Confirmed speakers: Joseph Cohen\, Saul Newman\, Robert Pfaller\, Guillaume \;Sibertin-Blanc\, Frank Vande Veire\, Guido Vanheeswijck
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 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 \;&lsquo\;explosions&rsquo\; 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&rsquo\;t it Nietzsche&rsquo\;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&rsquo\;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&rsquo\;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 papers of 20 minutes 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 at \;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\, bureaucratic organizations 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&rsquo\;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&rsquo\;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 about ressentiment?
-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&rsquo\;s essential relation to (messianic) \;time?
-Is ressentiment the father or the child of modernity?
This conference is organized by Sjoerd van Tuinen (www.svtuinen.nl) and the \;Centre for Art and Philosophy (CAP\, \;www.caponline.org) with the financial \;support of the Netherlands Scientific Research Organisation (NWO) and the \;Trust Fund foundation
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