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4 - The Resentment– Ressentiment Complex: A Critique of Liberal Discourse
- Edited by Dan Degerman, University of Bristol
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- Book:
- The Politics of Negative Emotions
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 28 April 2023, pp 74-94
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Part of our ideological heritage is a widespread contemporary discourse in social and political theory that distinguishes ‘resentment’ from ‘ressentiment’, defending the former and dismissing the latter (Rorty, 2000; Barbalet, 2001; Meltzer and Musolf, 2002; Demertzis, 2006; MacLachlan, 2010; Murphy, 2012; Darwall, 2013; Fassin, 2013; Rushdy, 2018). While the definitions of these terms vary, their use is more constant. The emphasis on resentment is coterminous with a generally progressive stance on the passions that react against forms of social injustice, albeit with an ugly face. At stake is, for example, the defence of moral indignation of working and middle class voices over the exorbitant bonuses for the managerial elite, or the exoneration of black rage over entrenched racism. In contrast, the emphasis on ressentiment stems from a more conservative point of view, in which inequality is seen as a fact of nature and passionate resistance in the name of justice is portrayed as mendacious and harmful. The aim is to defend liberal democracy against inappropriate or unnecessarily polarising expressions of anger. Democracy would require ‘good losers’ willing to self-sacrifice in the interest of socio-political stability.
At the same time, liberal and conservative voices tend to agree in one respect: whereas resentment is deemed essential for democratic practice, ressentiment is considered its nemesis. The former is the felt need to remedy wrongs; the latter is a toxic brew of botched revenge, humiliation, backbiting and spite. While resentment can be legitimated as long as it is instrumental in guarding shared norms of justice, there is always the threat of its ‘sliding’ into a self-authorising ressentiment. For instance, Michael Ure (2015) states that resentment is a necessary, but insufficient, virtue of democratic practices that are committed to mutual respect, equality and justice. For these practices to persist, legitimate grievances must at all cost be prevented from getting stuck in ‘a radical envy and a deep hatred of existence that identifies virtue with victimhood’: ‘Resentment is the raw material; ressentiment is a lack of hygiene’, and hence we ‘need to understand how socio-political resentment can slide into ontological ressentiment in order to avoid totalitarian or perfectionist politics’ (Ure, 2015: 601, 610).
3 - “Transgenous Philosophy”: Post-humanism, Anthropotechnics and the Poetics of Natal Difference
- Edited by Willem Schinkel, Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, Lena Tsipouri, Vanja Stenius
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- Book:
- In Medias Res
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2012, pp 43-66
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Summary
In this chapter1 I investigate Peter Sloterdijk's relation to humanism, especially in its post-Kantian sense of an ideology of Enlightenment based on anthropology. How does an author who writes after Nietzsche's biopolitical challenge of the Übermensch, Heidegger's ontological upgrading of the humanitas, Foucault's structuralist decentering of man, Derrida's deconstruction of anthropocentric discourse and Deleuze & Guattari's machinic constructivism, relate to the ideology of emancipation through formation (Bildung), i.e. the “anthropotechnics” of reading and writing? What are the biopolitical insights of an “anthropo-phenomenology” or an “anthropology beyond humans”? Can a positive understanding of ‘humanity’ still be found in his work?
Since the Summer of 1999, it has been impossible to find an answer to these questions without reference to the complex context of the affair with which it is customary to associate Sloterdijk's name. The occasion for Jürgen Habermas and other public intellectuals to ring the alarm bell was a philosophico-literary lecture given by Sloterdijk entitled Prescriptions for the Human Park. A Reply to Heidegger's Letter On Humanism. The contents of this text were wilfully and abusively interpreted as a programmatic series of statements on engineering the Übermensch. It soon attracted public attention all over Europe and definitively established Sloterdijk's name as one of the most significant, but also controversial, present-day continental philosophers. The bitter irony of all this attention, in itself an exceptional honour for a demanding philosophical paper, is that the subject of the original text – and this seems to have escaped humanists and transhumanists alike – was first and foremost precisely the question of what it means to write today, after the age of the book and the humanist ideology of its patient reading have come to an end. And despite, or, one is tempted to think, because of, all the attention this text has received since then, this essentially political question is still waiting to be taken seriously.
In the first part of this chapter, I distinguish and briefly discuss two “layers” that together constitute the scandal: Firstly, Sloterdijk's actual text on humanism and formation in the age of genetic engineering, and secondly, the convergence of the scandal and the mass-medial dynamics of “normalization” on the one hand and the hyper-morality and dogmatically conservative humanism of the last generation of Frankfurt School theorists on the other.