July 4, 2024
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Philosophy’s interest in resentment in the Western world goes back a long way. It is present in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) as a feeling of frustration and acrimony caused by a certain social position and, in general, has a negative connotation (“unsocial passion”, the great poison of happiness). Nietzsche used the French word ressentiment because he thought that the corresponding word in German (Rachegefühl) did not express the semantic density of ressentiment. Something similar happened with another word, this time German, which became universalized – Zeitgeist. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche states that resentment is the internalized reaction of powerlessness in an oppressive society in which one has not succeeded. The resentful person is not direct, naive or honest, neither with himself nor with others; he squints as if suffering from strabismus; he likes to hide at the back of reality, in secrecy and clandestinity, wherever he considers himself safe; he knows how not to forget and knows how to wait until the moment arrives; while it doesn’t arrive, he is an expert in humility, flattery and self-deprecation; when the moment arrives, he is more clever, cunning and violent than any non-resentful person (1887). The “noble man”, on the other hand, is incapable of resentment and forgets the offenses of his enemies.
Since Nietzsche, the theme of resentment has not ceased to be present in philosophy, although not always with the same intensity. Phenomenology, in general, and Max Scheler, in particular, delved into the theme of resentment (1915). Sloterdijk found the root of critical theory in resentment culminating in his crusade for the end of critical theory, which both Toscano and Zizek rightly criticized. The interest in resentment captivated psychology and, finally, sociology. From a sociological point of view, Max Scheler’s reflection on resentment is particularly important. For Max Scheler, resentment is a feeling of hatred that results from a certain type of interpersonal relationship; it signals a disorganization of society and a deep crisis of values; it is manifested by a certain perversion of values that leads to a false view of the world. Resentment is a self-poisoning of the spirit, caused by a systematic accumulation of certain emotions and feelings, which generates a “thirst for revenge” on the authority towards which the resentful person feels envy and powerlessness. At the time of his writing, Scheler attributed resentment to a crisis of values that lay in the gradual replacement of Christian ethics by the bourgeois ethics produced by industrialization and machinery.
From Scheler, we can conclude that each society produces its own type (or types) of resentment. I have no particular sympathy for Oswald Spengler’s book on the decadence of the West (1922), but I agree with him when he says that in every age human beings behave in relations with each other in ways that are congruent with the general atmosphere of the time, and even reflect it – the spirit of the age. One of the most prevalent modes in today’s world experience is resentment. Resentment is an emotion or feeling that presupposes a conflict that is not formulated politically, but ethically and morally. To that extent, the question of power and power relations becomes much more complex. In this text, my aim is to characterize the relational world that characterizes resentment in general and then to focus on one of its types. Resentment is an emotion or feeling that manifests itself as resentment, hatred, anger, bitterness, acrimony, indignation in response to something experienced as harm or injustice. It is therefore a reactive attitude that is formulated in an ethical or moral register, rather than a directly political one, and is based on a watertight binarism between victim and aggressor. As such, it implies an unconditional moral justification that does not allow us to consider the complexity of the processes that may lie behind the resentful person’s situation. The person causing the resentment is reduced to the condition of aggressor and the resolution of the resentment can only occur through the aggressor’s recognition of the damage caused, reparation or repentance. Any use of power by the aggressor is, by definition, an abuse of power. The subject of resentment does not see himself acting out of power or interest, but rather for ethical reasons and moral behavior. They see the surrounding world as dominated by hostile powers and only recognize the power to feel offended as their own. This characterization is like Max Weber’s ideal-type, since the different types of resentment can have only some of these characteristics and with different accents. Inspired by Smith and Nietzsche, Fassin proposes two ideal-types of resentment: historical-ideological resentment (Nietzsche) and relational, inter-group-community resentment (Smith). The former refers to historical facts such as long experiences of persecution, genocide or apartheid; while the latter refers to reactions of frustration in relational or group situations that can include police officers, right-wing extremists, long-term unemployed workers, etc. The former refers to suffering of long historical duration, while the latter refers to relational suffering or even “positional suffering”. In both cases, these are emotions or feelings that dramatize harm considered unjust from an ethical-moral point of view, and therefore not immediately political. They always imply the existence and celebration of victims. Both types of resentment demonize the aggressor; in the case of historical-ideological resentment, the intensity of the resentment and hatred makes repentance, forgiveness or reparation almost impossible. In the resentments that abound in contemporary society, we find components of both types of resentment, but it is always possible to detect nuances and prevalences. In this text, I will deal exclusively with the predominantly relational intergroup-community resentment.
Intergroup-community resentment
In this type of resentment, ideological-political convergences between aggressors and victims are often common and become one of the factors that intensify resentment. Such convergences can give rise to parallel militancies, but not genuinely common militancies, because in the latter there tend to be negotiation processes in which binarisms don’t exist or, if they do, they are multiple and neutralize each other (the aggressor and the victim can be on the same side in a certain internal dispute, but on opposite sides in another dispute). Resentment demands unconditional binarism, just like the ethical-moral aggravation that sustains it. Especially in the global North, this type of resentment is prevalent due to the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant version of capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century and the culture war that sustains the growth of far-right politics and the neoconservatism that accompanies it. They contribute to generating forms of individualistic subjectivation that celebrate autonomy and assert themselves through moral judgments about harm and injustice. The individual political subject is dramatized by being transformed into the center of politics through the exemplarity of its investment.
Neoliberal power generates various types of political subjectivation, but in general they all converge in the moralization of offence or harm and the detour of resistance or hatred towards identifiable and “proportionate” targets, many of which have nothing to do with real power. For this reason, neoliberal subjectivation favors forms of politicization which, in the light of the main vectors of real power, function as depoliticization (diverted or substitutive forms of reaction to real power). Like pain, resentment does not imply knowledge of its true causes. The targets of resentment may themselves be victims of neoliberal power and neoconservatism, but they are converted into aggressors when political subjectivation takes place through resentment. In the countries of the global North, the most typical illustration of this phenomenon is anti-immigrant resentment on the part of the working classes. This is an extreme case of the subjectivization of the politics of resentment, which consists of turning victim against victim.
The ethical-political subjectification of resentment has various nuances. In general, it is characterized by the dramatization of real or illusory harm and the unexamined certainty of its causes; by taking phantasms for reality; by resorting to epiphanies of individual autonomy that are, in essence, the substitution of dependencies; by the creation of a community of victims that enhances Manichean propensity and moral comfort in the face of a hostile outside world; by the conviction that the distribution of resources is unfair or that diagnoses are incorrect, with a total lack of self-criticism; the mobilization of feelings of indignation, resentment, anger, rage, acrimony, which can conceal envy, intrigue, an inability to confront one’s own limitations or analyses that make the origin, size or characterization of the damage more complex. The resentful person maximizes the damage in order to maximize the aggressor’s malice and thus enhance revenge. In extreme cases, the aggressor, more than evil, is the incarnation of evil. The greater the polarization, the less chance there is of reparation, repentance or reconciliation. The resentful person quickly moves from seduction to victimization.
When the resentful person rejects reparation or reconciliation, the only possible resolution to the resentment is revenge. For Max Scheler, the “thirst for revenge” is a form of “self-poisoning of the mind” that results from the frustration caused by a mixture of envy of something you don’t have and the powerlessness to obtain it. Revenge forces extreme reductionism on both the victim and the aggressor. Either of them ceases to be anything other than the victim or the aggressor. The possibility of complex constellations, whether victim-aggressor (to what extent is the victim also an aggressor?) or aggressor-victim (to what extent is the aggressor also a victim?) are no longer possible. The most elaborate form of revenge is sacrificial violence: the scapegoat. Sacrificial violence consists of denying the most inviolable values under the pretext of defending them. One of the most recent imperial struggles has been the “war on terror” which, among many other consequences, has given rise to the so-called “criminal law of the enemy” (I dealt with this topic in Law and Epistemologies of the South, Cambridge UP, 2023). This is an exceptional law in which the rights of the defense, procedural guarantees and the presumption of innocence are suspended in order to act effectively against the so-called “enemy”. It is, in essence, an expression of the right to revenge in which the end justifies the means.
Scapegoating is a specific form of ritual, sacrificial violence whose main objective is to create or reinforce a given social system or organization. According to René Girard (Scapegoating, Violence and the Sacred), scapegoating belongs to the “rituals of persecution” through which societies reject and destroy victims because they are convinced that they destroy or threaten the social order. A scapegoat is chosen – a person or group – who is innocent, sometimes marginal to the community, whose balance is restored when their anger is vented against him or her. Something about the marginality of the scapegoat (the fact that medieval Jews were blamed for the epidemics) makes the execution seem just to the perpetrators, so that the bleeding of society’s anger can be effective and order restored.
As the inequalities and discriminations of neoliberalism increase, we will increasingly live in societies of resentment: total fragmentation of feelings of injustice, the intensification of conflicts between victims and the impossibility of articulating struggles against capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal domination. These struggles leave the real aggressor unscathed and relieved by the fact that the forces and reasons for resistance and struggle against him are divided and effectively diverted from the targets that could benefit him. One of the dangers of the proliferation of the society of resentment is this: the perpetuation of the power that causes it. The other danger is the increased difficulty in distinguishing real damage from illusory damage, real causes from illusory causes, and real victims and aggressors from illusory victims and aggressors. This makes it more difficult to effectively punish, in a substantive and procedurally fair way, the real damage suffered by real victims against the real aggressors. Resentment puts an end to hope for a fairer society. Resentment replaces the Spinozist dialectic between fear and hope with the dialectic between hatred and revenge. Revenge aspires to the transfer of power, not the transformation of power. Without this transformation, there will be no hope for a better world.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Philosophy’s interest in resentment in the Western world goes back a long way. It is present in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) as a feeling of frustration and acrimony caused by a certain social position and, in general, has a negative connotation (“unsocial passion”, the great poison of happiness). Nietzsche used the French word ressentiment because he thought that the corresponding word in German (Rachegefühl) did not express the semantic density of ressentiment. Something similar happened with another word, this time German, which became universalized – Zeitgeist. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche states that resentment is the internalized reaction of powerlessness in an oppressive society in which one has not succeeded. The resentful person is not direct, naive or honest, neither with himself nor with others; he squints as if suffering from strabismus; he likes to hide at the back of reality, in secrecy and clandestinity, wherever he considers himself safe; he knows how not to forget and knows how to wait until the moment arrives; while it doesn’t arrive, he is an expert in humility, flattery and self-deprecation; when the moment arrives, he is more clever, cunning and violent than any non-resentful person (1887). The “noble man”, on the other hand, is incapable of resentment and forgets the offenses of his enemies.
Since Nietzsche, the theme of resentment has not ceased to be present in philosophy, although not always with the same intensity. Phenomenology, in general, and Max Scheler, in particular, delved into the theme of resentment (1915). Sloterdijk found the root of critical theory in resentment culminating in his crusade for the end of critical theory, which both Toscano and Zizek rightly criticized. The interest in resentment captivated psychology and, finally, sociology. From a sociological point of view, Max Scheler’s reflection on resentment is particularly important. For Max Scheler, resentment is a feeling of hatred that results from a certain type of interpersonal relationship; it signals a disorganization of society and a deep crisis of values; it is manifested by a certain perversion of values that leads to a false view of the world. Resentment is a self-poisoning of the spirit, caused by a systematic accumulation of certain emotions and feelings, which generates a “thirst for revenge” on the authority towards which the resentful person feels envy and powerlessness. At the time of his writing, Scheler attributed resentment to a crisis of values that lay in the gradual replacement of Christian ethics by the bourgeois ethics produced by industrialization and machinery.
From Scheler, we can conclude that each society produces its own type (or types) of resentment. I have no particular sympathy for Oswald Spengler’s book on the decadence of the West (1922), but I agree with him when he says that in every age human beings behave in relations with each other in ways that are congruent with the general atmosphere of the time, and even reflect it – the spirit of the age. One of the most prevalent modes in today’s world experience is resentment. Resentment is an emotion or feeling that presupposes a conflict that is not formulated politically, but ethically and morally. To that extent, the question of power and power relations becomes much more complex. In this text, my aim is to characterize the relational world that characterizes resentment in general and then to focus on one of its types. Resentment is an emotion or feeling that manifests itself as resentment, hatred, anger, bitterness, acrimony, indignation in response to something experienced as harm or injustice. It is therefore a reactive attitude that is formulated in an ethical or moral register, rather than a directly political one, and is based on a watertight binarism between victim and aggressor. As such, it implies an unconditional moral justification that does not allow us to consider the complexity of the processes that may lie behind the resentful person’s situation. The person causing the resentment is reduced to the condition of aggressor and the resolution of the resentment can only occur through the aggressor’s recognition of the damage caused, reparation or repentance. Any use of power by the aggressor is, by definition, an abuse of power. The subject of resentment does not see himself acting out of power or interest, but rather for ethical reasons and moral behavior. They see the surrounding world as dominated by hostile powers and only recognize the power to feel offended as their own. This characterization is like Max Weber’s ideal-type, since the different types of resentment can have only some of these characteristics and with different accents. Inspired by Smith and Nietzsche, Fassin proposes two ideal-types of resentment: historical-ideological resentment (Nietzsche) and relational, inter-group-community resentment (Smith). The former refers to historical facts such as long experiences of persecution, genocide or apartheid; while the latter refers to reactions of frustration in relational or group situations that can include police officers, right-wing extremists, long-term unemployed workers, etc. The former refers to suffering of long historical duration, while the latter refers to relational suffering or even “positional suffering”. In both cases, these are emotions or feelings that dramatize harm considered unjust from an ethical-moral point of view, and therefore not immediately political. They always imply the existence and celebration of victims. Both types of resentment demonize the aggressor; in the case of historical-ideological resentment, the intensity of the resentment and hatred makes repentance, forgiveness or reparation almost impossible. In the resentments that abound in contemporary society, we find components of both types of resentment, but it is always possible to detect nuances and prevalences. In this text, I will deal exclusively with the predominantly relational intergroup-community resentment.
Intergroup-community resentment
In this type of resentment, ideological-political convergences between aggressors and victims are often common and become one of the factors that intensify resentment. Such convergences can give rise to parallel militancies, but not genuinely common militancies, because in the latter there tend to be negotiation processes in which binarisms don’t exist or, if they do, they are multiple and neutralize each other (the aggressor and the victim can be on the same side in a certain internal dispute, but on opposite sides in another dispute). Resentment demands unconditional binarism, just like the ethical-moral aggravation that sustains it. Especially in the global North, this type of resentment is prevalent due to the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant version of capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century and the culture war that sustains the growth of far-right politics and the neoconservatism that accompanies it. They contribute to generating forms of individualistic subjectivation that celebrate autonomy and assert themselves through moral judgments about harm and injustice. The individual political subject is dramatized by being transformed into the center of politics through the exemplarity of its investment.
Neoliberal power generates various types of political subjectivation, but in general they all converge in the moralization of offence or harm and the detour of resistance or hatred towards identifiable and “proportionate” targets, many of which have nothing to do with real power. For this reason, neoliberal subjectivation favors forms of politicization which, in the light of the main vectors of real power, function as depoliticization (diverted or substitutive forms of reaction to real power). Like pain, resentment does not imply knowledge of its true causes. The targets of resentment may themselves be victims of neoliberal power and neoconservatism, but they are converted into aggressors when political subjectivation takes place through resentment. In the countries of the global North, the most typical illustration of this phenomenon is anti-immigrant resentment on the part of the working classes. This is an extreme case of the subjectivization of the politics of resentment, which consists of turning victim against victim.
The ethical-political subjectification of resentment has various nuances. In general, it is characterized by the dramatization of real or illusory harm and the unexamined certainty of its causes; by taking phantasms for reality; by resorting to epiphanies of individual autonomy that are, in essence, the substitution of dependencies; by the creation of a community of victims that enhances Manichean propensity and moral comfort in the face of a hostile outside world; by the conviction that the distribution of resources is unfair or that diagnoses are incorrect, with a total lack of self-criticism; the mobilization of feelings of indignation, resentment, anger, rage, acrimony, which can conceal envy, intrigue, an inability to confront one’s own limitations or analyses that make the origin, size or characterization of the damage more complex. The resentful person maximizes the damage in order to maximize the aggressor’s malice and thus enhance revenge. In extreme cases, the aggressor, more than evil, is the incarnation of evil. The greater the polarization, the less chance there is of reparation, repentance or reconciliation. The resentful person quickly moves from seduction to victimization.
When the resentful person rejects reparation or reconciliation, the only possible resolution to the resentment is revenge. For Max Scheler, the “thirst for revenge” is a form of “self-poisoning of the mind” that results from the frustration caused by a mixture of envy of something you don’t have and the powerlessness to obtain it. Revenge forces extreme reductionism on both the victim and the aggressor. Either of them ceases to be anything other than the victim or the aggressor. The possibility of complex constellations, whether victim-aggressor (to what extent is the victim also an aggressor?) or aggressor-victim (to what extent is the aggressor also a victim?) are no longer possible. The most elaborate form of revenge is sacrificial violence: the scapegoat. Sacrificial violence consists of denying the most inviolable values under the pretext of defending them. One of the most recent imperial struggles has been the “war on terror” which, among many other consequences, has given rise to the so-called “criminal law of the enemy” (I dealt with this topic in Law and Epistemologies of the South, Cambridge UP, 2023). This is an exceptional law in which the rights of the defense, procedural guarantees and the presumption of innocence are suspended in order to act effectively against the so-called “enemy”. It is, in essence, an expression of the right to revenge in which the end justifies the means.
Scapegoating is a specific form of ritual, sacrificial violence whose main objective is to create or reinforce a given social system or organization. According to René Girard (Scapegoating, Violence and the Sacred), scapegoating belongs to the “rituals of persecution” through which societies reject and destroy victims because they are convinced that they destroy or threaten the social order. A scapegoat is chosen – a person or group – who is innocent, sometimes marginal to the community, whose balance is restored when their anger is vented against him or her. Something about the marginality of the scapegoat (the fact that medieval Jews were blamed for the epidemics) makes the execution seem just to the perpetrators, so that the bleeding of society’s anger can be effective and order restored.
As the inequalities and discriminations of neoliberalism increase, we will increasingly live in societies of resentment: total fragmentation of feelings of injustice, the intensification of conflicts between victims and the impossibility of articulating struggles against capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal domination. These struggles leave the real aggressor unscathed and relieved by the fact that the forces and reasons for resistance and struggle against him are divided and effectively diverted from the targets that could benefit him. One of the dangers of the proliferation of the society of resentment is this: the perpetuation of the power that causes it. The other danger is the increased difficulty in distinguishing real damage from illusory damage, real causes from illusory causes, and real victims and aggressors from illusory victims and aggressors. This makes it more difficult to effectively punish, in a substantive and procedurally fair way, the real damage suffered by real victims against the real aggressors. Resentment puts an end to hope for a fairer society. Resentment replaces the Spinozist dialectic between fear and hope with the dialectic between hatred and revenge. Revenge aspires to the transfer of power, not the transformation of power. Without this transformation, there will be no hope for a better world.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
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Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.
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