The Polemics of Ressentiment

A two-day transdisciplinary conference

Erasmus University Rotterdam, 17-18 May 2014

The rise of populism, cynicism, fanaticism and fundamentalism challenges us to reconsider the problem of ressentiment, characterized by Nietzsche as the self-poisoning of the will by way of interiorization of an injury or trauma in the form of a postponed and imaginary revenge. Whereas its conceptualization dates back to the nineteenth century and has gradually dissolved in the course of twentieth century emancipatory processes, the concept of ressentiment is now making a comeback in political discourse. The aim of this conference is to dramatize the polemogenous and thus essentially divergent senses in which the concept of ressentiment has and can be used today.

Ever since Scheler, we have often been told that, throughout modern history, ressentiment has been the basic affective pathology of ideologies of protest on the left and the right. From Romanticism to Jacobinism, from Marxism to National-Socialism, and from feminism to post-colonialism, in each case ‘explosions’ of envious but impotent anger would explain why utopian struggle unavoidably leads to violent dystopia. Thus it has become a platitude of liberal conservative discourse that we should give up the militant passions of egalitarian struggle and content ourselves with the jaded realism of global capitalism in order to put an end to the dialectical cycle of ressentiment. But what if the self-gratification of anti-ressentiment rhetoric stems from a depoliticizing psychologism that is itself laden with ressentiment? Wasn’t it Nietzsche’s lesson that moral pacification is precisely the way by which the priest changes the outward direction of the ressentiment of his herd inwardly, thus organizing bad conscience? Indeed, does neo-liberalism not cultivate ressentiment as a strategy of control, a tactic fostering of sad passions such as envy, hope, nostalgia, indignation and anxiety in people who, in the name of an exhaustive self-preservation that leaves all utopian critique in its wake, will renounce their own power and give in to secrecy and cowardice, turning their guilt inward and their hatred outward?

As Sennett has famously argued, a passive receiving of publicness has condemned isolated and disempowered citizens to the indifference and loss of critical judgment typical of the man of ressentiment. With Girard, we may add that today’s citizens live in a global winner-take-all-society that subjects its members to ruthless competition while imposing on them a taboo on revenge. There has emerged a cultural industry that, alternating between sentimentality and cruelty, has private resignation and public spectacle, victimhood and identity claims converge. Rather than judging over revolutionary politics by reducing it to some self-discrediting ressentiment, then, shouldn’t we seek to explain and overcome this subjective identification with impotence as a prison we choose to live in? Perhaps the political problem of ressentiment is not the alternative of revolutionary hatred and counterrevolutionary remorse, but the genealogical question first raised by Spinoza: why do we often fight for our own slavery as if it were our beatitude?

Call for papers

We invite 20 minute papers from philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies, social and political theory, sociology, cognitive science, social psychology, history, comparative literature, psychoanalysis and other relevant disciplines. Please send a 300 words abstract to Monique Goense, 323450mg@student.eur.nl before 28 February 2014.

Possible questions to be addressed:

-What is the relation between morality, justice and ressentiment today?

-What are the main media and institutions by which ressentiment is currently organized (e.g. religion, ideology, financial debt)?

-How do judicial practices and forms of political democracy stir and/or attenuate ressentiment?

-If there exists an intrinsic link between ressentiment and theoretical critique, then how does one address ressentiment critically and clinically, i.e. without further fueling ressentiment?

-What are the differences between Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment and later conceptions (Weber, Scheler, Adorno & Horkheimer, Girard, Sennett, Dworkin, Rawls, Deleuze, Connolly, Sloterdijk etc.)?

-Are there philosophical precursors to the concept of ressentiment (e.g. Spinoza’s theory of the sad passions, Augustine on envy etc.)?

-Or neuro-political equivalents?

-What do writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Osborne, Albert Camus, Jean Amery, Michel Houellebecq and W.G. Sebald teach us aboutressentiment?

-Can ressentiment be overcome and by what techniques (e.g. forgiveness)?

-How does ressentiment relate to other affective constellations such as shame, guilt, bad conscience, disgust, anger, envy, hatred, fear, suspicion, paranoia, narcissism, cynicism?

-What is the nature of ressentiment’s essential relation to (messianic) time?

-Is ressentiment the father or the child of modernity?