Drawing upon a wide variety of authors, approaches, and ideological contexts, this book offers a comprehensive and detailed critique of the distinct and polemical senses in which the concept of ressentiment (and its cognate 'resentment') is used today. It also proposes a new mode of addressing ressentiment in which critique and polemics no longer set the tone. Contemporary tendencies in political culture such as neoliberalism, nationalism, populism, identity politics, and large-scale conspiracy theories have led to the return of the concept of ressentiment in armchair political analysis.
This book argues that, due to the tension between its enormous descriptive power and its mutually contradicting ideological performances, it is necessary to 'redramatize' the concept of ressentiment. Inspired by Marxist political epistemology, affect theory, postcolonialism, and feminism, the book maps, delimits, and assesses four irreducible ways in which ressentiment can be articulated: the ways of the priest, the philosopher, the witness, and the diplomat.
The first perspective is typically embodied by conservative (Scheler, Girard) and liberal (Smith, Rawls) political theory, the second by Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault, whereas the third is found in the writings of Améry, Fanon and Adorno, and the fourth is the author's own, albeit inspired by philosophers such as Ahmed, Stiegler, Stengers and Sloterdijk.
In producing a dialectical sequence between all four typical modes of enunciation, the book seeks to answer the question by what right do we possess and use the concept of ressentiment, and what makes the phenomenon worth knowing? The Dialectic of Ressentiment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in critical theory, social and political philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, history, literature, and anthropology. It will also appeal to anyone interested in (public debates on) the politics of anger, discourse ethics, trauma studies, and memory politics.
- Associate professor