Resentment

The resentment (in French in the text) is a philosophical concept of the German Penseur Friedrich Nietzsche. The use of this term probably goes up with the Danish thinker Kierkegaard, and it was taken again by max Scheler ( the man of the resentment , transl. france 1950).

By resentment, it is necessary to hear a feeling of resentment or rancour, related to a Jalousie, a Envie: a feeling of hatred and reproach (of bad faith ) with regard to somebody who is able to feel a feeling (to produce an action, to live a situation,…), whereas one is oneself unable.

Genealogy of morals

The beings of resentments are, for Nietzsche, a race of man for whom the true reaction, that of the action, is prohibited and which compensates only by means of one imaginary revenge ( Généalogie of morals , transl. P. Wotling, Paris, Livre pocket, 2000). It thus directly binds the resentment so that it names the moral of slave : the morals of slave is essentially consisted the resentment, by a creative not .

Thus, the being of resentment is it deeply reactive, i.e that it is in a situation of impotence which generates frustrations. Any man, whatever it is, with whom one prohibits the action, and which of this fact is in the impotence, is affected by the resentment: i.e. it can only undergo impossibility of being expressed.

The force consists in surmounting this state (which then is nothing any more but one momentary state - as when one overcomes the desire of revenge); the weakness, on the contrary, does not manage to get rid some (for example, the desire of revenge becomes an obsession, or, the regret of an act becomes a moral torture which does not leave any more the thought in rest), and then transforms its frustrations with its advantage by finding justifications with its impotence, by the denial and the inversion axiologic: this will to be justifications characterizes precisely the mentality of slave.

This mentality of the resentment is found for example in the ideologies which are defined compared to a real or supposed enemy: the enemy (or impotence causes it) is judged as causes free evil; by opposition, that which undergoes allots an imaginary moral superiority, which Nietzsche summarizes as follows: they are malicious, therefore we are good . An idealistic alternative in is: the world is fundamentally given by the Mal, therefore we shine higher.

Other uses

Gilles Deleuze

The concept of resentment was commented on, in particular, by Gilles Deleuze in Nietzsche and philosophy (1962) in the optics of an affirmative revival and anti-dialectical of the Philosophie. After the hegemony of the doctrines post-hégéliennes, Deleuze proposes a philosophy centered either on the idea of going beyond Dialectique and on the critical activity, but of course the valorization of the credit on the reagent (criticism and the dialectical one being compared to negativity)

Rene Girard

The notion was also worked starting from the medium of the Années 1960 by Rene Girard, which identifies the resentment with pure and simple ordinary jealousy with regard to a model indépassable. Girard criticizes the romantic idea which it can exist higher individuals only capable of autonomous feelings, and considers that the imitation is the ordinary and general condition of the Man. We all are reactive with the direction indicated with contempt by Nietzsche, including and to even start with the beings who, apparently, are higher than the direction nietzschéen. Such being, like Romeo and Juliette or the idols of the star-system, not only are not higher, but they are on the contrary supremely depend on the feelings of others to nourish their, with the risk, when they are livés with themselves, of the suicide and the artificial worlds. Nietzsche itself appears in Girard like particularly " ressentissant" (for example with regard to Wagner, that he admired then that he will attack), and the tension between the contempt for the slaves and its own situation becomes an explanatory parameter of the madness of Nietzsche. Girard also develops the ideologies of the resentment (Communism, anti-semitism, and more generally all the anti-some thing…) on the same topic, whereas the Bible and the Christianity “crucifiés” by Nietzsche and all the modern thought seem to him on the contrary carriers of the truth of the feelings.

One must to point out that Girard supports on reading simplifying of thought theory of Nietzsche, it draws aside the nuances (for example, for Nietzsche the higher man does not escape the resentment, but it surmounts it) and that Nietzsche was reached of a Cancer Cerveau, which implies that the bond between its madness and its psychology, admitted by Girard, is not so obvious and can be in the other direction…

Marc Angenot

On the ideological level, the concept of resentment was studied by the analyst and historian of the speeches Marc Angenot ( ideologies of the resentment , 1996) who does one of the vectors of the political ideologies of it, identity and nationalists of the 20th century. Same manner that its predecessors Angenot conceives the resentment as an attitude which is characterized by an accumulation of objections and by a voluntarism whose proliferation (particularly notorious today with the postmodernism, the claims identity and the tribalism ) supplies various forms of discrimination and of social conflictualities. Even if stability and the enchantment volitilize under our eyes (what the German philosopher Walter Benjamin named the decline of will have ), the Réflexivité and the maintenance of a certain collective hope remain the best means, according to Angenot, to secure reactive effects of the resentment. The historian and philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff also devoted certain writings on the resentment from the point of view close to that for Angenot.

See too

• Nihilism
• Resentment
• Revenge