Global Discourse • vol 10 • no 2 • 237–253 © Bristol University Press 2020 • Online ISSN 2043-7897 https://doi.org/10.1332/204378920X15828100918561 Special Issue: The Politics of Negative Emotions RESEARCH ARTICLE The resentment-ressentiment complex: a critique of liberal discourse Sjoerd van Tuinen, vantuinen@esphil.eur.nl Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands 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. Key words resentment and ressentiment • liberalism • authenticity • affect • politics To cite this article: van Tuinen, S. (2020) The resentment-ressentiment complex: a critique of liberal discourse, Global Discourse, vol 10, no 2, 237–253, DOI: 10.1332/204378920X15828100918561 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 237 Sjoerd van Tuinen 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). The problem with this distinction is that it is mostly theoretical, and that it presupposes a highly idealised and universally shared conception of the political realm – indeed, a ‘totalitarian or perfectionist’ one. In reality, I argue, the slide is impossible to localise and, as soon it becomes topical, has already occurred. Elisabetta Brighi (2016) observes a ‘relative hegemony’ of ressentiment due to recent failures in the politics of recognition, for example among Muslims who are treated as less than full members of postcolonial societies. She asks, how are we ‘to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-hegemonic, and self-affirming political practices’ instead of merely solidifying established identities? Yet acknowledging this difficulty does not keep her from defending the moral value of resentment in response to failures of justice. Focusing on the Paris terror attacks of 2015, she raises the apparently unsettling but ultimately self-referential question: ‘Is the current wave of global terrorism fueled by resentment or ressentiment?’ (Brighi, 2016: 427) Rather than seeking to give a new answer to this question or providing criteria that would contribute to an ever more refined distinction between resentment and ressentiment, what needs to be investigated is the function of such a differentiating exercise. Why is it necessary to constantly protect the socio-political order from the risk of moral corruption in these terms, and for whom? Far from wanting to downplay the social and political significance of collective sensibilities, the focus here is on the attempts to interpret and legitimate some at the cost of others. Invariably, one of the main authorities invoked in these attempts is Nietzsche. This is all the more surprising as Nietzsche never actually made any distinction between resentment and ressentiment. On the contrary, he would arguably have denied its relevance to his own understanding of justice. It is therefore by way of a historical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment in its cultural and socio-political context that a critique of the mainstream discourse on the reactive attitudes becomes possible. At stake are the principle and possibility of politics in the 238 The resentment-ressentiment complex age of the ‘domestication’ (Lyman, 2004) of moral sensibilities. I will argue that the many attempts at distinguishing resentment from ressentiment frame these attitudes in the form of a false problem. This problem not only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of a depoliticisation of others, but also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. The argument will proceed in two steps. First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key role in the evaluation of reactive attitudes, those of their rationality, their authenticity and their justness. It is then argued, by way of a critique of the distinction between moderate and excessive resentment and a deconstruction of the distinction between unreflective and self-conscious ressentiment respectively, 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’; however, 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 ‘demoralisation’ of the problem of reactive attitudes by means of a historicosystematic 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. The problems of rationality and authenticity A first moral ground for the contemporary distinction between resentment and ressentiment is usually found in classical liberal theory, namely in the difference between a reasonable resentment and a self-legitimating ressentiment. Resentment is defined as a retributive feeling of injustice, which is essential for our mutual recognition as equal citizens. Because benevolence does not suffice in the pursuit of justice, Adam Smith argues that resentment is necessary for demanding redress, even if it is also ‘the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind’ (Smith, 2009: 47). While ‘harsh and turbulent’, his contemporary Joseph Butler finds it to be ‘one of the common bonds, by which society is held together’ (Butler, 2017: 70). The problem is that the gratification of resentment has an intrinsic tendency towards excess. Under the aegis of moral justification, it can quickly become self-defeating and a threat to social life, where it may trigger counter-resentments. In order for true justice to exist, and for resentment not to deteriorate into rancorous memory, both Smith and Butler emphasise that revenge should never be more than a means to an end. It is a necessary evil that only becomes morally good when balanced with our natural pity and compassion by deliberative reason. The challenge of resentment therefore lies in its moderation and its proportionate acting out. This moral uprightness as well as the tendency to action are lacking in ressentiment. As a category in moral and political discourse, ressentiment has gradually come to absorb the function and significance of resentment, such that resentment’s negative and irrational connotations now overshadow its positive and more reasonable aspects. This is due to Nietzsche’s conceptualisation, but it is also the consequence of a historical shift in public culture. The rise of liberalism coincides with the rise of civil society and a new public sphere in 18th century Europe. Together with indignation, resentment could be regarded as the reactive but necessary counterpart to the enthusiasm that formed the impassioned drive of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its role in 239 Sjoerd van Tuinen the terror that followed. In the following, more complacent period, however, the term acquired the additional connotation of a suspicion about the prevailing humanism. It was not only the notion that passion can be subordinate to reason that became questionable, the authenticity of the passions themselves was at stake. In The Present Age (2002 [1846]), Søren Kierkegaard complains that the public culture of courageous speech and concrete action had dissolved into lethargy. Comparing his own time with the prior ‘revolutionary age’ characterised by a certain revelatory rawness, he diagnoses a ‘passionless, sedentary, reflective age’ dominated by ‘ressentiment and abstract thought’ (Kierkegaard, 2002: 63, 96, 33). The struggles for freedom and equality immediately preceding the time of Kierkegaard could only be experienced evasively, through the lens of scepticism and cowardice, as if they consisted of nothing but satire. Whereas the revolutionary age was characterised by exemplary deeds, and pre-modern times were known for the fearlessness of religious faith, in his own age nobody was capable of devotion to anything beyond their immediate self-interest. Everywhere a prudent passivity prevails over immediate action, such that passions, including that of resentment, were disconnected from enthusiasm and internalised as ressentiment: ‘just as in a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘so ressentiment (misundelse) becomes the negatively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age’ (Kierkegaard, 2002: 72, translation modified). We thus discover a second moral ground for the contemporary distinction between resentment and ressentiment, the former being active and sincere and the latter overly reflective and self-deluding. At best, ressentiment is a frustrated resentment turned inward; at worst, it is a smouldering envy that was never meant to see the light of day. Either way, once there is ressentiment, the time for authentic resentment is over. Those who cultivate indignation are increasingly seen as the representatives of a rotten culture, actors in a spectacle without dignity, sustainability or credibility. This is also documented by writers such as Fyodor Dostoevky and Gustave Flaubert. Ceaselessly dissecting human life in its basest motives, they became the literary prophets of a whole society’s misanthropic truth: no matter whether we are above or below, we are all crooked slaves beyond healing. But what is this literary gesture if not a paradoxical appropriation and embodiment of the ressentiment that always already binds the author to those he seeks to distinguish himself from? Kierkegaard struggled for an anachronistic spiritual enrichment of life. But when he opposes a desire for the true life to the sober, calculated existence of the bourgeoisie, his contempt can hardly hide his own boredom and passivity – something he knows all too well, since his rapturous phrases never succeed in becoming more than relentless irony (Conway, 2015: 134). How, if not by scolding the mediocrity of others, could he reckon himself superior? In failing to make a plausible difference, does he, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert, not effectively universalise the modern pathologies – ressentiment, hysteria, anxiety, boredom and so on – of the bourgeoisie? Bernd Stegemann has shown that the 19th century resentment of ressentiment played a key ideological role in the legitimation of socioeconomic inequality. (Stegemann, 2017: 147) Its anti-liberalism was not just the trademark of a literary existentialism that attempted to overcoming the decadent culture into which it was born. It was also the replacement of the narrative of class opposition with that of failure of individual character. Capital is not bad, humans are bad. In the general neuroticisation of social conflict, the only justified form of ressentiment would be 240 The resentment-ressentiment complex that of cynicism, a sophisticated, self-conscious sense of impotence, whereas the very idea of real praxis is repressed from the outset. Deprived of its earlier role as defender of the general interest, the bourgeoisie implicitly confirmed its own exploitation of the working classes and simultaneously arranged with their hatred, since, precisely to the extent that the proletariat failed to find solace in the blessings of hard labour, its wounds were in fact its own and therefore well-deserved. In the words of Reinhard Olschanski: A ressentimental master-morality of self-sacrifice declares the hatred for the dominating class as ressentimental hatred, as a slave revolt that merely externalizes the general corruption with which everyone is afflicted instead of locating it in one’s own inner life and bending it into a self-hatred for one’s own wickedness. (Olschanski, 2015: 45–8, my translation) The problem of justice While the phrasing of Stegemann’s critique of existentialism suggests that a similar critique could be made of Nietzsche, it is precisely this dialectic of human culpability and sacrificial realism, of nihilistic nausea (Ekel) and compassion (Mitleid) in which ressentiment turns back on itself, that also forms the bone of contention in Nietzsche’s polemic with the liberal moralists of his time (Nietzsche, 2006a: essay III, §14). His refusal to indulge in the ‘absurd’ is what sets him apart from his predecessors in moral theory, as well as from most of the discourse on ressentiment that has since become dominant. It will lead him to pose the problem of ressentiment in entirely new terms. Nietzsche agreed with the diagnosis that general servility has displaced modern politics into morality and the symbolical order. His historical context was the new German Reich (1871–1918) of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, a state constituted by the specific conjuncture of Protestant Christianity and the failure of the bourgeois revolution, which he despised for its reactionary particularism and racism. He regarded the gradual growth of modern democratic movements, including socialist and anarchist worker movements but especially bourgeois liberalism, as symptoms of the destiny of the West: nihilism. For him, too, the chaos of public opinion and its hypocritical bursts of sentimentality, the inevitable despotism of the ‘herd’, meant a gradual demise of the very power of organisation of modern life. Yet what is unique about Nietzsche is his attempt to free the concept of ressentiment from its entrapment in the reflexive pessimism of his contemporaries. Along with Wagner, Nietzsche identifies both Dostoevsky and Flaubert as the great decadents of his age. They personify a general reactivity, a form of agency that disavows its own activity and that sees everything in the jaundiced perspective of decline and decay, with the ‘retrospective weariness’ of the latecomer and epigone who believes the future to be already a thing of the past. (Nietzsche, 2007: II, 5) Instead of their hypocritical oscillation between a heroic assumption of ressentiment and a much too clever resignation – their ‘bad conscience’ – Nietzsche seeks a new naivety, the ‘innocence of becoming’. This makes him closer to Charles Baudelaire, whose artistic attitude to the present was one of untimely affirmation rather than liberation or redemption. The aim of his writing, indeed the task of the ‘artist-philosopher’ as Nietzsche sees it, is to create an alternative point of view whenever the reactive affects 241 Sjoerd van Tuinen of one’s own time threaten to overtake critical thought. At stake is the possibility of beginning again, a rupture of time. What this means politically becomes clearer when we recall that Nietzsche borrowed the concept of ressentiment from Eugen Dühring’s Der Wert des Lebens, in which it is argued, along the lines of the classical liberal philosophy of resentment, that ‘the feeling of justice is a ressentiment and belongs together with revenge’ (Dühring, 1881: 176). Having initially accepted revenge as a means for self-preservation and defending honour in his most ‘English’ book, Human, All Too Human (2005 [1878]), Nietzsche soon polemicised against it, as it would legitimate anti-Semites and anarchists, among whom ressentiment blooms. The defence of ressentiment by Dühring is an attempt ‘to sanctify revenge with the term justice’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11; III, 14; see also Elgat, 2017). The main problem for Nietzsche is not the risk of infinitisation inherent to revenge or the lex talionis, as it was for Smith and Butler. Rather, it is the very notion that justice would be merely a sublimation of the feeling of past grievances, since this glorifies not only revenge but all the reactive impulses that derive from it. Nietzsche’s objection is twofold. First, resentment and indignation are not instruments for protecting and maintaining order, but sources of moral degeneration in which aristocratic values of excellence and vigour are sacrificed for a more mediocre society. The reason for this is the pettiness of revenge, which, precisely to the extent that it is considered proportionate and civil, implies and demands general equality or reciprocity. The administering of revenge would be merely the re-enforcement of social recognition by means of punishment, which is problematic not because it leads to more suffering but because it associates suffering with a frustrated sense of entitlement and an attachment to past humiliation. As Nietzsche makes Zarathustra teach, out of the revenge ‘towards time and its “it was”’ is born the ‘spirit of revenge’ that constitutes the metaphysical element of our existence: the grudging thinking (nachdenken) that (a) opposes being to becoming and decreases our capacity to affirm suffering and overcome ourselves, and (b) condemns the aspiration for justice to gratuitous suffering inflicted on the self (Nietzsche, 2006b, II ‘On Redemption’). Second, the valuation of the reactive affects overlooks a more noble class of affects that constitutes the true source of justice, the active ones. ‘The active man, the attacking, aggressive man is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man who merely reacts’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11). For how could revenge lead to justice? Only if someone first had the power to determine an equivalence between damage and suffering, and thus to derive pleasure from cruelty. Only in this case, Nietzsche argues, is justice no longer a reactive demand directed at the past, but an active determination of the future. As long as the measure is already given, by contrast, we can only subject ourselves, but realism – resignation, adaptation – cannot lead to justice. To find a moral meaning in suffering implies that the world is already divided into victims who seek compensation for an internalised trauma and culprits who must internalise pain. But this division is only the rationalisation of a pain that has no intrinsically rational sense apart from a freedom to act rather than a settlement of accounts. Acting is therefore the only way to externalise and justify suffering. The challenge is to act our pain itself as a stimulant, not for moral payback but ‘for life’. Nietzsche thus brings about a complete inversion of perspective, based on a genealogical expansion of the historical scope of the concept of ressentiment far beyond the perspective of the psychologists of his time: It is true that resentment and vengefulness lie at the basis of Western morality and its insatiable need for moral 242 The resentment-ressentiment complex vivisection. However, this testifies not to its noble and civilised but to its corrupt and servile nature. Just as the man who reacts is like a ‘headless frog’, ‘English psychologists’ operate like frogs in a swamp (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 15; I, 1). They everywhere seek the low motivations that sustain morality but refuse to question this morality itself. They sniff around, historicise a little, add a dash of evolution, and ask what the purpose of ressentiment is. But for Nietzsche, ressentiment has no use value except for its further proliferation. He thus reinterprets the derivation of the notion of justice to resentment as the ultimate self-rationalisation of ressentiment. It is essentially a modern distortion, Nietzsche argues, since part of justice has always consisted precisely in the attempt to impose laws on the backward-looking passions and so put an end to the ‘senseless ravages of ressentiment amongst those inferior’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 14; II, 11). More untimely and incommensurate than the differences between moderate and excessive resentment or between self-reflexive and unacknowledged ressentiment, his own difference between active and reactive affects – or in slightly more psychological terms, between happy contempt or sullen vengefulness – is all the more important and necessary for a critical understanding of the reactive attitudes and their tense relation to justice. If the dialectical overcoming of ressentiment remains stuck in negativity and the post-Christian passion for moral and physical suffering, then its active overcoming must take the form of a transfiguration of the past itself, that is, of the mixing up of the past with divergent becomings of the present. Just sentiments Now that we have reconstructed the historical evolution in the problematisation of resentment/ressentiment, we can turn to attempts at distinguishing them. Today, there is again widespread agreement among social and political theorists that resentment arises in a morally legitimate response to those who have deliberately insulted, injured, deprived or discredited us or those we solidarise with. Resentment is of a piece with the recognition of the other as a free and accountable fellow and, in turn, with being recognised as such oneself (Strawson, 1974; Williams, 2005; Fukuyama, 2018). While its expression may not always be compatible with the law, and it is often at risk of becoming irrational and immoral, it is difficult to imagine any idea, let alone any practical politics, of (social) justice without it. At the same time, there is a strong consensus that not all forms of resentment are equally justified. There is a fine line separating righteous indignation from self-righteous indignation, for example, between the juridical contestation of bureaucratic arbitrariness and the vandalising of public buildings or even terrorist attacks. Moreover, some resentments, for instance, that of African Americans over police violence, seem more authentic than, say, white supremacist anger over the removal of confederate monuments or the perceived unfairness of affirmative action policies. Despite the structural transformations of the public sphere since the time of 18th century coffee houses and 19th century newspapers, what remains constant in the contemporary discourse on political affect are the well-worn twin problems of rationality and authenticity. What has changed, perhaps since the mid-20th century rise of the ‘resentmentparadigm’ (Schneider, 2019) in social science in response to the historical experience of fascism and rightwing extremism, is that both problems now also tend to get framed 243 Sjoerd van Tuinen in terms of the moral opposition between resentment and ressentiment. Accordingly, ressentiment would be the uncivilised and inauthentic form of resentment, just as resentment would be a more constructive and pure articulation of the feeling of injustice. The postulate that this is more than a theoretical distinction, and that it must be made time and again, appears beyond contestation. Let us therefore have a critical look at how the problems of rationality and authenticity are currently being tackled. Rationality While there could be no sense of justice without a sense of being wronged, legitimate resentment is always triangulated. It presupposes a moral or social norm in terms of which it is justified. I resent you stealing something from me, because we share certain moral commitments, such as the concepts of private property or the utilitarian pursuit of self-interest. As a consequence, however, there is always a danger that the question of the ‘right’ political reason depoliticises the wrongs that induce resentment in the first place. For Smith, resentment is legitimised in conformity with a shared notion of communicative action in public space. Since resentment is ‘the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions’, Smith argues, it must be ‘properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator’ (Smith, 2009: 76) – that is to say, not the level of those who act and fight for change, but the level of those who observe how others act. Smith presupposes a depoliticised equilibrium between benevolence and resentment, but the problem is that these are not harmonious among themselves. Contemporary social theorists like (John Rawls 1971, 533) or Robert Solomon, too, concentrate on how to avoid or preempt envy and ressentiment through an ethics of competition or standards of equity and transparency (Solomon, 2015). However, in this way the question of justice is overshadowed by the procedural sufficiency of those who judge others for not playing by the rules of fairness and sportsmanship – in other words, conformity to those rules that hold a liberal society together but that may well be part of the structural causes of the very injustices that the resentments in question are reacting against. Insofar as resentment remains triangulated by the moral standards of mutual respect, equality and social justice, our sight of the political cause of a more deeply entrenched ressentiment therefore remains blocked. To return to the example from the United States, almost immediately after the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2013, the movement was chastised for reinforcing racist stereotypes of angry or overly expressive black people. By focusing on the angry black man and woman, Black Lives Matter was seen to be counterproductive to liberal-democratic politics. As an overdose of anger, it was considered a threat to the public peace, which must be suppressed in the name of the greater good of consensus, deliberation and majoritarian rule. This shows that the right to angry speech is itself a marker of cultural dominance, whereas racial subjectivity is predicated on the suspended agency from which it ensues. The obsession with procedural rationality neglects the more substantive protest by interpreting it as a loss of control and as a potential prelude to violence. Yet engaging in a politics of rage and fury may be precisely the way in which Black Lives Matter and related movements can criticise respectability politics as a constitutive element of white supremacy, whereby black people are forced to alter their public behaviour to gain access to the rights that come with white personhood (Hooker, 2016; Thompson, 2017: 460). In directly 244 The resentment-ressentiment complex confronting the hegemony of narratives such as that of the American Dream, excessive resentment could well deserve exoneration as a political practice. As Audre Lorde once put it: ‘Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.’ (Lorde, 1984: 129) Authenticity More persistent than the problem of the disproportionality of resentment, and apparently less susceptible to ideology critique, is the problem of its authenticity or integrity. Resentment becomes suspicious when, for example, it is corrupted by a sour grapes phenomenon. As Bernard Reginster puts it, ‘the fundamental difference between ressentiment and resentment is that resentment appears to presuppose the condemnation of its object and constitutes a reaction of disapproval to its occurrence, whereas ressentiment rests on the implicit endorsement of the very values embodied by those towards whom it is directed.’ (Reginster, 1997: 296; see also Merton, 1968: 209–10) This stance is illustrated by the contemporary discourse, dominant in North America, about the ‘angry voter’. Whereas there may have been times when the resentment of the masses made the status quo tremble, today politicians and the media actively engage in the cultivation and exploitation of resentment. By sowing division and generating fake news, they channel resentment into a rhetorical direction ‘that frustrates citizens’ desires while upholding the very structures that inflame civic resentment in the first place’ (Engels, 2015; see also Cramer, 2016; McVeigh and Estep, 2019) This leads ‘angry white men’, otherwise powerless to improve their increasingly precarious living and working conditions, to displace their resentment onto cultural issues that actually naturalise and consolidate both their socioeconomic condition and the accompanying feelings of bitterness, shame, and fear – perhaps first of all the fear of equality. ‘You/Jews will not replace us’, the white supremacists chant. Or as one social scientist comments: ‘Discourses of resentment encode reactions to a sense of loss, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement; they consolidate feelings of fear, anger, bitterness, and shame.’ (Banning, 2006: 83) In addition, there is also the discourse about ‘spoilt citizens’ and ‘pampered consumers’ who can no longer live up to the demands of emancipated life and long for authoritarian leaders mainly out of spite and fear of giving up privileges. This is a discourse that is perhaps more at home in Europe, where the gradual demise of social democracy articulates in revolts of the middle classes, easily dismissed as ‘professional protesters’ and ‘weekend anarchists’. In Germany, the massive protests against the Stuttgart 21 railway station project as well as the Thilo Sarrazin’s attacks on supposedly lax immigration laws led to the neologism of ‘anger-citizens’ (Wutbürger), which designates older and relatively well-to-do citizens who refuse to participate in civil society out of a supposedly misplaced contempt for arrogant elites. Whether or not there is a rational and emancipatory core of resentment hidden underneath ressentiment, in both examples the argument appears to be that the destiny of inauthentic resentment is ressentiment. Failing to address the true causes of injustice or injury leads to the introversion and multiplication of resentment. Many therefore replace the old distinction between rational and irrational resentment with the distinction between a socio-politically virtuous and accurate resentment and a vicious and unreliable ressentiment. Whereas social indignation and resentment ‘in their genuine form’ respond to the real causation of lack or harm, as Rahel Jaeggi 245 Sjoerd van Tuinen (2019) argues, once they are diverted into free-floating projections, they become indeterminate, infinite and ‘unreal’ in their persistence and vehemence. Such a differentiation seems all the more desirable at a time when the regression of the darling affect of liberal identity politics – resentment – can count on too much understanding from media that rely on outrage as their main source of profit. As the editors of a contemporary magazine bemoan, one can be envious of the hegemony of angry white men in this respect: The reduction of white resentment to economic concerns now has been thoroughly debunked. But the exhausting examination of white resentment – mostly by white people, who perhaps were the only ones shocked by the overwhelming white support for Trump – has overshadowed any political possibilities for the affect beyond rallies blanketed with MAGA [Make America Great Again] hats. Maybe this is because the resentment hasn’t been identified as such. (Compare with Anderson, 2016; Breitbart, 2011 and Wang and Goodman, 2018.) The suggestion here is that there also exist less mediated, more pure resentments that do more justice to inequalities at the level of class, race or gender. By implication, justice increasingly becomes a question of the originality of concerns. But how do we measure this originality? In fact, if the dismissal of ‘PC’ and ‘woke culture’, climate denialism, xenophobia and misogyny were really only ‘codifications’ of a more basic anxiety over socioeconomic dispossession, then what guarantees that the resentments over any other perceived lack of recognition are more immediate or trustworthy? Here one risks a regression into the older opposition between reasonable and excessive resentment. Resentment would still be reasonable to the extent that its causes can be deciphered and appropriated by the social scientist, whose task then becomes the reorientation and whitewashing of its articulations according to more objective standards. While this task may be necessary and effective, it has an undeniably patronising effect. It may even confirm the hegemony of some resentments at the cost of those ressentiments that never lead to political action but only articulate in silent resignation over past atrocities. The diagnosis of ressentiment, even if it is meant as an instrument in ideology critique that refuses to psychologise and focuses solely on structural conditions, is never far from blaming the victim. To the extent that contemporary resentments over identity are actually deemed irreducible to socioeconomical concerns, by contrast, what more could authenticity mean than the sincerity of the resentful? In this case, the problem is that the subjective identification with a minority position always bears the danger of becoming part and parcel of an identity politics that, if it does not deny or even blame suffering, tends to replace class politics with a moral discourse that incorporates and conserves social divisions. As Wendy Brown famously puts it, the investment in our ‘wounded attachments’ inevitably reiterates a feeling of powerlessness that substitutes action and thereby makes them all the more unredeemable (Brown, 1995: 52). The ensuing rancour and recrimination towards one’s perceived oppressor are at the same time a kind of renunciation of freedom or power. Struggles for recognition are therefore increasingly inseparable from the call out culture that is the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Perhaps what is being overlooked in the search for both objective and subjective criteria in the determination of the authenticity of resentment is that our grievances may 246 The resentment-ressentiment complex well be much more contingent and less our own than we think. Even if we abstract from the role of the various parties that have an interest in the exploitation of our emotional lives, our pain is almost always overdetermined by a large variety of flows of sensations and feelings that surface in different and displaced ways. As Sara Ahmed has shown, this means that the relation between pain and social injustice is much more fortuitous than we are morally inclined to think (Ahmed, 2010: 30–1, 191–203). In the age of male sensibility and liberal guilt, the risk is that those who feel strongest or articulate themselves in the loudest fashion automatically and rightfully prevail (Ellison, 1999). Indeed, it is precisely the fear of such anarchic ‘explosions of feeling’ under the veil of ‘righteous indignation’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 18, 14) that could unite contemporary progressives with Nietzsche, as it implies the impossibility of critically distinguishing subject-positions and organising any form of counter-hegemonic solidarity. These problems suggest that the contemporary discourse on the difference between resentment and ressentiment is not that different from the 19th century discourse of authentic ressentiment. To be sure, this distinction now tends to function under inverted conditions: it is the minorities and historically marginalised and traumatised whose resentments seem a lot less reactionary or neurotic than the hyper-reflexive ressentiments that saturate our media, and a lot more empowering. As Elizabeth Warren retorted against Joe Biden’s ‘angry’ criticism in the run-up to the democratic primaries: ‘I am angry and I own it.’ But does the spectre of nihilism simply disappear once we live up to our resentments and identify with them? To the extent that such a reflexive appropriation of resentment has nothing to do with guilt or defensiveness, clarity instead of silence could lead to action and forge new intersectional alliances (Lorde, 1984: 133). As the more hegemonic obsession with white male anger shows, however, there is no guarantee that clarity does not turn cynical. On the contrary, the undecidability of the authenticity of resentment raises the suspicion that this criterion, too, remains predicated on an established distribution of privileges and differences. As Brown observes, this means that identity politics ‘is as likely to seek generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impotence, as it is to seek its own or collective liberation. Indeed it is more likely to punish and reproach … than to find venues of self-affirming action’ (Brown, 1995: 403). Even in its most immediate expression, resentment is therefore prone to function in an ideological way. Here too, the hackneyed distinction between resentment and ressentiment is only a relative and abstract distinction that presupposes a more fundamental non-distinction. Politics and ressentiment It is this current interpretative impasse that I propose to call the ‘resentmentressentiment complex’: the more they are confused, the greater the need to distinguish between the two becomes, especially, but not only, when combined with the attempt to safeguard rational governance from ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’ passions. What the constant recurrence of this non-distinction reveals is a tendency to leave it up to our moral sensibility rather than critical thought to set the unity of measure for political action. This begs the question whether the difference between resentment and ressentiment, no matter whether it is set in terms of proportionality or authenticity, is ultimately only relative to the point of accommodation for bourgeois eyes and has no meaning beyond them (Dolgert, 2016: 361). 247 Sjoerd van Tuinen I regard it as proof of the tenacity of the resentment-ressentiment complex that even Nietzsche, despite his categorical rejection of any role for the reactive attitude in guarding justice, has always remained a reference for the attempts to salvage resentment from ressentiment in the name of a progressive agenda. While simultaneously treated as an immoral genius or a radical conservative, some authors even credit Nietzsche for being one of the first to warn us of the ‘slide’ of resentment into ressentiment. William E. Connolly, for example, insists that ‘[y]ou do need to draw upon the powers of resentment and indignation from time to time, as Nietzsche himself emphasizes, but you seek to do so in ways that do not allow those resentments to slide into ressentiment’ (Connolly, 2011: 66; see also Hunt, 2013). But isn’t the wish the father of the thought here? Whereas the advice to act on our suffering makes sense at existential and moral levels, or perhaps within the confines of a small-scale agon of nobles, it ignores Nietzsche’s actual rejection of any kind of politics based on vindicatory passions, a rejection which could be phrased in the stark words of Brown, namely that every reactive form of politics is ‘a practice that reiterates the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury’ (Brown, 1995: 73). As little as Brown does Nietzsche distinguish resentment from ressentiment. He leaves no doubt that justice, for him, could never follow from any kind of revenge. Rather, it originates in the good will that prevails among those of roughly equal power to come to terms with each other – with each other’s ‘actual active emotions (Affekte) such as lust for mastery, greed and the like’ (Nietzsche, 2012: 259) – through economic and military settlement. Justice is essentially a matter of the ‘composition’ of ressentiment, of turning revenge into a question of exchange and calculation as opposed to any immediate reaction. In particular, it is the invention of a legal system that delays and depersonalises both actions and injuries: ‘“just” and “unjust” only start from the moment when a legal system is set up (and not, as Dühring says, from the moment when the injury is done)’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11). The social function of the law is thus not an abstractly conceived levelling in the interest of fairness or social rights, but a counterbalancing of ressentimental interpretations of justice. Not even obligation-law serves the creation of a sense of guilt, but precisely its repression. Despite his abhorrence of the anarchism of feeling, Nietzsche’s argument is rooted in an anarchism of the political act. Contrary to the modern transformation of law as activity into a knowable object of science, he understood positive law as an art, thereby inverting traditional hierarchies. The law stands above justice as art stands above truth (Berkowitz, 2006). Instead of taking the distinction between just and unjust as a natural given, Nietzsche localises justice in the moment of the rational composition of the social. From this it follows, first, that the conditions of justice are not themselves rational. As a ‘bestiality of the act’ rather than the ‘bestiality of the idea’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 22), their ‘rationalisation’ is itself irrational or at least pre-rational. This emphasis on the transgressive nature of the political act puts Nietzsche’s critique of reactivity at light-years remove from those who argue that anger is always normatively or rationally inappropriate (for example Nussbaum, 2016: 31). Second, justice is opposed to authenticity. It is found precisely in the forgetfulness and impersonality of an act, and in the happiness that arises from the exercise of the power to act; it does not derive from grievances over one’s past. Ressentiment, by contrast, castrates justice and takes its life from it at the same time that it conceals its own will to power. By turning the initial measuring of social equilibrium into the 248 The resentment-ressentiment complex fetishisation of injustice, itself a caricature of an ‘original’ justice, it dooms social justice to be the form in which justice is repressed and sublimated (Kofman, 1993: 42–9). As a consequence of this complete overhaul of our conception of justice, it appears that Nietzsche cannot qualify as a philosopher of social justice in any contemporary sense. Within the social sphere, the law may well sanctify a form of revenge, albeit in the heavily mediated form of rights and duties. But reactivity, according to Nietzsche, is not what makes the law just. On the contrary, this justification lies in the domain of politics – that is, the domain of action instead of feeling. To be sure, this argument does not just affect exonerations of rage against sexism or racism, but also more conservative attempts to defend a moderate resentment. In effect, justice is only what is enacted and what does not exist outside its enactment. It both precedes and exceeds social triangulation. While Nietzsche’s brash vitalism raises many new and difficult questions, however, they need not get in the way of our main concern here. As it stands, we can speak of a legitimacy of social ressentiment, to the extent that it is the inevitable but already rationalised consequence of the asymmetrical establishment of social order with its winners and losers. However, this reactivity or vengefulness could never be guiding in the further struggle for social justice, since it inherently keeps scratching old wounds. Precisely due to its being rendered socially latent, it tends towards rampant growth and arbitrary raging rather than to its own dissolution. For Nietzsche, the much-feared slide of resentment into ressentiment therefore seems to be the necessary discontent of civilisation. This is not at all to contest that it is necessary to repoliticise the state monopolies on force or finance when a society tends to inequality and the exclusion of minorities, especially when the law is primarily endorsed as necessary to depoliticise rage. But it cannot be done on the basis of a distinction between legitimate resentment and illegitimate ressentiment. Resentment has only relative standards and ressentiment shows it. What entitles Nietzsche to dismiss resentment along with ressentiment when it comes to justice is precisely his concern with the possibility of politics as such – that is, not a politics within the confines of social subordination, but with the only true political event: the production of new practices and rules as much as alternative values we can live by. In many ways, this argument anticipates Hannah Arendt, whose high-minded contempt for the ‘social’ equals Nietzsche’s. Indispensable for protest and revolt, she recognised resentment as that ‘legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse’ (Arendt, 1968: viii). Far from being the basis for yet another liberal argument, however, legitimacy for Arendt is a category that belongs to morality and law, not to political action. What characterises the latter is that it is by definition unexpected, unruly, and irreducible to any social distribution of possibilities. [A]ction can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis. (Arendt, 1958: 184) As Nietzsche had done before, Arendt argues that true political acts are only possible in the form of new beginnings, that is, as revolutionary moments which are as exceptional 249 Sjoerd van Tuinen as justice itself. The examples Arendt gives of such moments are Thucydides and Pericles, precisely those founders of state and lawgivers that Nietzsche admires. Pointing to the Greek term archein, meaning to begin, to lead and to rule, Arendt argues that true action does not adhere to the laws of history. More universal than any relation of domination and exploitation, political action has ‘an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’ (Arendt, 1958: 170; see also Haider, 2018) and prefigures forms of solidarity and collective empowerment that are transversal to existing social and legal relationships. In fact, the outstanding or the exemplar would be impotent if they did not have a chance of enlisting the co-acting of others. Inseparable from its actualisation in affective relations with a plurality of others, the power to act is therefore the very raison d’être of public life: ‘action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of a new process’ (Arendt, 1958: 168–9). As Arendt points out, political action is especially immune to the questions of authenticity or truthfulness. In politics, nobody is the author of their own life (Siemens, 2005 ). Her description of public life bears a remarkable resemblance to Kierkegaard’s depiction of the revolutionary age as an age of tumultuous action in contrast to a post-revolutionary age of feeling. Instead of the enthusiasm, participation, decisiveness, decorum, authority and defiance that characterised the golden age of liberal politics, our age confuses politics with the social sphere in modern life, and as a consequence has replaced the virtues of active civility with the narcissism of professional politicians and their passive spectators, as well as with impartial calculations and the reflectivity of ethical committee members. In particular, it confuses political acts with emotions that cannot be confirmed in public life. For this reason, Arendt would probably have been as horrified over, say, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as she was over the tendency to cultivate moral grievances in lieu of political action in the French Revolution (Arendt, 2006: 49–105). As much as Nietzsche and Arendt locate politics in action, it does not follow that suffering is irrelevant to politics. To expunge politics from collective moods and thereby arrive at an alternative conception of the political made up solely of exceptional events would be an even graver idealism than the one found in liberal ideology, which subordinates the passions to rational interest. It is never sufficient to distinguish the autonomy of the political from the affective determinants that shape the modes of operation in political conflict and impact its potential outcomes. On the contrary, action always erupts from the inextricable entanglement of moral sentiments and politics. As Ahmed argues against Brown, there is no pure action, since it is impossible to separate the action that could lead to change from the reactions that feel, interpret, resist and metabolise what happens. At stake is precisely the contingency, fragility, change and unpredictability of (concerted) action. It takes perseverance and momentum to achieve a more just order, and this achievement may well be sustained by ressentiment. Neither is a pure reaction. The passions are the waverings of the mind that either increase or diminish one’s power to act. Thus anger or ‘against-ness’ (Ahmed, 2010: 172–8), as constituent affect of feminist politics, is not fully determined by the past but also open to future transformations. Nevertheless, these transformations do not make the passions themselves political. Instead, they make it possible to see them from a political point of view – that is, not the perspective of their dismissal or exoneration, but that of their causes and their passage into action. On the one hand, Ahmed reminds us that ‘although injustice cannot be 250 The resentment-ressentiment complex measured by the existence of suffering, some suffering is an effect of injustice’ – ‘of the repetition of some actions rather than others’ (Ahmed, 2010: 196). This suggests that, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s claim that acts considered in themselves can never be just or unjust (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11), their repetitive composition can be. If this were not the case, no normative distinction between Trumpist politics and the civil rights movement would be possible. What ultimately constitutes the non-reducibility between politics and social therapy, on the other hand, is the only possible redemption of suffering. Between reaction and action there is no equipollence, as between effect and cause. For Nietzsche, any attempt to rationalise reactivity is itself still the expression of a reactive life. The older problems of proportionality and authenticity thus dissolve into the problem of justice. What matters in politics is the distinction between, on the one hand, emotions such as resentment and ressentiment, which are only ever effects, and, on the other hand, the actions that provide their (de)legitimating grounds. This finally returns us to that other problem we set out with, namely ‘how to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-hegemonic, and self-affirming political practices’. We have not given an answer to this question, which belongs to political judgement and only secondarily to academic theorisation. But we hope to have shown that it must be answered outside the limitations and ambivalences of mainstream parameters. In liberal and conservative discourses, the vexed problem of the difference between resentment and ressentiment will always be in need of unravelling, but in reality there is no such problem. Worse, the industrious obsessing over vindicatory feelings, especially when carried out under the mask of critical theory, effectively suppresses the political and bears the unmistakable sign of nihilism, that is, the decline of our capacity to act politically. Acknowledgement I am grateful for Dan Degerman’s editorial comments. 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