Resentment and Ressentiment

 Resentment and Ressentiment - Double Whammy

Nietzsche presented the notion of ‘ressentiment’ which means that the past oppression and domination continues emotionally or affectively. The contrasting notion is ‘resentment’ or the desire to punish - the indignation one feels when confronted with injustice inflicted on others or oneself. You can just read "The Genealogy of Morals" but there is more to it today.

Resentment consists of this dual dimension: the sudden anger of ressentiment and the deliberate practices of prevention of injustice and injury, eg policing, prosecuting and the politics of security.

The reactive attitudes on the one hand and the policies on the other constitute this dual dimension.

Nietzsche however labels the hostile reaction aimed at the world as ‘slave morality,’ as ressentiment - waiting, provisionally humble and not forgetting.

The noble man with noble morality forgets and cannot take his enemies seriously for long. 

The slave morality constructs evil, the evil enemy, and then counters herself as good! The noble person conceives the basic concept ‘good’ and then creates an idea of bad.

Values thus emerge from opposite logics: ressentiment transforms good and bad into good and evil - a moral category; the noble ones conceive of bad and good in practical or aesthetic terms. The unsatisfied hatred, the thirst for revenge, in ressentiment is contrasted with resentment: a legitimate response to a wrong committed and lead to a fair punishment of the perpetrator!

Both resentment and ressentiment are negative moral emotions but with a different sense and intensity. Perhaps the worst aspect of ressentiment is the repressed feelings that “legitimizes” the reaction of envy and impotence, like grudges and junk yard dogs!

See Fassin, D 2013 “On Resentment and Ressentiment”

I like Fassin’s take because he contextualized Nietzsche’s motif in terms of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide (which occurred around the same time as the Serbian genocide/ethnic cleansing and both followed ongoing civil wars), the problem of AIDS "non-intervention" - the rejection of distribution of antiretrovirals in Africa, and the crisis of policing in the French banlieus, and by extension in certain other cities in the US and East Asia!

From Jeremy Engels 2015 "The Politics of Resentment - A Genealogy"

"In times of suffering, it is human to point fingers and cast

stones. Blame gives meaning to suffering, and for this reason civic resentment is intimately related to the problem of scapegoating. It is an economic system that is to blame for much of the pain that Americans feel today—yet it is difficult for us, as rhetorical actors, to condemn a system. It is easier to blame individuals. While Rawls might be correct, and resentment at times might be associated with a desire for justice, Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrates how easily those who are willing to name a scapegoat, and who promise redemption through victimage, can dupe the resentful soul. To be resentful is necessarily to be vulnerable to manipulation." p18

There are many books out with the title "Politics of Resentment,"

Betz 1991

Engels 2015

Resnick 2001

Kramer 2016

Fukuyama 2018

Metzl 2019

not to mention books with 'resentment' or 'ressentiment' in the title, nor articles, like Fassin's.