Ressentiment

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

• Source: Sources/Expanding the Shrunken Soul; Atlas/Maps/DLQ 10 MOC
• Keywords: Cards/permanent notes
• Relevant Notes:
  • Module 1A
  • Module 1B
  • Module 2
  • Module 3

Ressentiment means “resentment”, yes, but with nuances. More precisely, ressentiment is the sublimated spirit of revenge, the masked and muted desire to prevail over one’s stronger rival. While envy, jealousy, and rivalry can contribute to it, they are not exactly the same. Ressentiment is a reaction. In ressentiment, literally “re-feeling”, one feels the importence of frustrating encounters with one’s superior rivals.

According to Scheler, one experiences a morbid attraction to return again and again to painful defeats. As ressentiment feeds on the revisited feeling, it grows and develops, engendering a painful tension that eventually finds release in the denigration of the rival’s values and the exaltation of their opposites. Ressentiment leads frustrated underdogs to invert all that is valuable to their stronger, more attractive, morally superior, more capable or successful rivals. It leads the weak to denigrate strength, the unlettered to belittle letters, and the poor to disparage wealth and power. Ressentiment leads sinners to debunk virtue and losers to redefine winning. It doesn’t only affect the way people think. Above all, ressentiment modifies their spontaneous reaction (attraction, repugnance) to people, practices, and institutions that humiliate them.

Ressentiment is a profound sense of  resentment,  frustration, and  hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, generated by a sense of weakness/inferiority and feelings of  jealousy/ envy in the face of the ‘cause’, that ultimately generates a rejecting/justifying ‘ value system’ or  morality that exists as a means of attacking or denying the perceived source of one’s own sense of inferiority.

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure onto an external ‘scapegoat’, which scapegoat is itself the thing that ‘made’ one realize one’s own inferiority/failure. Yet a fully internalized ressentiment can turn one against oneself; thus, there is often an irony attached to it.