Bloomsbury The Polemics of Ressentiment: Variations on Nietzsche (Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy)

The rise of populism, cynicism, fanaticism and fundamentalism challenges us to reconsider the problem of ressentiment, characterized by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) as the self-poisoning of the will by interiorization of trauma in the form of a postponed and imaginary revenge. The concept of ressentiment is now making a comeback in political discourse. The aim of this book is to examine the divergent senses in which the concept of ressentiment is used today. We have 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 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 global capitalism in order to put an end to the dialectical cycle of ressentiment. This book makes a strict distinction between ressentiment and resentment, or the feeling of injustice, and there is a sustained focus on the polemical nature of the concept. For many contemporary authors, ressentiment is the most important factor in the axiological reversals and ideological paralogisms that characterize modern emancipatory politics. The contributions to this volume draw upon a wide variety of methods and ideological contexts, offering the full diversity of interpretations of ressentiment.