment is the paramount threat facing our contemporary democracies. Cynthia Fleury, for instance, claims that resentment is an “evil that is dangerous for both the psychological health of the subject and the proper functioning of democracy.”7 She conceptualizes this emotion like a disease, an internal threat to the body politic. In this view, resentment is a pathology that begets no possibility of productive engagement. The logical solution, then, appears to be the elimination of resentment from politics altogether. However, this near-reflexive association of resentment with the angry white man obscures a hidden history behind the concept: resentment can express a bitterly held desire for freedom, an idea most clearly articulated by Frantz Fanon. In “On Violence,” Fanon sketches a spontaneous, instinctively rebellious image of the rural peasant masses, a group defined, in part, by their resentment toward the colonizer. As the colonized looks on with resentment at the colonizer’s world of electric lights, paved roads, and trash cans overflowing with wonderful garbage, he dreams of revenge. The colonized knows that this violently unequal life is no accident and that someone must be to blame. As Fanon writes, the colonized “identifies his enemy, puts a name to all of his misfortunes, and casts his exacerbated rage and hatred in this direction.” This act of resentment “rids the colonized of . . . their passive and despairing attitude.”8 Fanon, therefore, conceptualizes resentment as a force for destruction, but also an opening for a radically reimagined life. He refuses the notion that resentment is beyond the realm of productive engagement. On the contrary, he is adamant that the war for liberation can only be won by organizing the masses’ resentment through the party form. In short, he carves out a clear, alternative path for this emotion. On this point, Glen Sean Coulthard has recently drawn attention to the centrality of an activating, self-affirming form of resentment in Fanon’s seminal work The Wretched of The Earth, which uses this concept to mark out “an important turning point in the . . . coming-to-consciousness of the colonized.”9 Yet, Coulthard is careful to distinguish this resentment from Nietzschean ressentiment, an emotion that “irrationally” chains us to the past. Fanon’s resentment, by contrast, emerges as a source of genuine value-change in that it helps create the values of the future nation. In the same spirit as Coulthard, a handful of moral philosophers—Jeffrie Murphy and William Connolly, amongst others—have tried to rescue resentment by delineating ressentiment as its bad underside.10 These contributions make a compelling case that resentment need not be stultifying or regressive. I share this interest in recovering a more ambivalent understanding of resentment. However, I also share Sjoerd van Tuinen’s suspicion of approaches that draw so strict a line between resentment and ressentiment—a distinction that Friedrich Nietzsche himself never explicitly drew.11 Endeavors to cleanly sever resentment from ressentiment repeat a long-standing problem in the history of the concept. That is, they rest on the dubious assumption that resentment can be brought under rational or normative control. We find an impulse to curb ‘troubling’ forms of resentment not only in someone like Arendt, but also in the most prominent, positive account of resentment in the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. Smith’s idea of a legitimate, moral form of resentment attempts to rid resentment of the too much. His resentment is just right—not too angry, not too unreasonable, and not too dangerous. Yet this Goldilocks resentment runs squarely into the same problem that confronts any effort to pin down a ‘good’ resentment: it attempts to pare away the very excess that pushes against the limits of everyday politics. We tend to be resentful about things we should not be. This is precisely what allows this emotion to grow into uncanny proportions and reshape our entire outlook. If we were fully justified in our resentment, if our claims were already recognized, perhaps we would not experience the emotion as resentment at all. The concept of resentment, then, names something that tends to elude dominant frameworks of understanding. This emotion often exceeds our grasp because it emerges from first-person experiences of social pain, frustration, domination, injury, impotence, that may be difficult to make sense of from a third-person standpoint. Resentment is contextual, meaning it cannot be fully captured by one definition and it certainly cannot be fixed in advance as either a pathology or virtue. It is a defiant emotion that exceeds whatever terms are to justify or critique it. In this sense, it operates at the edges of legibility, where we will find the political itself. In light of this, I propose a different approach to making sense of resentment—one that begins with a decidedly un-decided definition of the emotion. I insist on not defining resentment at the outset as a challenge to the idea that any one person gets to decide what counts as a legitimate, political form of resentment, no matter how noble their intentions. There is no one political form of resentment. But more than that, resentment may well be the sense of the political itself, beyond whatever forms of politics take shape from it. In this sense, resentment is a political concept to the extent it names a feeling that disrupts the existing order of things and unmakes that which seems given. Yet this is precisely the function of ressentiment as defined by Nietzsche himself. In this article, therefore, I refuse the very distinction between resentment and ressentiment, a distinction that represents only the most recent way of closing off the political potential of this emotion. I adopt this approach with a larger aim in mind: to hold out against the kind of fatalism towards resentment that we saw in Arendt. The first section of this essay revisits Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment through the figure of the ‘mob’ to question the idea that ressentiment is a value-neutral, diagnostic concept. This concept performs a gatekeeping function: it decides who counts as a political actor and who is doomed to only ever react. Engaging with ressentiment as a political concept in this way allows us to recover what has so far been deemed unrecoverable in ressentiment: a radical negativity that says ‘no’ to the way things are without always offering a clear, positive vision for the world. The second section turns to Smith, whose account of resentment as an appropriate response to injustice nonetheless shares, to a certain extent, Nietzsche’s conviction that this emotion is self-defeating. Smith, that is to say, is convinced that only some forms of resentments count. Yet resentment is far more ambivalent than either Smith or Nietzsche allows, and this is precisely what makes it so interesting a political emotion. To develop this point, I end by returning to the malheureux as the figure of ambivalence par excellence. In light of my analysis, it should become clear that resentment is neither straightforwardly reactionary nor righteous; it is malleable, protean, lacking in moral clarity, yet always charged with political potential. What follows is an attempt to insist on resentment’s undecidability and tendency to exceed the conceptual frameworks that attempt to contain it. *** The unhappy passions have long been considered anti-political in one way or another. Spinoza, for instance, argued that sadness weakened the body’s ability to act such that those in power, the despot or the priest, need the sadness of their subjects in order to govern effectively. Owing to this denunciation of negative emotions as essentially pacifying, Gilles Deleuze places Spinoza in a great lineage from Epicurus to Nietzsche. But it is Nietzsche, of course, who cast resentment in the way we know it today. Lacking a suitable term in the German language, the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morals borrows the French term ressentiment to describe more of an all-encompassing mentality rather than a simple or fleeting emotion.12 Ressentiment, in this reading, is born from impotence or the inability to act upon other, more authentic emotions in the immediate term. If we lack the strength to directly confront the source of an emotion like anger, we are left to ruminate on and re-feel that emotion. We transform what would have been an action into just another feeling. In Deleuze’s succinct definition, ressentiment is a reaction that “ceases to be acted in order to become something felt.”13 As the man of ressentiment turns inward, he loses the faculty of forgetting, which Nietzsche and Deleuze see as an active force insofar as freeing the mind of past burdens prepares one for future action.14 This is the chief critique leveraged against this feeling—ressentiment is a state of being where our reactive forces take over the active ones, continually reducing our power to act. Yet here the man of ressentiment does something curious which finds its parable in one of Aesop’s fables:
Unable to reach the grapes, the fox revalues the fruit as undesirable, temporarily delivering himself from the torment of his impotence, if not his hunger. This familiar story of the ‘sour grapes’ helps illustrate how ressentiment, a feeling born from impotence, produces its moral inversion. Nietzsche explains how the impotent man, like the fox, devalued the very things he lacks. That is, he reinscribes strength as ‘evil,’ while elevating his own weakness to the position of ‘good.’ This is why Nietzsche places ressentiment at the start of what he calls “slave morality,” the major turning point in Western culture. He attributes to this feeling a capacity to invent an entirely new kind of world. Yet for Nietzsche, ressentiment’s remarkable moment of creativity is ultimately grounded in reaction. It is not an affirmation of the self but a denial of all beyond it. All its seemingly positive judgments—meekness, noble poverty, and even Christian love—are simply a negation of what the slave could not have. There is no pretension by the slave to ascend to the master’s position. Nietzsche sees that the slave still values himself as a slave, invested in his own impotence like the fox who feigns that he never wanted the grapes to begin with. In other words, Nietzsche tells us that ressentiment, even as it “becomes creative and gives birth to values,” is destined to keep us unfree. It is an “imaginary revenge.”16 Once the man of ressentiment gives up on his own freedom, he decides that ‘if I can’t have it, no one can.’ From here on out, he smothers the ability of the stronger types to act on the world by condemning them and making them feel guilty for this very capacity. And he takes great pleasure in punishing them for their sins. Explaining how ressentiment’s success in the world rests on a delusion of moral responsibility, Nietzsche imagines a lamb who bears a grudge against a bird of prey. This lamb, Nietzsche argues, makes a double error. To hold the eagle responsible for preying on him, the lamb interprets both its own weakness as a virtue and the eagle’s killer-instinct as vice. The eagle had no choice in the matter of course. Nothing, after all, “is more tasty than a tender lamb.”17 Just like the lamb, Nietzsche contends, the man of ressentiment mounts a misguided appeal to justice, as if things could have been otherwise. This is all the worse for the man of ressentiment who hides behind the idea of oppression to justify his own inactivity. He does not attempt to change anything or admit his own faults, he obsesses over a ‘they’ who he imagines is the cause of his suffering.18 In projecting blame outward, ressentiment, Nietzsche argues, prevents us from confronting the inescapable conditions of life itself. A deluded attempt to assign meaning to the inevitable pain, misery, and suffering of any given life, ressentiment turns us into reactive creatures who are unable to simply accept, let go, and move on. This feeling seems to paralyze us, ensuring that we cannot grow from or overcome the challenges we face. Failing to achieve anything tangible even as it drags others down to its level, ressentiment appears to be a response from the powerless that alters the subjectivity of the powerful in a way that prevents all parties’ life-affirming instincts from flourishing. Nietzsche approached this bleak history of ressentiment through his now well-known method. Tracing a line of descent from our modern, secular society to the birth of “Judeo-Christian” morality, Nietzsche’s genealogy starts with aspects of the present that he finds particularly troubling—our oppressively civilized, altruistic values—and asks how they came to be. He attempts to uncover a history of struggle behind the very values that allowed meekness and mediocrity to triumph and, in so doing, open up the possibility for an alternative kind of ethical life. Still, a question remains. How did such a reactive emotion born from impotence come to be such a powerful force in the world? Nietzsche found his answer not in the masses, but in the artistic genius of the priests, who he thought were exceptionally clever and cunning but still too weak to challenge the strong head on. Armed with their ascetic ideal, he argues, the priests took their revenge and gave a spiritual form to the ordinary men of ressentiment. They affirmed the sickly herd with the seal of goodness. And the masses lapped it up, their wounds anointed. Yet Christianity’s final move was to reframe suffering as punishment, turning our ressentiment inward against ourselves as well as the strong. In the end, Nietzsche found good taste, beauty, authenticity, pleasure, prosperity, and power struck down everywhere. This is the most well-known story of resentment, often cited to warn against the objective dangers of such a pathological emotion. However, the story is hardly apolitical. As Domenico Losurdo explains, Nietzsche’s philosophy was explicitly a reaction to the advent of mass culture, parliamentary politics, and Enlightenment values, which he took to be symptoms of cultural decline under the guise of justice.19 To be sure, Nietzsche held a special kind of contempt for the mass democratic movements of his time, which he saw as being driven by ressentiment. He writes that “democracy represents the disbelief in great human beings and an elite society: ‘Everyone is equal to everyone else.’ At bottom we are one and all self-seeking cattle and mob.”20 Clearly, democracy is not a strictly institutional problem for Nietzsche. It is a pernicious state of mind, an orientation grounded in the ideal of equality that he took to be corrosive of higher values such as distinction and plurality. Far from a mode of emancipation then, for Nietzsche, democracy marked a leveling force that does away with the “pathos of distance,” the very feeling of superiority, that he saw as an essential precondition of greatness.21 This is not the only way to read Nietzsche on democracy, however. Lawrence Hatab, for instance, points to how Nietzsche associated democracy with creativity and a break with tradition. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche writes that democracy “thirsts for innovations and is greedy for experiments.”22 Reading Nietzsche as a thinker who is interested in opening up the world to different values, Hatab argues that he did not necessarily oppose democracy. In one sense, this may well be true: Nietzsche, especially the earlier Nietzsche, was indeed interested in forms of agonistic struggle that are central to any democracy. Even by The Will to Power, he suggests that we can still rescue democracy if the stronger types can learn to exploit the herd animal for what it is. He asks,
For Nietzsche then, ressentiment does not eliminate the possibility of great politics altogether. Ressentiment becomes a condition for its emergence. Yet one thing remains constant throughout his oeuvre: he never saw the herd, the mob, the man of ressentiment as a political actor. He thought that the masses cared little for politics, except for when flattered and duped by “sick intellects” like Robespierre.24 In this way, the concept of ressentiment undermines the very possibility of seeing mass movements as a meaningful form of resistance. Yet resentment is an emotion that constantly denies this kind of containment. Its radical negativity, as Nietzsche recognized, routinely puts any form of superiority into question by bringing it down a peg or two—an uncomfortable feature of the democratic movements of his time or perhaps any democratic movement at all. Nietzsche, of course, dismisses this hostile egalitarianism as “the rancor of the mob as judge.”25 He never did cede that even an event like the French Revolution could have been a form of self-assertion. As he writes in The Will to Power, “the social hodgepodge, consequence of the Revolution, the establishment of equal rights” bears the “instincts of decline (of ressentiment, discontent, the drive to destroy),” in those who “have long been kept down.” In short, “everything has become mob.”26 Nietzsche’s fixation on ressentiment then reveals more than a commitment to life-affirming action. This concept also functions, at least in part, as an anxious defense of hierarchy. Once democratic ressentiment had been let loose, Nietzsche saw a most profound levelling. So pervasive was this force, he argued, that it even lurked behind the relatively modest education and welfare reforms introduced by arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck. In one particularly vivid formulation of this problem, Nietzsche warned that “tongues already taste a joy which is forbidden to them . . . it is not hunger that provokes revolutions, but the fact that the mob have contracted an appetite en mangeant [while eating].”27 Any kind of egalitarian impulse was nonsensical to Nietzsche, who pictured society like a pyramid with the lower classes at the base.28 He imagined that only a select few had the capacity for autonomous action and greatness. However, as Jan Rehmann observes, Nietzsche “disguised the aristocratic rulers as the ‘active ones,’ although he himself knew exactly that they live from the domination and exploitation of the active ones who do the work for them.”29 That is to say, Nietzsche’s worldview hinges on the denigration of the many as essentially reactive, as men of ressentiment. And like a fly in a spider’s web, the harder they protested, the more they seemed to affirm their own inferiority. What is most ironic though, is that ressentiment exhibits many of the characteristics that Nietzsche cherished so dearly. Not dissimilar to the radical determination of the free spirit, this feeling paved the way for world-historical events. Yet it was the very things that Nietzsche despised about ressentiment—its reactiveness and stubborn refusal to accept the world as is—that granted this feeling the extraordinary potential to dictate how things ought to be. In other words, Nietzsche recognized that resentment held the ability to make things that once seemed completely unreasonable a part of our common sense. Of course, he denied that resentment’s radical negativity could constitute true value creation. He saw only an inversion. His man of ressentiment is always unconsciously wedded to the master’s values even when he tries to repudiate them. As Nietzsche writes, “while every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, Slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed.”30 In other words, ressentiment does not actually break with dominant values. Any action rooted in a ressentiment is fundamentally a reaction that remains within the very structures it wants to overturn. To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that Nietzsche is simply mistaken and ressentiment should be read as an uncomplicatedly affirmative, creative emotion. The question of becoming actional—how to act from a sense of one’s own strength rather than weakness—is not an unimportant one. However, the action-reaction dichotomy cannot fully capture the political form that ressentiment took in Nietzsche’s day, that is, democracy. At once a rejection of superiority and an affirmation of equality, democracy traverses the very distinction between action and reaction. Democratic ressentiment is clearly a bottom-up sentiment, yet it operates in a far more ambiguous area. Attending to the political work of resentment helps us see that reaction and action may well be two sides of the same coin. After all, don’t we always have to say ‘no’ to contempt, indignity, and exploitation in order to say ‘yes’ to life? In this sense, resentment has a particularly important political valence: it allows us to rethink what it means to act in the world. It allows us to see that we don’t necessarily need to forgive and forget in order to be free. Nietzsche’s musings on ressentiment were not unlike that of the conservatives who came before him. He found in Edmund Burke an unrestrained resentment that moves the masses to insolence or, worse, lawlessness. Warning about the utopians who pervert the natural order of things, a good society for Burke was one in which the inferior classes were subservient to the expert, the wise, and the wealthy. Burke emphasized the role of sentiments like prudence and deference in retaining the delicate balance of an orderly society, wherein “the magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority.” Reflecting on the intellectual ferment bubbling in the streets of Revolutionary France, Burke laments that “writings and sermons have filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind.”31 Burke’s multitude were not “swinish,” or greedy, by nature. By “corrupting the common people with the spoil of the superior classes,’’ the radical sects of Paris had drawn out their most unvirtuous passions.32 That is, Burke took the resentful masses as an instrument at the disposal of their more calculating leaders, rather than as actors in their own right. Yet Burke and the other conservative thinkers who pilloried the French Revolution touch on an incessant feature of democracy. Namely, that once democratic passions are unleashed, everyone thinks they can get above their station and no institution or tradition is above reproach. Indeed, they reignite a two thousand year-old gripe with democracy, a regime that has haunted every skeptic since Plato wrote that “it makes the souls of the citizens sensitive, so that if they come close to anything with a whiff of slavery, they become resentful and won’t put up with it . . . they end up with no respect at all for the law.”33 Plato captures the spirit of democracy, that is, the spirit of freedom, with the concept of resentment. The politics of resentment is a politics of sheer anarchy (and ultimately tyranny) in Plato’s dialogues. Much like Plato’s assessment of the democratic man, Burke saw that the French no longer had any self-restraint, let alone politesse. They rebelled against a “mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known.”34 It was clear to Burke that the manipulation of a thoroughly social resentment had turned his hierarchical world upside down. In a world where politics depended on moral authority, this petulant emotion vitiated respect for one’s superiors and destabilized politics itself. Like Nietzsche a century later, Burke hollows out the radical potential of resentment by reducing it to the basest of passions and a petty desire for the assets and attributes that belonged to the upper classes. Framed and developed within a period of social struggle, this concept warded off claims from the burgeoning mass-based movements of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Yet in silencing this kind of social suffering, the conservatives inadvertently reopen the question of this emotion’s insurgent force. If resentment, or indeed ressentiment, disrupts entrenched patterns of obedience, can we really write it off as pathological or otherwise anti-political? Today, the concept is reserved to explain a rather different phenomenon to democracy, that is, the resurgence of the right. As political entrepreneurs roll out campaigns that scapegoat job-stealing migrants and demonize the liberal state for holding open the door, scholars across disciplines have theorized their success as hinging on the mobilization of ressentiment. Wendy Brown, for instance, moving away from her earlier conviction that left-wing identity politics is characterized by this affliction, revives Nietzschean ressentiment for the present in this way. Recognizing that there must be a missing link between economic anxiety and the shift to the right, she argues that, in recent years, this emotion is born from the “dethronement” of the white working or middle-class male by offshored union factory jobs and disappearing affordable housing. Yet Brown points a finger at ressentiment as the poisoned seed that only flowers a bitter fruit. No longer able to live up to his ascribed social identity, she writes, the white man turns “angry, amoral, and impetuous, spurred by unavowed humiliation and thirst for revenge . . . easily exploited by plutocrats, rightwing politicians, and tabloid media moguls whipping it up and keeping it stupid.”35 On first blush, this is a curious shift; once wielded by Nietzsche in a critique of the desire for equality, ressentiment is now supposed to explain decidedly inegalitarian movements. Once again, I am less interested in pinning down once and for all whether this emotion leads to a certain kind of politics than with asking, in the vein of Ann Laura Stoler, what kind of political work a concept like resentment does. Stoler tells us that sentiments are key to tracking the mechanisms that underlie relations of dominance. She takes sentiments to be “relational measures of comparative worth and value,” which “instantiate prior relations of unequal worth,” but more importantly, are also “productive of those assignments.” In other words, emotions such as impertinence, shame, disgust, and contempt designate who is high and low. These concepts perform important normative work: they “mark who should act subordinately to whom” and, therefore, when that assignment has been transgressed.36 The concept of resentment seems to perform similar functions whether it is used to describe the left or the right. For one, from Nietzsche’s agonizing over democracy to the contemporary criticisms of the far right, this concept conjures up the image of hordes of individuals shepherded by intellectuals, pundits, and politicians. Casted out into the realm of idealists and ideologues, the concept pins the charge of irrationality to the man of ressentiment. This emotion becomes a pathological or even ontological problem since it seems almost impossible to bring the man of ressentiment over to the correct side. Even when scholars like Brown accurately locate the structural conditions behind discontent, the man of ressentiment can easily transform into another kind of scapegoat and allow the left to avoid reckoning with its own failures. In so doing, the ressentiment thesis risks replicating the very motions it so vehemently criticizes.37 But more than that, contemporary critics of ressentiment double down on the old problem of this concept—they assume that ressentiment has no place in good politics, that only the right has any use for it. Resentment may well take on forms that are utterly distasteful to us. But to claim that ressentiment always leads to authoritarianism is to evacuate this emotion of its political potential. As Nietzsche himself recognized with much horror, ressentiment paved the way for democracy in the modern world by shaking the very foundations of morality previously known. It dug the world up at its root and planted in it something altogether different. As a challenge in one way or another to the prevailing order of things, this radical negativity is likely to appear excessive or unjustified. But attempts to subject resentment to rational critique, to pathologize this excess as a form of ressentiment tend to obscure what gives resentment its political edge—its undecidability. None of this is to say that Trump supporters are not resentful, far from it. But this feeling alone cannot be blamed for the content of their grievances, many of which arise quite organically from the many miseries of American life. More to the point, the xenophobia, racism, and general cruelty that characterize the Make America Great Again movement are not in any way an inevitable corollary of ressentiment. As this brief foray into a democratic ressentiment demonstrates, this emotion has no predetermined relationship to any one typology of politics even as it invariably produces some kind of a challenge to the status quo. * * * The term resentment bears the load of Nietzsche’s ressentiment to such an extent that it has become rather difficult to carve out a separate meaning for resentment in our everyday lexicon. Albert Camus’ resentment, for instance, is just as weak, insecure, and unhealthy as ressentiment. While rebellion “is the principle of superabundant activity,” he writes, “resentment is always resentment against oneself.”38 Yet there is another side to the story. Though often obscured by the Nietzschean approaches, Adam Smith’s resentment is a useful and even salutary feeling. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his own genealogy, Smith argues that this emotion is the only one capable of seeing that justice is served. Smith’s resentment inculcates a desire for punishment in us. It has a disciplinary function; it works to “bring him [the perpetrator] back to a more just sense of what is due to other people, to make him sensible of what he owes us, and of the wrong he has done to us.”39 Smith’s resentment is far from an impotent, mindless cry for revenge. By attributing responsibility or blame to the wrongdoer, resentment helps remedy injustice and restore order—a stark contrast to the imaginary revenge of Nietzsche’s ressentiment. Smith is largely sympathetic to this sentiment, yet he goes on to make every effort to contain this “consciousness of ill-desert” in a palatable form. He argues that resentment can only gain us social approval when it is moderated. “Nothing,” Smith contends, “is more graceful than the behavior of the man who appears to resent the greatest injuries, more from a sense that they deserve [it] . . . than from feeling himself the furies of that disagreeable passion.”40 That is, the injured party must steel themselves to appear reasoned, impartial, judge-like. This is a normative move. It makes a judgement about when and where resentment is appropriate. Ultimately, Smith “tames” resentment, as Jeremy Engels puts it, making what was considered an ungovernable emotion, “governable.”41 This tendency to delimit ‘good’ from ‘bad’ resentment is thrown into clearer resolution still by an earlier positive conceptualization in Christian thought. Bishop Butler begins a sermon on resentment with a paradox—why would God imbue us with a feeling that is so hostile to forgiveness, a central tenet of Christianity? He goes on to resolve this problem by arguing that resentment is a morally sound emotion so long as it does not transform into an unnatural vice. As Butler explains, when resentment begins to destroy our benevolence toward our neighbor “it is excessive.” When resentment is “indulged or gratified for itself,” rather than in the service of some greater good, it “becomes malice or revenge,” which is “quite another thing” to our natural, God-given resentment.42 This represents Butler’s own attempt to rid resentment of its excesses and, to do so, he has to reckon with resentment as a first-person emotion. Unlike indignation, a feeling that speaks to a wrongful attack on another, resentment is primarily about wrongs done to us. It can be selfish and indeed difficult to understand from another’s point of view. But Butler explains how resentment can be good when it turns us to what is right. Just as we need compassion to help the afflicted, he argues, we need resentment—always in appropriate proportions—to retaliate against past injuries and prevent future ones. The cool consideration of reason cannot move us in the same way. Likewise, Smith also decides what counts as a genuine cause for resentment. Smith’s resentment is sympathetic only to the extent that it responds to the “proper” object, that is, a clear moral violation as defined by prevailing ideas of right and wrong.43 In this way, Smith naturalizes resentment as an emotion that “nature has implanted in the human breast,” one that encourages us to self-regulate our conduct and conform to those very norms.44 Nietzsche himself may well have been horrified by this kind of attempt to circumscribe our morality and predetermine how we act in the world. Yet he did not shy away from making his own judgements about resentment nor any form of politics that it gives rise to. While Nietzsche recognized that ressentiment underwrote the radically egalitarian movements of his time, he never conceded that it amounted to true action. He reduced the earth-shattering potential of this emotion to a reflex of weakness, hell bent on taking the world down with it. That is to say, Nietzsche and Smith, each in their own way, resign themselves to the notion that the most volatile forms of resentment are nothing but trouble. Though Smith’s approach is not quite as fashionable as Nietzsche’s today, some moral philosophers have followed the former’s lead in attempting to decide on the legitimate boundaries of this feeling. To rescue the emotion in this way, a few have tried to distill the differentia specifica of resentment vis-à-vis ressentiment. Jeffrie Murphy for instance writes that while resentment is a testimony to the fact that we care about our dignity and our rights, “ressentiment, by definition, is an irrational and base passion.”45 Some have even argued that Nietzsche misdiagnosed the slave revolt and democracy as a symptom of ressentiment when they really embody a more righteous resentment, but that this does not necessarily mean that we should throw out his concept all together.46 That is, they suggest that ressentiment better captures the forces which animate the right today, while resentment is a more appropriate term for those past visions of a better world for all. By delineating ressentiment as its pathological underside, resentment becomes decidedly dignified and restorative. But it is always risky; it can overstate or misjudge the cause of an injury and it can degenerate into a debilitating state of vengefulness. A few rather unusual philosophical accounts have complicated this distinction between resentment and ressentiment, however. Jean Améry, a self-professed man of ressentiment, acknowledged that this emotion “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Yet he never makes a Nietzschean effort to let go of those things that cannot be changed. Ressentiment for Améry reflects the judgment that no punishment, reparation, nor passage of time could overcome the evils of the Holocaust. Drawing on Améry, Thomas Brudholm contends that the imperative to forgive in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, may be misguided, since resentment can signal a reflex of moral protest by victims. He shows how Améry chose ressentiment over forgiveness and deliberately embraced the negative connotations of this feeling. However, as Brudholm writes of Améry, “it soon becomes clear that the ressentiments to be justified are claimed to be of a ‘special kind,’ known by ‘neither Nietzsche nor Max Scheler.’” Améry’s ressentiment is less about vengeance and more about dignity. It holds a legitimate moral component that continually refers back to the perpetrator “in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”48 By highlighting this productive role, Brudholm claims that it is wrong to disparage or simply ignore a victim’s deep-seated resentment. Accounts like Brudholm’s helpfully blur the moral line between resentment and ressentiment. This is important, because, as Didier Fassin puts it, injury-based emotions urge us “rethink what we take for granted about the distinction between the bright side and the dark side of our moral world.”49 Ressentiment is indeed a more ambivalent emotion than previously thought, however, these interventions generally identify the moral rather than political function of this emotion. Morality is not exactly what makes resentment a political emotion. My intention here, then, is not simply to politicize the affirmative moral conception of resentment/ressentiment found in thinkers like Smith and Améry. Indeed, morality is a troublesome starting point, because this concept often marks registers of suffering that are illegible to prevailing ideas of right and wrong. Alice MacLachlan has made this point clear in suggesting that the over-moralizing paradigm presented by philosophers like Murphy is altogether too limited by its tendency to write off resentments that are not easily recognizable as a moral claim. “Cleaning up” resentment of its unreasonable outbursts or grudge-holding tendencies, she argues, will “dismiss the anger of the most vulnerable, those least likely to have their needs and interests represented in a dominant social and moral framework.”50 MacLachlan draws on Alison Jaggar’s “outlaw” emotions, emotions that are not readily articulated as expressions of moral protest here. Often experienced by subordinate groups, Western epistemology has relegated certain feelings to the pathological borderlands— to use one of Jaggar’s examples “resentment rather than gratitude for welfare payments and hand-me-downs.”51 Our shared moral language may initially fail to make sense of this. The recipient feels a sense of injustice, but she is not supposed to and she just cannot find the appropriate words to sustain her claim. Yet in bringing to consciousness our gut-level awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, or danger concealed by moral niceties, these subversive emotions may form the basis of a counterculture when recognized by others who feel the same. Seen this way, resentment holds the potential to do more than reinstate the norms that have been transgressed. Seizing on the contradiction between the way things are and the way one feels things should be, this emotion promises to transform as well as critique the world around it. MacLachlan makes an important point. She puts her finger on the shortcoming of the Smithian approaches, namely that beginning from an abstract, normative paradigm tends to discredit the unpleasant, aggressive, or hysterical resentments of the most marginalized. Yet this is not only a moral or epistemological problem, but also a political one. Any account that attempts to decide once and for all what counts as a legitimate form of resentment is an attempt to foreclose its latent possibilities. Take, for instance, something that is almost always excluded from the idea of a just resentment. Faithful to the Nietzschean tradition, most contemporary accounts of this emotion maintain that the reframing of weakness as a virtue and strength as a vice amounts to little more than a petty desire to cut the strong down to size. But what if there is more to this move than a simple inversion? What if, as Nietzsche recognizes even as he scorns it, this kind of radical negativity is an important part of any democratic vision of the world in which no one is a master? What if democracy requires us to put the powerful in their place? To manage resentment’s excess by pre-determining which forms are rational or otherwise legitimate risks losing its revolutionary energy. Even the messiest parts of this emotion, including those deemed to be a form of ressentiment, might reshape our outlook in ways that allow us to create new beginnings. If this is the case, no one has the right to decide a priori what a political resentment looks like. Taking, then, a decidedly un-decided definition of resentment, consider how Carolyn Steedman evokes this feeling in Landscape for a Good Woman, a tale of the wanting of things and “the structures of political thought that have labeled this wanting as wrong.” Steedman tells the story of her mother, Edna, who was raised in a booming Lancashire cotton town to expect more than what her life in 1950s London had to offer. Edna felt the injuries of the British social system and “embodied fierce resentment against the unfairness of things.” Edna expressed that resentment against her own children. “We children,” Steedman notes, “were expensive items.” The cold, self-indulgent bitterness with which Steedman was made into a burden makes for an easy example of an outlaw emotion. Bound up with an unfulfilled desire “for a full skirt that took twenty yards of cloth,” Edna’s resentment was trivial at best and sinful at worst. It was not intelligible even to the British left.52 Despite growing up in a traditional Labour-voting household, Edna’s feelings never translated into a lucid class politics. Her turn to Conservatism did not come from a place of deference or traditionalism, but of resentment. In a commentary on this text, Stoler characterizes Edna’s conservatism as a “bitter defiance,” a radical rejection of what was expected of her class.53 Still, from the perspective of the Labour party, Edna’s defiance looks a lot like ressentiment. It kicks and screams but ultimately amounts to a kind of false consciousness. To dismiss Edna’s defiance as ‘merely’ ressentiment or reactive, however, is to miss the point. As Steedman so eloquently puts it, “beneath the voices of class-consciousness may perhaps lie another language, that might be heard to express the feelings of those outside the gate.”54 When we open the concept of resentment and make room for the voice of the dispossessed, we can hear that something is deeply wrong. Even though Edna had no right to feel that way, her resentment discloses how power works in the world. Her resentment forms the stuff of politics that Stoler names “politicality”—a potential for something to be charged with new stakes and new demands.55 Indeed, this is precisely what makes resentment a political emotion: it is tenuous and it has the potential to move in different directions. It is never doomed from the outset. I bring this entry to an end by returning to where it began: the resentment of the malheureux, that has haunted the conservative imaginary since 1789. As we recalled at the outset, Arendt argued that Robespierre had set the Reign of Terror in motion the moment he gave into resentment and surrendered his initial commitment to freedom to the urgent needs of the people. At this turning point of the French Revolution, and indeed every Revolution that was to follow, he transformed the Rights of Man into the rights of the sans-culottes. Unable to afford the silk knee-breeches, or culottes, donned by both the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie, the sans-culottes were defined by their lack of this status symbol. While this highly politicized part of the Parisian producing classes fought alongside the Jacobins against the aristocracy, the sans-culottes had grievances of their own that bound them together as a collective actor. As Karl Kautsky writes,
In short, the sans-culottes were bound by their resentment for anyone, old or new, who lorded over them, including those who purported to act on their behalf. Thinkers like Arendt, though, remained convinced that their resentment represented little more than a knee-jerk reaction to hunger. Reflecting her distrust of the social and the ‘unreasonable’ demands it makes on politics, she closes off the political potential of this emotion by reducing it to a cry for bread. A series of sans-culottean petitions to the Estates General during this period challenge the idea that their resentment was ‘merely’ social. Written in the name of day laborers, craftsmen, and others without property, one member of the sans-culottes stated that “among the elected representatives there is not one of our class and it seems that everything has been done only to the advantage of the rich.”57 Another complained about the exclusion of the non-propertied classes from the Estates General, asking “aren’t we too men, French citizens?”58 These statements, suffused with resentment, are about more than bread. Without breaking cleanly from the social, the sans-culottes make a clear political claim that introduces a conflict into the very idea of the people as told by the leaders of the Revolution. In a Rancièrean demand for a recount, they declare a “simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them.”59 Resentment, that is to say, reveals a contradiction in society and disrupts the order that defines what counts as a legitimate grievance. Once again, the moment of resentment is a moment of the political itself. As their resentment took center stage, the poor began to loudly and publicly castigate the rich as greedy and callous. They became politicized against their class enemy in the emergent bourgeoisie, ransacking marketplaces and factories across the city. Even when they won key concessions like the fixed price for bread, ill feeling toward the rich did not wane. As Arendt comments, “everybody had become convinced that only naked need and interest were without hypocrisy.”60 Arendt is not entirely uncharitable here. Once the lingering resentment of the rich had become the order of the day, poverty was glorified as a token of virtue, as demonstrated in the address of one sans-culottean society before the Convention in 1793 that opened with the line, “we are sans-culottes . . . poor and virtuous.”61 Just like the men of ressentiment as conceptualized by Nietzsche, the sans-culottes reinscribed attributes that they could not possess under the prevailing order with a moral baseness. Anyone who flaunted the stereotypical traits of wealth, anyone who was better-dressed or better-educated than the little men on the fringes of Parisian society was subject to oversight and condemnation. In reports justifying the arrest of suspects under the Jacobin dictatorship, even certain sentiments like disdain were taken to be the mark of the real enemies of the Revolution. There is no use in attempting to write out the nastier parts of this history, namely that the sans-culottes’ resentment was bound up with a desire for purification and violent punishment. The aim here is not to draw a line under the bloody hunt for enemies during the Terror as either a legitimate or illegitimate form of resentment. Rather, the point is that we must learn to sit with the discomfort of resentment, which can be, at times, profoundly generative. The sans-culottes’ simmering negativity, their ‘no’ to superiority, was the source of their unwavering commitment to exposing the rotten core of society, but also of their creative originality. Resentment is an alternative way of acting in the world, even if it is always bound up with reaction. Indeed, the sans-culottes reshaped the political ideals of the Revolution in a way that reflected their own class-based resentments. Testament to their influence on the course of politics, by the Revolutionary Year II ‘aristocrat’ was no longer just a legal term reserved for those of noble blood. It became a catch-all accusation for anyone who made no effort to further the cause of the Revolution, anyone who refused to offer work for fair wages, or indeed anyone with any money at all.62 That is to say, the meaning of this word was extended to encompass all social classes that the sans-culottes perceived as adversaries in their struggle against hierarchy. The poor, in short, had made a mortal enemy out of the rich. But in doing so, they had redefined the people itself. The sans-culottes’ resentment functioned as a distinctly political force, one that rewrote the very terms of inclusion and revolutionary virtue, not only in the French Revolution but in many revolutions that followed. The case of the sans-culottes tells us something about how resentment tends to be conceptualized more generally. This emotion is often marked out as a kind of excess—a feeling that lies beyond the border of a ‘good’ politics that routinely puts that very border into question. What thinkers like Arendt get wrong is a refusal to afford it any political significance. She puts resentment down as a near hysterical reaction, a defect of a collective mind inflamed by hunger. By treating resentment as a pollutant to be purged from political life, Arendt reproduces the very logic that resentment resists, that is, the allocation of fixed roles and places or the policing of who counts. Moreover, the attempt to eliminate resentment entirely amounts to an attempt to end any kind of disruption, that is, to end politics itself. Any effort to excise resentment in the name of political purity will always fail so long as suffering exists in the world. This emotion persists as a constitutive remainder, a symptom of unredressed demands. *** This article has challenged the idea that we need to liberate ourselves from resentment, which is also to say, ressentiment. Perhaps this is the ultimate Nietzschean move insofar as it is an invitation to accept something that is here to stay. But if resentment is a constitutive part of political life, how can we ever become actional like the child in Thus Spoke Zarathustra? How can we affirm our own strength, dignity, and creativity while obsessed with revenge? I suspect this problem ranks among the many that will never be resolved in final. But to accept only affirmative, autonomous action as properly political is to foreclose the possibilities for an emotion like resentment in advance. It is to declare, as Nietzsche does, that true action must be cleansed of resentment and that politics must be somehow disentangled from the wounds that give rise to it. This is precisely the injunction we must resist if we are to learn to work with egalitarian and participatory democratic practices that begin with a wrong. In the final analysis, resentment cannot be neatly sorted into the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ precisely because its expressions that are too readily consigned to the pathological may nonetheless reshape our worldview and open the possibility of new beginnings. Resentment becomes a truly political concept to the extent that it names a mode of feeling charged with a radical potential, a mode of disruption that can take on remarkably different forms. Indeed, resentment may be the sense of the political itself, though what that looks like can never be known in advance. This is an emotion that constantly changes and whose shape, crucially, is determined in and through political struggle. Reading resentment in this way means finding a space of undecidability rather than identifying a telos, be it liberation or oppression. Unless we resist fatalistic accounts of this emotion, we deliver resentment to those who are more than willing to engage with it. Acknowledgements: I thank Andreas Kalyvas, Ann Laura Stoler, J.M. Bernstein, Sandipto Dasgupta, George Shulman, Jonah Inserra, Helia Faezipour, two anonymous reviewers, and, finally, the participants of the 2022 Political Concepts Conference held at The New School for Social Research for all their comments and support at various stages of this project.
Published on September 5, 2025 * Clover Reshad * 1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, [1963] 1990), 110.↩ 2. Ibid.↩ 3. Arendt argues that revenge instigates an irreversible cycle of violence, whereas forgiveness releases the power that the past holds over us. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 216; cited in J.M. Bernstein, “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel’s Poetics of Action,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56.↩ 4. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 111.↩ 5. Ibid., 73.↩ 6. A brief note on my approach to the study of emotion more broadly. Affect theorists are often at great pains to delineate affects from emotions, feelings, sentiments, and so on. In this article, I am less interested in engaging with this debate and more interested in how resentment works as a political concept.↩ 7. Cynthia Fleury, Here Lies Bitterness: Healing from Resentment, trans. Corey Stockwell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023), 191.↩ 8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 31, 51.↩ 9. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 114.↩ 10. See Jeffrie Murphy, “Moral Epistemology, the Retributive Emotions, and the ‘Clumsy Moral Philosophy’ of Jesus Christ,” in The Passions of Law, ed. S. Bandes (New York: NYU Press, 2000). William Connolly views resentment as an abundant source of energy for friendly, democratic struggle, but he views ressentiment as an existential condition that moves us to hate difference (Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], xxi). Michael Ure argues that the slave revolt was actually a form of “socio-political resentment,” which is a legitimate response to collective injustice, as opposed to “ontological” ressentiment, which is against life itself (“Resentment/Ressentiment,” Constellations 22:4 [2015], 599–613).↩ 11. In his recent book, Sjoerd van Tuinen offers a persuasive critique of polemical attacks on ressentiment, including Nietzsche’s. He ultimately calls for a “diplomat” figure who has a “detoxifying task” ahead of him: to diagnose and “transmute” ressentiment “instead of merely confirming” it (The Dialectic of Ressentiment: Pedagogy of a Concept [New York: Routledge, 2024], 272, 277). This differs from the approach I pursue in this article. While van Tuinen approaches ressentiment as a polemical concept, I attempt to think through some of the varied political forms resentment can take. I approach resentment as a concept that exceeds attempts to predetermine those political forms.↩ 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, [1887] 1989), Essay 1.↩ 13. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. and ed. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 111.↩ 14. Nietzsche argued that the past “returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment” and that creativity requires us to forget, which is an active force (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. and ed. Peter Preuss [Bloomington: Hackett Publishing, (1874) 1980], 61; see also 64).↩ 15. Francis Barlow, “The Fox and the Grapes,” in Aesop’s Fables with His Life: in English, French and Latin, trans. Aphra Behn (London: H. Hills, 1687), 187.↩ 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, §10.↩ 17. Ibid., §13.↩ 18. As Nietzsche writes, “somebody must be to blame if one suffers—in short that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish” (The Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici [London: Allen and Unwin, 1927], §34).↩ 19. Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet, trans. Gregor Benton (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Losurdo takes an antithetical approach to that of Nietzsche’s well-known interlocutor Walter Kaufmann, who reads Nietzsche as an apolitical philosopher whose ideas can nonetheless be reconciled with emancipatory politics.↩ 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, [1901] 1968), §752.↩ 21. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote: “‘Equality,’ a certain definite process of making everybody uniform . . . is essentially bound up with a declining culture: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be one’s self and to distinguish one’s self—that, in fact, which I call the pathos of distance is proper to all strong ages” (The Twilight of the Idols, §37).↩ 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow in Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §292. Cited in Lawrence J. Hatab, “Nietzsche, Democracy, and Excellence,” International Studies in Philosophy 32:3 (2000), 45.↩ 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §954.↩ 24. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. and ed. H.L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf [1895], 1931), §54.↩ 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §100.↩ 26. Ibid., §864.↩ 27. Ibid., §209.↩ 28. “A high civilization is a pyramid” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §57).↩ 29. Jan Rehmann, Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism: Deleuze and Foucault, trans. Kolja Swingle and Larry Swingle (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 46.↩ 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, §10..↩ 31. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1790] 2003), 129.↩ 32. Edmund Burke to Florimond-Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, circa August 6, 1793, in Selected Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. H.C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 330.↩ 33. Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 563d.↩ 34. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 33.↩ 35. Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” in Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 75.↩ 36. Ann Laura Stoler, Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 49.↩ 37. As Fredric Jameson so neatly surmises, the theory of ressentiment “is itself the sign and the product of ressentiment.” This is to say, ressentiment may reveal a conservative thread, a scorn for popular protest, in arguments that are ostensibly concerned with liberty (see his “Authentic Ressentiment: The ‘Experimental’ Novels of Gissing,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31:2 [1976], 143.↩ 38. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (London: Penguin Modern Classics, [1951] 1982), 22.↩ 39. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1759] 2004), 113.↩ 40. Ibid., 64, 89, 101, 200.↩ 41. Jeremy Engels recognizes that “the art of politics in the West has been concerned with controlling, normalizing, manipulating, and taming civic resentment so that it does not explode into revolutionary acts.” Yet, in the end, he calls on “citizens to take action rather than be resigned to the politics of resentment,” because he views this emotion as a threat to the demos, especially when it morphs into a ressentiment that is easily abused by opportunists (see The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy [Penn State: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025], 57, 19, 22).↩ 42. Bishop Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, ed. David McNaughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1896] 2017), 78, 77, 69; emphasis added. See also Ernesto V. Garcia, “Bishop Butler on Forgiveness and Resentment,” Philosophers’ Imprint 9:10 (2011): 1–19.↩ 43. Amia Srinivasan treats anger in a similar way. For Srinivasan, anger is an act that communicates an injustice, but “for S’s anger that p to be apt it must be that p involves a genuine moral violation” (“The Aptness of Anger,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 26:2 [2018], 8).↩ 44. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 89, 200, 101. ↩ 45. Jeffrie Murphy, “Moral Epistemology, the Retributive Emotions, and the ‘Clumsy Moral Philosophy’ of Jesus Christ,” 152.↩ 46. In a slightly different way to the moral philosophers previously mentioned, Max Scheler’s famous essay on ressentiment can be located here. Characterizing the feeling in familiar terms as a “a self-poisoning of the mind . . . caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions,” Scheler contends that Christianity cannot be reduced to ressentiment, as Christian love, instantiated in sacrifice for the sick and poor, exists on a plane above reaction. In Christ we find the sublime that we can aspire to. Ressentiment, Scheler argues, better explains the emergence of bourgeois society and its tenets of thrift, humanitarian love, and utility as the benchmark of value. Not entirely dissimilar from Nietzsche’s own critique of capitalism as a utilitarian system, Scheler is also suspicious of its flattening of values (Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim, ed. M.S. Frings (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, [1912] 1994).↩ 47. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 68.↩ 48. Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 12; 121.↩ 49. Fassin locates resentment in a morally grey area. He differentiates resentment from ressentiment, yet, interestingly, he flips the normal valence of the two terms. For Fassin, ressentiment names a reaction to “historical facts of domination” that we tend to see in victims of genocide. Ressentiment, he argues, demands recognition over revenge. He relates resentment, on the other hand, to a sociological position that causes frustration. He argues that we see it in police officers and supporters of the far right. This emotion “blurs reality,” as it is frequently misdirected to the “wrong sources,” including vulnerable groups. It is a much more vindictive emotion. Fassin critiques normative accounts of these emotions, though I suggest that any attempt to differentiate resentment and ressentiment risks slipping into this territory (Didier Fassin, “On Resentment and Ressentiment,” Current Anthropology 54:3 [2013], 249–267).↩ 50. Alice MacLachlan, “Resentment and Moral judgment in Smith and Butler,” in The Philosophy of Adam Smith, ed. Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (London: Routledge, 2010), 428.↩ 51. Alison Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Inquiry 32:2 (1989), 166.↩ 52. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 23, 30, 39.↩ 53. Ann Laura Stoler, “On Being Shorn of Grace: Sentiments of Inequality,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 89:2 (2022), 460.↩ 54. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 114.↩ 55. Ann Laura Stoler, Interior Frontiers, 111.↩ 56. Karl Kautsky, “The Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution,” in Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, trans. and ed. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Leiden: Brill [1889] 2009), 538–9.↩ 57. Cited in Karl Grünberg, Archiv fur die Geschichte des Socialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 1 (Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1979), 447.↩ 58. Cited in Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille: July 14th 1789, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 136.↩ 59. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 8.↩ 60. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 110.↩ 61. Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 5.↩ 62. Ibid., 6.↩ |
