The resentment-ressentiment complex: a critique of liberal discourse
2020
This article offers a critique of a widespread political discourse that distinguishes ‘resentment’
from ‘ressentiment’, legitimating the former and dismissing the latter. This distinction not
only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of the depoliticisation of others, but
also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. Why is it necessary to
constantly protect the socio-political order from the risk of moral corruption in these terms,
and for whom? First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key
role in the evaluation of the reactive attitudes: their rationality, their authenticity, and their
justness. It is then argued that the first two problems are ill-posed. These problems concern
differences in degree, and are therefore always prone to the relativism of what, retrospectively,
can be called ‘the resentment-ressentiment complex’. The true problem with retributive
passions concerns a difference in kind, not between resentment and ressentiment, but between
active affects and passive or reactive affects. This Nietzschean ‘demoralisation’ of the problem
of reactive attitudes by means of a historico-systematic reorientation leads to the concluding
claim that while moral sentiments and political actions are always entangled, only the latter
constitute the ground of social justice.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
1
Citations
NaN
KQI