Ressentiment and its Vicissitudes
Nietzsche, Benjamin and Wendy Brown on pain, revenge, history and overcoming
For Nietzsche, ressentiment — a festering hatred and vengefulness — articulates a particular mode of satisfaction. This is the satisfaction of the mutilated, the scorched and the crucified; it is what consoles the bleeding, powerless masses of humanity. Thousands of years ago, there was another, additional satisfaction — that of the aristocrats who, in triumph, exalted their distinction above the tortured multitude, lavishing themselves in glory. The aristocrats’ gleeful indulgence in bestial cruelties, whole ‘rampages of murder, arson, rape and torture’, structured the social distribution of the two satisfactions (GM, 32-34). Ressentiment was, indeed, a function of the aristocrats’ festivals of atrocity: the lowly human beings that suffered in these carnivals ‘instinctively’ generated the vengeful hatreds comprising ressentiment to displace, to numb, their terrible pain (GM, 25, 113). This instinctual reaction therefore indexes an inability to overthrow domination with superior force, to launch an armed revolution; ressentiment is — more exactly — the flesh’s substitute for such emancipatory self-assertion.
An outward explosion of these turbulent feelings of hatred and vengefulness is ‘the original, the beginning, the authentic act’ of the satisfaction that they provide (GM, 28). The ressentiment of the masses torn apart in the aristocrats’ rampages attained specificity and became creative in the moral vilification of the lords of torment as ‘Evil’. Enjoyment was derived, by way of an exploitation of the metaphysics of agency petrified in the texture of language, from the corollary of this: the oppressed class in whom ressentiment raged began to venerate itself as morally ‘Good’, having reinterpreted the gruesome abuses inflicted upon it into shining testaments to moral virtue. Corporeal pain was thereby made to vanish into the fundamentally narcissistic satisfaction provided by the moral ideology of sublimated ressentiment; the tortured bodies of the socially powerless were anesthesised, deadened, by a satisfaction in the imaginary revenge of Evil and Good. (Nietzsche’s broader historical thesis is that the whole edifice of modern morality is a fungus of ressentiment; on his account, the ruling moral ideas — the sinfulness of flesh, the freedom of will, the equality of souls, the celebration of weakness, the slander of reality — are all an outgrowth of this ignoble feeling.)
Of course, as a consequence of two thousand years of Western history, social domination is no longer organised as pure gleeful butchery. The displacement of the aristocratic horde’s bloody carnivals presents Nietzsche with an opportunity to elaborate a crucial political insight: if the sufferer does not spontaneously code a symptom to dislodge their own pain, a symptom like the moral universe of ressentiment (and not entirely unlike a dream, slip, joke or neurotic illness), then other forces will design and impose their own apparatuses of psychic satisfaction, dispense their own drugs. Nietzsche’s specific illustration of the social management of ressentiment is his genealogy of ascetic ideal as the biopolitical strategy of priestly rule. In this genealogical analysis, Nietzsche claims that the priests can only claim human life as the empire of their political power through an inward deflection of the oppressed masses’ seething ressentiment. (This is the nexus of the first and the third essays of Genealogy of Morals.) Indeed, a vengeful loathing totally infuses the ascetic turning of life against itself, the infinite ‘terror, frosts, fires and raptures’ into which the downtrodden enthusiastically plunge their bodies (GM, 103, 105). The subject of the ascetic ideal enjoys torturing itself because it experiences this agony as a sublime revenge against the Evil bodily drives — the vital passions that the priest ingeniously teaches are the twisted roots of all sin and all suffering (as opposed to real social forces). The priest educates a subject that, hooked on the jouissance of the ascetic ideal, seeps into a position of subservience, and thus capitulates to the reproduction and the reification of the wider social structure that guarantees this subjective position.
Clearly, though, the mode of enjoyment that Nietzsche examines with his concept of ressentiment would shrivel into nothing without an object to vilify. As Deleuze comments, ‘we can guess what the creature of ressentiment wants: he wants Evil, he needs Evil in order to be able to consider himself Good’ (NP, 119). Ressentiment therefore eventually atrophies into a pure psychic tie to the forces which incite and command it; a socially managed recrimination of Evil furthers domination precisely as the institution of an enjoyment, a satisfaction located far beyond the pleasure principle. Nietzsche’s portrayal of ressentiment as power biting into the psyche, as a mental life eaten through by social domination, is obviously far more sophisticated and productive than the boring right-wing cliche that high hopes for emancipation and justice are the superficial gleam hovering over a pit of envy, loathing and spite, mere shimmers. Rather, I think Nietzsche’s exposure of the continual reiteration of power in the subjectivities that it violently fabricates represents a powerful clarification of Adorno and Horkheimer’s allusion to ‘the pernicious love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them’: this love for a screaming planet, a ‘far greater force’ than brute repression, is inseparable from some configuration of socially rearticulated ressentiment (DE, 106). In all this, we see that the politics in Nietzsche’s dark world is not merely the blood and gore of mounted barricade and smoking cannon, the outer movements of unrest, revolution and war. Indeed, illuminated throughout Nietzsche's stunningly plural styles and his endless multiplication of voices, the exuberant play of signifier and signified and carnivalesque revolt against totality and transparency in the Nietzschean text, is politics streaming into the head — and, in large part, constituting the mind itself. As Nietzsche himself declares, the ‘greatest events’ are the ‘greatest thoughts’ (BGE, 285).
Presidents that are bloviating, pathetic excuses for primal fathers, the creeping electoral gains of nativist political parties, increasingly vicious police and border forces, the explosion of military-industrial power. It seems to me that the key measure of socially managed ressentiment today is this surge of neo-fascist reaction. Here is the decisive symptom of the painful impotence, loneliness and alienation of a totally administered world. The political formations of neo-fascism psychically mobilise recriminations of the already socially marginalised — refugees and migrants, transgender people, the wider working-class, ‘cultural Marxist’ intellectuals — for their supposed Evil. Neo-fascist politics distributes social virtue, anaesthetising enjoyment, through its flailing, paranoid accusations: the supposed wastage of dwindling state resources, the defilement of a mythic social cohesion, the alleged stripping away of childhood innocence. A politics rhetorically structured by these accusations drills ressentiment into the minds of its adherents — as a subjectivising separation from the Evil that it enunciates, neo-fascism is constitutive of a deep satisfaction in the ruling order, the planetary reign of torment. The slave revolt in morality now takes place at a Trump rally (as it did, maybe, at Nuremberg).
But, as Wendy Brown suggests in her strident critique of the ‘political articulation’ of identity in its ‘emancipatory mode’, ressentiment may also breach left-wing movements (SI, 53-55). Though Brown’s critique is interrogating formations of politics along axes of gender, sexuality, race and so on, she makes clear a disinterest in comprehensively determining the ‘general worth’ of what today circulates under the name ‘identity politics’ (SI, 55). Plainly, to be a woman, LGBT, or a member of a racial or religious minority fundamentally hurts — and, from a Nietzschean perspective, this pain demands its own management. As I take it, Brown’s basic assertion is that politicised identity is consolidated in a ‘reaction to’ such painful cruelty and humiliation, the social barbarism that is neo-fascism’s explicit program — hence, the enunciation of the political demands of identity is an ‘entrenching, restating, dramatising and inscribing [of] pain’ (SI, 70, 72). In this, however, Brown uncovers a genealogical structure of ressentiment: implicated in identity politics is a gratifying capture of ‘social virtue’, to the exact extent that this politics is a rhetoric of exclusion from and mutilation by an Evil world (SI, 71).
Brown’s Nietzschean polemic thus asserts that politically articulated identity — notwithstanding its real emancipatory achievements in the social field, the great monuments to its radical distinction from neo-fascism — is inextricable from ‘a wounded attachment’ to power (SI, 53). According to Brown, any political project rhetorically organised around an oppressed identity, after all a scar of the social order, will be stained by a disturbing jouissance — an obscure and obscene desire for Evil will stick to the very terms of such political struggle. While I am very cautious about Brown’s overall genealogical thesis about the politics of identity — its manifest risk is an excessive depreciation of genuinely heroic social movements — she undeniably succeeds in elaborating a decisive political problem. Brown’s polemical reworking of the Nietzsche’s problematic of ressentiment — which would, of course, mortify the legislator of grand politics — challenges the left to design and enact a relationship to the pain of the social world that avoids implanting a new psychic bond to the ruling order. For her own part, Brown argues that the proper political task is the total ‘disinvestment’ of identity from the past, a rebirth as Zarathustra’s ‘bridge to the future’ (SI, 72). As Brown is careful to emphasise, it would veer towards pure callousness to demand that the socially marginalised simply forget what they suffer — to assume the moral perspective of the barbarous Nietzschean aristocrat, whose own minor ressentiment instantly evaporated to clear the psychic space for (his) triumphant self-affirmation. Brown’s politics would be, instead, a shattering of identity by transforming the pain upon which it is founded into a ‘possibility’ for an active overcoming, a challenge to invent styles of political expression that simultaneously master and deplete the suffering constitutive of a ‘socially virtuous’ subjectivity (SI, 74-75).
With all this clarified, it is necessary to recall Benjamin’s searing charge against the Social Democrats in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, another argument with the left-wing’s relationship to the past and the suffering in which it consists. Benjamin charges that the Social Democrats’ appointment of ‘the struggling, oppressed class’ as the harbinger of a future humanity’s liberation teaches a forgetting of the knowledge deposited in this mass by the ‘one single catastrophe’ of historical progress, the heaping of rubble and piling of corpses as Paradise recedes further into the mists of prehistory (TPH, 257-58). This knowledge is an ‘image of enslaved ancestors’, of the crushed revolts of Roman slaves and Anabaptist peasants, of slaughtered workers in the streets of Paris and Berlin, of the fascist barbarism that engulfed Europe last century, and of — one must add — the global decimation of imperialism, from ancient colonial massacres to Vietnam and Iraq (TPH, 260). This memory of past pain, a true splinter in the eye, could ‘nourish’ a righteous hatred for a ruling class that has ‘never ceased to be victorious’ — and thus prepare for the revolutionary eruption of the Messianic in history (TPH, 265). Obviously, Benjamin is not counselling the proletarian to sink into the ressentiment attacked by Nietzsche. Benjamin’s politics of memory, clearly, is far closer to that presented in Brown: it bravely confronts the agony of history as an incitement to overcoming, a past to heroically triumph over. The wails of ghosts are not to be endlessly reinscribed in a fallen world; their cries have to be heard to rescue humanity from its terrestrial hell.
We have not halted the catastrophe — and new possibilities for suffering are appearing every single day. It is not merely the development of new technological terrors in the death factories of capital, whether the sign outside says Lockheed or Amazon. Now, the maddened, suicidal destruction of the Earth’s ecology looms over us all. An ever more murderous neo-fascism, fires that swallow the whole sky, cities swept away by toxic oceans, air that melts flesh down to the bone, devastation and desolation without end — this is the infinite suffering that climate change promises us. In this great twilight of humanity, our pain cannot be allowed to doom us to the enslaving ressentiment that Nietzsche so eloquently dissects, a politically paralysing saturation in social virtue. As my reading of Brown and Benjamin together has ultimately aimed to suggest, we have to make our agony into something that can cleave history, the entire world, into two — it has to summon a will to power that can conquer the future for ourselves. Everything may depend on it.
Thank you to all supporters of Critical Rory Theory. This writing is dedicated to my union comrades. I hope to resume publishing at least semi-regularly.