The Polemics of Ressentiment

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 ‘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?

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