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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The greatest threat to modern democracy comes from within and it has a name: resentment. Stemming from feelings of inferiority in relation to others, resentment is a diffuse and obsessive loathing, coupled with delusions of victimhood, which clouds one’s judgment and perspective, so that an individual’s capacity to act and heal is paralyzed. Without the ability to heal, resentment can give rise to violent impulses, to the rejection of the rule of law, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the urge to use violent means to try to regain control of one’s life.
As individuals and as societies, we face the same challenge: how to diagnose resentment and its dark forces, and how to resist the temptation to allow it to become the motor of our individual and collective histories.
This bestselling and highly original account of the psychic forces shaping modern societies will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the crisis of democracy today and what we can do to address it.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Quote
Notes
Part I: Bitterness: What the Man of Resentment Experiences
1. Universal Bitterness
Notes
2. Individual and Society in the Face of Resentment: Rumbling and Rumination
Notes
3. The Definition and the Manifestations of Resentment
Notes
4. The Inertia of Resentment and the Resentment Fetish
Notes
5. Resentment and Egalitarianism: The End of Discernment
Notes
6. Melancholy in a State of Abundance
Notes
7. What Scheler Could Teach to the Ethics of Care
Notes
8. A Femininity of Resentment?
Notes
9. The False Self
Notes
10. The Membrane
Notes
11. The Necessary Confrontation
Notes
12. The Taste of Bitterness
Notes
13. Melancholic Literature
Notes
14. The Crowd of Missed Beings
Notes
15. The Faculty of Forgetting
Notes
16. Expecting Something from the World
Notes
17. The Tragedy of the Thiasus
Notes
18. Great Health: Choosing the Open, Choosing the Numinous
Notes
19. Continuing to Be Astonished by the World
Notes
20. Happiness and Resentment
Notes
21. Defending the Strong against the Weak
Notes
22. Pathologies of Resentment
Notes
23. Humanism or Misanthropy?
Notes
24. Fighting Resentment through Analysis
Notes
25. Giving Value Back to Time
Notes
26. In the Counter-Transference and the Analytic Cure
Notes
27. To the Sources of Resentment, with Montaigne
Notes
Part II: Fascism: The Psychological Sources of Collective Resentment
Notes
1. Exile, Fascism, and Resentment: Adorno, 1
Notes
2. Capitalism, Reification, and Resentment: Adorno, 2
Notes
3. Knowledge and Resentment
Notes
4. Constellatory Writing and Stupor: Adorno, 3
Notes
5. The Insincerity of Some, the Cleverness of Others
Notes
6. Fascism as Emotional Plague: Wilhelm Reich, 1
Notes
7. The Fascism within Me: Wilhelm Reich, 2
Notes
8. Historians’ Readings, Contemporary Psyches
Notes
9. Life as Creation: The Open Is Salvation
Notes
10. The Hydra
Notes
Part III: The Sea: A World Opened to Man
1. Disclosure, According to Fanon
Notes
2. The Universal at the Risk of the Impersonal
Notes
3. Caring for the Colonized
Notes
4. The Decolonization of Being
Notes
5. Restoring Creativity
Notes
6. The Therapy of Decolonization
Notes
7. A Detour by Way of Cioran
Notes
8. Fanon the Therapist
Notes
9. The Recognition of Singularity
Notes
10. Individual Health and Democracy
Notes
11. The Violation of Language
Notes
12. Recourse to Hatred
Notes
13. The
Mundus Inversus
: Conspiracy and Resentment
Notes
14. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 1
Notes
15. What Separation Means
Notes
16. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 2: Democracy as an Open System of Values
Notes
17. The Man from Underground: Resisting the Abyss
Notes
End User License Agreement
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Here Lies Bitterness
Healing from Resentment
Cynthia Fleury
Translated by Cory Stockwell
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Ci-gît l’amer. Guérir du ressentiment
© Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2020
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5103-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5104-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935679
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Quote
This book is based on a decision, a commitment, an axiom: its intangible principle or regulating idea is that man, the subject, the patient, has the power to act.1 It is not a question of wishful thinking, or of taking a falsely optimistic view of people. It is a question of a moral and intellectual choice—a wager that we are capable of acting. It is above all a way of insisting on the respect due to those who are in treatment, for the patient is an agent—the agent par excellence. Thinking about patients responsibly means accepting their capacity to leave denial behind in order to confront reality. Life, even in its banal routines, affirms this capacity even as it sometimes contradicts it. As for my own life, I ceased long ago to entrust it to facts alone. Battling resentment teaches us that a certain tolerance for uncertainty and injustice is necessary.2 What we find on the other side of this confrontation is the possibility of expanding ourselves.
Notes
1
[Trans. note: With few exceptions, I translate
l’homme
as “man” throughout the book, for two reasons. First, Fleury insists on this term, both in her use of
l’homme
, and in the distance she takes from “inclusive writing” (see her comments on this in Part III, Chapter 2). Second, one of Fleury’s arguments is that resentment has traditionally been too closely associated with women; from this standpoint, her constant use of “man” may serve to emphasize that resentment is far more universal than it is often assumed to be, and indeed that certain forms of it are much more masculine than feminine.]
2
[Trans. note: “Resentment” in this sentence and throughout the book translates the French
ressentiment
. There is a long history of using this French term in English, especially within philosophy; this follows in part from the fact that Nietzsche (an important reference for Fleury) employs the French term throughout his work, which has led English translators of Nietzsche simply to leave the term as is. I have chosen to translate it as “resentment” (except when citing works that specifically opt for the French term) in part because Fleury’s aims are not solely philosophical: they are also (to name just a few) literary, clinical, and political. Using the French term
ressentiment
would make little sense within Anglophone clinical contexts. In contemporary politics, meanwhile, it has become more and more common to speak about the “politics of resentment,” and Fleury herself comments on this.]
I BITTERNESSWhat the Man of Resentment Experiences
1 UNIVERSAL BITTERNESS
Where does bitterness come from? From suffering and from a lost childhood, one might say from the outset. Starting from childhood, something is played out between bitterness [l’amer] and this Real that shatters our serene world. Here lies mother, here lies the sea [Ci-gît la mère, ci-gît la mer].3 We all take different paths, yet we are all familiar with this link between potential sublimation (the sea), parental separation (the mother), and pain (bitterness)—this melancholy that does not come about all on its own. I don’t believe in essentialism (without a doubt, many have died from or by way of its illusions); instead, I support a dialectical approach. Bitterness, the mother, the sea, it’s all tied together: the mother is also the father, the parent, that which precedes separation, that from which we don’t want to separate, that which takes on meaning only in the light of separation, that which we have to become on our own, parents for others, whether or not they are our own children, parents in the sense that we take on something of the need for transmission.
Bitterness must be buried; above it, something else will grow and come to fruition. No earth is ever damned for eternity: a bitter fertility founds the understanding that is to come. The distinction between confronting bitterness and burying it is not very important: in treatment with patients, we do both, one after the other, one in spite of the other; here as well, there is always a remainder, as though something incurable persisted, but it is still possible to locate “stances”: places where the health of the soul finds its footing.4 The task of the patient is to multiply these stances.
It is with the following words that Ishmael, at the beginning of Melville’s book dedicated to the tireless quest for the white whale, describes a sort of unease that constrains him, and at the same time—above all—an existential resource to which he aspires:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.5
Getting to the sea . . . Melville also writes of the need to “see the watery part of the world,”6 and we understand that what is at stake in the motif of the sea is not navigation, but an existential open expanse, a sublimation of the finitude and lassitude that fall upon subjects without them knowing how to respond, because there is no response. All they can do is navigate, cross, go toward the horizon, find a place where they are able to live once more in the here and now. They have to distance themselves to avoid “knocking people’s hats off,” to avoid the roar of their mounting resentment. “If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”7 Ishmael thus knows very well that none of this is personal, that the need for the ocean alleviates the feeling of abandonment that is there in all of us from the beginning, a feeling that punctuates our lives, like a sad refrain reminding us that the countdown to death is always there, and that there is no meaning in the origin or in the future—only, perhaps, in this desire for immensity and weightlessness that water, the sea, and the ocean represent.8 “What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”9 So long as these reveries predominate, they constitute a kind of barrier against a more intimate and dangerous darkness—in other words, bitterness, and its crystallization that inevitably opens out onto resentment.
Notes
3
[Trans. note: The French title of this book is
Ci-gît l’amer
, and my decision regarding the translation of the title’s final term requires a word of explanation. The direct translation of
l’amer
is “the bitter”; for stylistic reasons, I have translated it throughout as “bitterness.” What is important here is that
l’amer
in spoken French is indistinguishable from
la mère
, which means “the mother,” and
la mer
, which means “the sea.” Fleury plays on this homophony here and throughout the text. This is impossible to reproduce in English, but the reader should remain aware of it, given its importance for several of Fleury’s arguments.]
4
The
Littré
dictionary gives the following etymology for stance: “Ital.
stanza
, stance, (properly speaking) stay, sojourn, stop, from the Latin
stare
, to stay, to stop; one speaks thus of a stance because it is a kind of stop.”
5
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
(1851; New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 3.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
The oceanic feeling was defined in 1927 by Romain Rolland in his correspondence with Freud to describe this
universal
desire to be one with the universe. In his work, Rolland turns this into a foreshadowing of religious feeling: the oceanic bears witness to a spontaneous spirituality of man that is independent of this feeling. The oceanic enters into a dialectical relationship with an originary sense of abandonment, permitting the subject not to feel a sense of “lack,” to confront separation and finitude (here lies mother) without giving in to melancholy. It arises from a feeling of eternity, of a quick flash and then of rest. Freud, without naming him, addresses Rolland at the beginning of
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1929), in which he deals at length with the oceanic feeling of the Ego.
9
Melville,
Moby-Dick
, p. 4.
2 INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY IN THE FACE OF RESENTMENTRumbling and Rumination
At this point, you might say: “So what? Everyone is familiar with resentment. Nothing this common, no matter how bad it is, can be a serious problem for the individual or for society.” In response, I join Cornelius Castoriadis, philosopher and psychoanalyst by trade, in espousing the idea that people are radically different from one another when it comes to their ability to keep their own resentment at a distance. It may seem that an awareness of resentment would allow us to avoid falling prey to the petrification that ensues from it. But in fact, this is not true of all people, or of all societies. “What can I aim for when psychoanalyzing an individual? Certainly not the suppression of this obscure depth, my unconscious or his unconscious—an undertaking that would be murderous if it were not impossible. What I can aim for is to establish another relationship between the unconscious and consciousness.”10 The individuation of a being, his subjectivization, and what Wilhelm Reich will later call his “capacity for freedom” all arise from the creative and serene relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.11 Castoriadis reminds us of the decisive truth of analysis, not only for a subject, but for the society in which this subject lives:
The entire question is whether the individual has been able, by a happy accident or by the type of society in which he has lived, to establish such a relationship, or whether he had been able to modify this relationship in such a way as not to take his fantasies for reality, to be as lucid as possible about his own desire, to accept himself as mortal, to seek the truth even if it should cost him, et cetera. Contrary to today’s prevailing imposture, I have affirmed for a long time that there is a qualitative difference, and not only a difference of degree, between an individual thus defined and a psychotic individual or one so heavily neurotic that he can be described as alienated, not in the general sociological sense, but in the quite precise sense that he finds himself expropriated “by” himself “from” himself. Either psychoanalysis is a swindle, or else it intends precisely this end, a modification of this relationship such as we have described it.12
What is at stake here is the advent of a man who is qualitatively different from his peers, and who would hold a key to humanism and to the society in question.
Inversely, people who are alienated cannot participate in the building of any common world except for one that embodies a process of reification. The aim of psychoanalysis is just as political as it is therapeutic.
For current power, other people are things, and all that I want goes against this. The person for whom others are things is himself a thing, and I do not want to be a thing either for myself or for others. I do not want others to be things, I would have no use for this. If I may exist for others, be recognized by them, I do not want this to be in terms of the possessions of something external to me—power; nor to exist for them only in an imaginary realm.13
Castoriadis here paints the wretched but well-known picture of the dynamics of objectification—indeed, “thingification”—as an organizing principle of society as a whole and also of intimate relations, because these relations are indissociable from the drive-related conflicts that reign within individuals. The stakes are both individual and social: one must not consider others or oneself as things because doing so will consolidate the collective mechanism of resentment, leading men and societies to sunder their prospects through these resentmentist means—making it almost impossible to overcome psychic and social alienation.14
Notes
10
Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Revolutionary Exigency,” in
Political and Social Writings, Volume 3, 1961–1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society
, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 243 [translation modified].
11
[Trans. note: On Reich’s “capacity for freedom,” see Part II, Chapter 7.]
12
Castoriadis, “The Revolutionary Exigency,” p. 243.
13
Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Subjective Roots of the Revolutionary Project,” in
The Imaginary Institution of Society
, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1975), pp. 90–5, here p. 94.
14
[Trans. note: “Resentmentist” in this sentence and in what follows translates
ressentimiste
, a neologism employed by Fleury; per the
OED
’s definition of the suffix “-ist,” one might think of a “resentmentist” person as someone who actively practices resentment, or who adheres to it as though it were a creed.]
3 THE DEFINITION AND THE MANIFESTATIONS OF RESENTMENT
Max Scheler defined resentment with great clarity in the book he devoted to it in 1912, just before the First World War (a terrible time of lethal drives): “the repeated experiencing and rumination of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else, which leads this emotion to sink more deeply and little by little to penetrate the very heart of the personality, while concomitantly abandoning the zone of action and expression.”15
The key term for understanding the dynamics of resentment is “rumination”: something that is chewed and re-chewed, and that furthermore possesses the characteristic bitterness of food that has been worn down by chewing. Rumination is itself that of another rumination, in the sense that what is at stake in it from the outset is reliving an emotional “re-action” that in the beginning could have been addressed to someone in particular. But as resentment goes on, its addressee becomes increasingly indeterminate. Loathing becomes less personal and more global: it can come to strike individuals whom the emotional reaction did not originally concern, but who at some point were caught up in the extension of the phenomenon. From this point a double movement is at work that is reminiscent of the one described by Karl Polanyi:16 the more resentment gains in depth, and the more the person is impacted in his core and in his heart, the less he is able to maintain his capacity for action; as such, his ability to express himself creatively weakens. It eats away at him, digs into him. And with every rekindling of this resentment, compensation becomes more and more impossible: the need for reparations, at this point, is unquenchable. Resentment leads us down this path—no doubt illusory, but no less cruel for being so—of impossible reparations, and indeed of their rejection. Obtaining these impossible reparations—which do in fact exist—would require invention, creation, sublimation. But dealing with resentment means penetrating a zone that stings painfully, and which therefore resists any attempts to project light onto it—or rather, by way of a reversal (like a sort of inverse stigmatization), affirms a certain enjoyment of its darkness.17 “This rumination, this constant rekindling of the emotion, is thus very different from a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events that gave rise to it: it is a reexperiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling—a re-sentiment.”18
How, then, to resist the continuous pressure of this painful reliving? We see here that there is a possible link to the phenomenon of trauma, which produces a “breach” in the psyche.19 The breach thus plays upon what was initially a wound, a blow, or an inability to heal over, and turns it into a yawning gap, one that is active, at times intense, at times chronic. In the face of the jolts brought on by this gap, which are fed by rumination, the work of the intellect and of rational thinking remain helpless.
Undoubtedly we should not give up so quickly on the performativity of this work of reason, but let us be realistic about the limitations of rational argument: let us accept that it is difficult to resist the jolts of a sadness that seeks to confine within itself envy, jealousy, contempt for others and eventually for oneself, the sentiment of injustice, the desire for revenge. It ends up gnawing at you, as Scheler writes:
Perhaps the most suitable German word would be Groll, which indicates an obscure, suppressed, gnawing rancor that is independent of the ego’s activity, and which little by little engenders a long rumination of hatred and animosity that does not contain a specific hostile intention, but nourishes any number of such intentions.20
Groll is rancor, the fact of holding a grudge against someone, and we can see how this holding of grudges takes the place of the will, how bad energy is substituted for vital and joyous energy: how this falsification of the will, or rather this prevention of good will (this privation of the will for . . .), how this bad object deprives the will of a good direction—how it deprives the subject. It requires him to stop focusing on it. But as resentment goes on, indecision becomes all the greater, and the ability to turn away from it all the more difficult. It contaminates everything. The gaze gets caught up in its immediate surroundings rather than crossing into new territory, resulting in a boomerang effect that rekindles resentment. Everything becomes a bad sign, one that is not there to be dodged but rather so that one can remain captive to reexperiencing. The subject becomes “fat”: he loses his mental and physical agility, so necessary to the possibility of movement. Too full, closed in, the subject is on the border of nausea and its continuous heaving; he can cry out all he wants, but these cries will only appease the nausea for a very short time. Nietzsche spoke of intoxication,21 while Scheler evokes “self-poisoning” to describe the “malice”22 of resentment. The latter gives rise to a “more or less permanent deformation of the meaning of values as well as the ability to make judgments.”23 The impact of resentment thus attacks the sense of judgment, which is tainted, eaten away from within—already beginning to rot. From this point, producing informed judgments—which could lead to a redemption from resentment—becomes difficult. What is needed is to identify resentment’s echo or even its aura, though this term is too noble to be used to designate what is rather a spreading, a servile contamination that, with the passage of time, will find justifications that are worthy of the name. The faculty of judgment henceforth puts itself in the service of maintaining resentment rather than deconstructing it. Such is the sullying aspect of the phenomenon, which employs the instrument that could be used for liberation (the faculty of judgment) to maintain servitude and alienation—for there is indeed servitude in the face of the lethal drive. “Slave” morality is already at play here, in the fact of submitting oneself to rumination.
Notes
15
Max Scheler,
Ressentiment
, trans. William W. Holdheim (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 39 [translation modified].
16
In his book
The Great Transformation
, first published in 1944.
17
[Trans. note: I use “enjoyment” here to translate
jouissance
, which has a much stronger sexual connotation.]
18
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, p. 9 [translation modified].
19
According to the Freudian definition of breach:
We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to breach the protective shield. . . . Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have breached the surface and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), pp. 23–4 [translation modified].
20
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, pp. 39–40 [translation modified].
21
Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morality
, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 19 and 94; see also
Ecce Homo
, in
The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings
, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. The affect of resentment, born from an intoxication that cannot be separated from Judeo-Christianity, allows one to distinguish between the morality of slaves and that of masters.
22
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, pp. 45, 47.
23
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, pp. 45–6 [translation modified].
4 THE INERTIA OF RESENTMENT AND THE RESENTMENT FETISH
One can and one must refuse rotting food and nourish oneself otherwise, but in this state of mind, the subject prefers carrion. The preference for rotting elements is essential to the workings of resentment, for the latter cannot be thought of as retaliation, as a legitimate defense, as a simple reaction. Indeed, it often arises from a non-reaction, from a renunciation of action. It consists in having kept things within oneself. I’m not saying that one should never keep anything inside oneself, but the resentful subject has “suspended” time, as though to hate better and for a longer period. Attempts to combat this must penetrate vengeance, which is a very peculiar type of hope—a decaying hope, but one whose energetic force can be very intense. “Revenge is distinguished by two essential characteristics. First of all, the immediate reactive impulse, with the accompanying emotions of anger and rage, is temporarily or at least momentarily checked and restrained, and the response is consequently postponed to a later and to a more suitable occasion.”24
Quick retaliations are not enough to make resentment disappear, for in truth, resentment is not simply a question of re-action (or its absence): it also falls within the purview of rumination—the decision to ruminate or the impossibility of not ruminating. It is no simple matter to choose between a definition of resentment as impotence (to do something), and another definition that ends up conceding that there is a choice in favor of this impotence. This is undoubtedly a matter of degree and of the disability brought on by resentment, which is more or less accepted. One can be caught in the trap of resentment while at the same time trying to extricate oneself from it, refusing to settle for its viscous grasp. One is here on a knife’s edge: vengeance and rumination, but also refusing to succumb to it completely, not wanting to succumb completely.
Moreover, vengeance is not resentment: vengeance is terrible, and it contaminates like resentment, but it remains directed, determined, in the sense that it is possible for it to be assuaged. Scheler believes that the desire for vengeance falls away once revenge has been exacted, but I am not so certain: vengeance knows how to move about and locate a new object. Leaving in one’s wake this lethal dynamic, this energy of decay, is anything but simple. But with resentment, none of this is true. Its very aim seems to be the prevention of all moral overcoming; its goal is to ensconce itself in failure—to ensconce you in failure, you who try to create a solution.
We see this at work very clearly in certain tenacious forms of psychosis: in the way the patient puts all his energy into trying to prevent a solution, to cause doctors and medicine as a whole to fail, to produce only blockages. No overcoming is accepted: undoubtedly, accepting overcoming would produce a new collapse that the patient does not want to take on, and hence, dysfunction as a mode of functioning is preferred. Resentment’s only talent—and in this it excels—is to embitter: to embitter personalities, to embitter situations, to embitter outlooks.25 Resentment prevents opening, it closes, it forecloses: no escape is possible. The subject is perhaps outside of himself, but in himself, eating away at the self, and as such eating away at the only mediation possible with the world.
Even if resentment with regard to having (envy) and resentment with regard to being (jealousy) must be differentiated, it is possible to consider them together. This is precisely the accomplishment of resentment: eating away at the interiority of the person and not only at his desire for acquisition; shaking his ability to maintain his identity. “Envy does not strengthen the acquisitive urge, it weakens it,”26 writes Scheler, and the more envy grows, the more it renders the subject impotent, and the more it changes his discontent with regard to his possessions into an ontological discontent, which is much more devastating: “‘I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.’ This form of envy goes to the other’s very existence, an existence that, as such, smothers us, and is felt to be an unbearable reproach.”27 Here, the trap closes in around the subject. For while it is possible to believe that recuperating the ability to possess (goods) will end up appeasing him, no one believes that appeasement is possible for a subject consumed by a hatred for the other, a hatred nourished by overflowing fantasies.
When the subject oscillates within this breakdown—which tends toward a breakdown of his own self—healing or any form of removal from this grasp becomes extremely complicated. Here we must posit a regulating idea: healing is possible, but clinical work is undoubtedly insufficient for the required care, and for the continued transmission of this care. The therapist is human, and we have to grapple with this inherent insufficiency of the cure. It is impossible to get beyond resentment without the will of the subject taking action. It is precisely this will that is missing, buried each day by the subject himself, so as to avoid facing up to his responsibility, his spiritual task, his moral obligation to overcome.
Only the destruction of the other can possibly bring some form of enjoyment, some “pleasure principle” allowing one to face up to a reality that is unbearable because it is judged to be unjust, unequal, humiliating, not worthy of the value one attributes to oneself. Resentment is a delirium of victimization: delirium not in the sense that the individual is not a victim—he is, at least potentially—but because he is in no way the only victim of an unjust order. The injustice is global, undifferentiated; of course, it concerns the individual in question, but the complexity of the world means that it has no precise destination or recipient. Victim compared to what? To whom? Within which framework of values and expectations? It is one thing to temporarily define oneself as a victim and to recognize oneself as such for a moment; it is quite another to consolidate one’s identity exclusively on the basis of this “fact” which is undoubtedly more subjective than objective. What is at stake is a “decision” made by the subject to choose rumination: to choose the enjoyment of what harms, whether this enjoyment is conscious or, as is generally the case, unconscious. The “delirium” arises because of alienation—non-perception of responsibility in the repetition of the complaint—and because the subject does not see that he is actively working within the mechanics of rumination. He refuses to look away, to renounce the idea of reparations, knowing that all reparations are illusory because they will never be at the level of the injustice that he feels. The subject must close the chapter, and this is what he does not want to do. We are undoubtedly dealing here with the definition of “grievance” put forth by François Roustang, which must always be dissociated from suffering. Grievance always means “bringing forth a grievance,” which is undoubtedly commendable in the juridical sphere; in the psychological and emotional sphere, however, we must depart from this model so as to avoid being eaten away by our grievances, and shutting ourselves off in an all-consuming rage. Let us also recall the Freudian lesson about the denial of reality, which nicely evokes what is at play in resentment. The subject who is enamoured with resentment does not go so far as to deny reality (since he suffers from it), but his resentment functions like a sort of fetish.28 What is a fetish used for? Precisely to replace a reality that is unbearable for the subject. In other words, if it is so difficult for the subject to relinquish a grievance, it is because the grievance functions as a fetish: it procures for him the same pleasure; it screens off what must be avoided; it allows him to bear reality, to mediate it, to make it seem less real. The grievance becomes the only inhabitable reality through the pleasure principle that it provides, and the resentment fetish comes to act as an obsession. Resentment not only serves to maintain the memory of that which was experienced as a wound, but also allows for the enjoyment of this memory, as though it were keeping alive the idea of a punishment.
Notes
24
Ibid., p. 46.
25
See ibid., p. 49.
26
Ibid., p. 52.
27
Ibid., pp. 52–3 [translation modified].
28
As Freud conceives of it in his 1927 book
Fetishism
.
5 RESENTMENT AND EGALITARIANISMThe End of Discernment
Scheler describes it perfectly: resentment employs the faculty of judgment to denigrate everything that could encourage it to reform itself and hence to disappear. Resentment has an extremely strong capacity for self-preservation:
The common man is only satisfied if he feels that he possesses a value that is at least equal to others; he acquires this feeling either by negating (by falsifying) the qualities of those to whom he compares himself, in other words by a specific “blindness” to these qualities; or—and here lies the basis of ressentiment—he falsifies the values themselves which could bestow excellence on any possible objects of comparison.29
It would thus be healthy for him to be able to recognize his equality with others without the need to negate the qualities of these others. One possibility for elaborating an antidote to resentment lies in the notion of perceived equality. The structure of resentment is egalitarian: resentment arises the moment the subject senses that, while he may be unequal, he is only wronged because he is equal. Simply feeling oneself to be unequal is not enough to bring about this sense. The frustration develops on the terrain of the right to. I feel frustrated because I believe something to be my due or my right. The belief in a right is necessary to experience resentment. At least, this is the theory of Scheler and his Tocquevillian heirs, who believed that democracy was essentially a regime that brought about resentment precisely because the notion of egalitarianism was one of its inherent concerns.
It is not a question here of negating the necessity of equality for avoiding resentment—this echoes the “ultra-solution” of the Palo Alto School,30 which consists in killing the patient to eradicate the disease: “The operation was successful but the patient died.”31 Let us return to the previous citation from Scheler: if the “common” man is only satisfied by the feeling of possessing equal value, this does not mean that he truly possesses such a value, but that he must have the illusion of doing so. In other words, the “common world” persists by giving everyone the right to illusions about their own value. Furthermore, that which undoubtedly renders a man common, or at least assigns him a residence within mediocrity, is his incapacity to recognize the value of others, and his simultaneous belief that this will help him to extract himself from his own inadequacy. But inventing superiority has never brought about superiority. On the contrary, knowing how to admire others and recognize their value is a true antidote to resentment, even if it demands, at first, greater mental fortitude. Even so, denigrating others is not enough for resentment. A further step is necessary: that of the indictment. And since this indictment lacks any real object, it veers toward denunciation, disinformation. The corpse must be fabricated because there has not been any murder. From here on in, the other will be guilty. A form of “universal depreciation” ensues.
This “complete repression” sets in motion “a complete negation of values,” says Scheler, a “hateful and explosive animosity.”32 Because this is also what being “fat” means: holding within oneself an explosion, something ignitable, a deflagration that can consume everything without discernment. Resentment aims to destroy discernment, such that one can no longer make distinctions and aims single-mindedly for a tabula rasa. It is the logic of an oil stain that spreads everywhere, leading to an inability to grasp the origin or the cause of the affliction, which from this point becomes more difficult to assuage. The sheer breadth of the damage becomes so great that the sphere of solutions shrinks, bringing about an inverse ethos, a “general disposition” to produce hostility instead of welcoming the world. One regresses, folds back upon oneself, because evolution seems too threatening—a synonym for loss.
It is logical for discernment to be affected when the subject is overwhelmed by his resentment. Discernment is the act of separating, setting aside, and differentiating so as to better grasp the specificity of things and avoid generalizations; it is a disposition of the mind that allows one to make clear and healthy judgments. It is a disposition of health, from the physical standpoint but also from that of the psyche; it is the disposition of one who takes pleasure in, rather than feeling renounced by, the complexities of rational thinking. Discerning and feeling can sometimes be equated, in the precise sense that discerning is the capacity to feel fully and without confusion, to sense and to recognize, to identify without mixing things up. It is clear that the times in which we live put this aptitude for discernment at risk, even if they do not prevent it outright: the saturation of information (often notably false information), and the reductionism evinced by new forms of public space (notably social networks), nourish incessant assaults on discernment, which inherently possesses the wrong rhythm to resist them. Discernment presupposes time, patience, prudence, and an art of scrutinizing, observing, and anticipating: one discerns silently and with bated breath, seeing without being seen, disappearing so as to allow that which is observed to behave naturally. Discernment presupposes stepping back in the very situations in which the resentmentist subject sees himself as protagonist. Discernment was for a long time a completely spiritual value, specifically Jesuit,33 permitting people to clarify their motivations34 and to purify their emotions. In the work of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis de Sales, God is that which allows one to discern; “God” is more precisely divine grace, the time that allows the subject to transform internally. Here, of course, philosophy undertakes a secularization of the notion of discernment, and the only state of law that is worthy of the name—the social contract—must serve to protect the time necessary to undertake the transformation of self and world. The loss of discernment is the first symptom of narcissistic pathologies and psychotic disturbances.
Finally, let us not believe in the existence of objects worthy of being ruminated upon. No object—even that of learning about death—can save rumination from its sad lot, which is to weaken people. The famous idea that “to philosophize is to learn how to die”35 can lead us to believe that we must never forget our finitude, that it must constantly ring out in our minds, making us able to love everything, to overturn everything. Nothing of the kind is true. Montaigne, who is one of the greatest defenders (in the wake of Socrates) of the need to learn how to die,36 himself alerts us to a possible misinterpretation of this: with age, he discovers that learning about death is in no way a rumination—on the contrary, giving in to it consigns us to misunderstanding. “To see the exertions that Seneca imposed upon himself in order to steel himself against death, to see him sweat and grunt. . . . His burning emotion, so oft repeated, shows that he himself was ardent and impetuous.”37 In other words, believing that death is the aim of our lives does not manage to extract us from a precisely lethal agitation. Rumination on death does not produce a liberating analysis of death. “We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life.”38 Consequently, Montaigne opts for a definition of death that is just as essential, but that doesn’t allow it to be the purpose of life. It is not a “goal” but a simple “end.”39 Metaphysics is elsewhere: it moves about in the region of the invention of life.
Notes
29
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, p. 58 [translation modified].
30
[Trans. note: The Palo Alto School refers to a group of researchers associated with the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. The term “ultra-solution” was developed by Paul Watzlawick in his book
Ultra-Solutions
, which appeared in English in 1988.]
31
There are many versions of the “ultra-solution.” Certainly every version that is extremist, unsuited to the dynamics of negotiation (proposing a solution that no one can revisit doesn’t count as negotiation), is a classic ultra-solution; everything that rejects discernment, nuance, and complexity, on the pretext that these are unacceptable compromises—there are thus unacceptable compromises that are not compromises, but simulacra of compromises. But not every compromise is inherently unacceptable. The problem with the ultra-solution is the illusion of knowing which solution it rests upon: no solution is inherently irreversible; certain principles can be, but no solution of itself ever possesses, in the space-time that belongs to it, the key to the resolution of a problem. Or rather, it might, if the problem is simple, but in this case it is not really a “problem” as it lacks its own dynamics. A problem refers to an awareness of the complexity of an entire ecosystem: a problem is always in a state of movement. Consequently, believing in an ultra-solution that will put a halt to the “motility” of the problem—which is always in a state of interaction with its environment—is quite insufficient in intellectual terms. This does not mean that there is never a solution, but that the resolution is always dynamic: it brings us toward a cycle that puts into play different and successive space-times.
32
Scheler,
Ressentiment
, p. 70 [translation modified].
33
See Catherine Fino, “Discernement moral et discernement spirituel à l’époque moderne. Une collaboration en vue de la liberté du sujet,”
Revue d’
éthique et de théologie morale, Éditions du Cerf, 2018/2, no. 298, pp. 11–24. Fino cites Ignatius of Loyola: “We call Spiritual Exercises every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all inordinate attachments, and, after their removal, of seeking and finding the will of God in the disposition of our life for the salvation of our soul.” Ignatius of Loyola,
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
, trans. Louis J. Puhl (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 5. The
Exercises
were printed for the first time in Rome in 1548.
34
As Fino notes: “Good discernment thus demands that one clarify one’s motivations, purify one’s emotions, and bring judgment upon one’s desire, in order to valorize what is good and reject what is bad” (Fino, “Discernement moral,” p. 298).
35
[Trans. note: This is the title of one of Michel de Montaigne’s most famous essays. See Montaigne,
The Complete Essays
, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), Book I, Chapter 20.]
36
Montaigne,
The Complete Essays
, Book I, Chapter 19.
37
Ibid., Book III, Chapter 12, p. 1177.
38
[Trans. note: Montaigne,
The Complete Essays
, Book III, Chapter 12, p. 1190.]
39
[Trans. note: See ibid., Book III, Chapter 12, p. 1191.]
6 MELANCHOLY IN A STATE OF ABUNDANCE
Scheler sees democratic regimes as inherently more inclined to resentment. Tocqueville had already perceived this in his own time, characterizing egalitarianism as an evil that strikes man, and highlighting the fact that he becomes more sympathetic to equality as conditions become more equal. This is a logical phenomenon, but one that is difficult to control. The least example of inequality wounds the eye, he said, and the insatiability of the individual where equality is concerned can be devastating. Already, he was dealing with the evil that is melancholy in a state of abundance.40 I never tire of returning to this passage41 because it identifies a key element of immature democratic behavior—a perverse behavior that causes what is most exceptional in this system to rot, namely its demand for equality and the work it undertakes to bring this equality about.
Is this perversion unavoidable? I don’t believe so. It is a matter of education, one that plays out on the level of Foucault’s “government of the self,” the only framework that permits a “government of others” worthy of the name, and that respects the egalitarian challenge always faced by democracy. For Scheler, resentment is obviously not the result of perfect democracy, but of a democracy that is lacking—which always ends up being the reality of democracy, though this must not be taken as an invalidation of the latter. Resentment, Scheler notes, “would be slight in a democracy which is not only political, but also social and tends toward equality of property.”42
Resentment is produced by a gap between recognized and uniform political rights and a reality of concrete inequalities. This coexistence of formal rights and the absence of concrete rights produces collective resentment. This is undoubtedly true. But in contrast to Scheler, I believe that resentment is more structurally inherent in humans, because in an egalitarian economic situation, it transforms into a need for symbolic recognition, demanding ever more egalitarianism or projecting hatred onto others (a hatred that arises from insufficiently analyzed personal factors). This does not mean that our societies do not produce a potential for resentment43 when their inequalities are revived. Feeling “offended,” humiliated, and impotent gives rise, at first, to a withdrawal into the self, indeed a form of acquiescence that is the result of being knocked down. Happily, the subject soon gets back up. But if the initial blow lasts, if it is repeated, and if one gets the feeling that it comes about due to the actions of a growing number of individuals (an elite, for example), the offense becomes an all-explanatory framework that makes the subject its prisoner and comes to seem inevitable.
This leads to two possible results: on the one hand, the subject may waste away; on the other, he can seek to overturn the stigma, in other words to enter the terrain of victimhood, the fact of defining himself from this point on as the “offended” one, and to use this new identity in a tyrannical way—resentment being the first step on the road to terror. The violence with which Scheler takes egalitarianism to task is reminiscent of the critique of Nietzsche, who sees egalitarianism as directed by the morality of slaves who wish to weaken others so as to feel equal to them. Behind the inoffensive demand for equality there often lies, according to both of these thinkers, an egalitarian perversion: the fear of not being up to snuff, a sad and terrible emotion: “Only he who is afraid of losing demands universal equality.”44 This is of course a very conservative and disparaging view of equality (which is perceived merely as an instrument employed to reach egalitarianism), one that overlooks equality’s importance for human dignity. Nonetheless, the analysis of resentment here is justified, because it nicely reveals the way resentment falsifies values in the manner of a sophist, whose eloquence often attempts to mask a spiritual weakness. Resentment can be articulated with eloquence, but generally the two split apart quite quickly, because there is a link of kinship between values and the fact of being cultured. Negating all values obliges one to denigrate culture or intellectualism.
Scheler pursues his analysis by calling the common man a “weakling.” We must understand this to mean a spiritual weakness, which will soon require the assent of the masses to be perceived as legitimate. “But soon the need for binding forms of judgment will reappear.”45 In fact, since the judgment in question is merely a decaying opinion, the masses are necessary to give the subject of resentment the consistency that he does not possess on his own, which subsequently allows him to go in search of a little of this potential for resentment in others. For as everyone knows, no one is a stranger to spiritual weakness. “The man of ressentiment is a weakling, he cannot stand alone with his judgment. . . . Universality, or the consent of all, thus replaces the true objectivity of values.”46
The test of solitude can serve as a rampart against the damage of resentment, to the extent, on the one hand, that it remains an act that makes individuation possible, and on the other hand because an individual who chooses to confront solitude, even one that gives rise to immense bitterness, remains less damaging to others, because he is confined within himself. In searching out the consent of all, the subject of resentment displays the traps of the conformism within which he is caught. Judgment often presents itself as the outgrowth of a critical mind—similar to the development of paranoid conspiracy theories—but in truth this is thinking at a base level. This form of judgment is a falsification of values for two reasons: first, because it presents itself as a new ordering of values, deposing the hierarchy of those currently in effect; second, because it borders upon moral relativism or nihilism.
The Nietzschean thesis that Christianity is a delicate flower of resentment47 is well known. It is contradicted by Scheler, who understands resentment as the source of a new form of morals, and more specifically as a form of modern morals, one typical of contemporary bourgeois societies whose ideal is precisely the bourgeoisie. Scheler’s thesis is thus antimodern. Further, he champions a very elitist Christianity, one that is quasi-aristocratic and antithetical to modern humanitarianism; its essence is not democratic, as is sometimes claimed in reflections on the notion of Christian love. For Scheler, Christianity is an absolute stranger to all ideas of the equality of human values, as evidenced by the distinction between hell, heaven, and purgatory. Scheler is completely correct in this, but the fact remains that Christianity espouses the idea that people are equal in their dignity, and views forgiveness as a possibility.
