The Globalisation of Re-sentment

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The Globalisation of Re-sentment: Failure, Denial and Violence in World Politics (*)

Elisabetta Brighi, University of Westminster

[[email protected]]

Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;

Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,

Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds:

And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,

Stir up their servants to an act of rage,

And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make

Our purpose necessary and not envious:

Which so appearing to the common eyes,

We shall be call'd purgers, not murderers.

W. Shakespeare,Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I

It is commonplace for pop psychology today to invite their readers to embrace, rather than resist,

failure. Invoking a supposedly timeless wisdom that stretches from Confucius to Sylvester Stallone,

self-help websites such as Psychology Today urge readers to cease looking at failure as one looks at

an unappealing birthday present and start welcoming failure as a gift, disappointment as a growth

opportunity, and defeat as a path leading to complete mastery of the resilient self.1A good dose of

denial, disavowal and effacement are arguably involved in the process. While the unresolved

feelings or incongruent actions that may have precipitated failure are mostly left unscrutinised, the

wider social, cultural and political context, conditions, and contradictions become conveniently

elided or misrepresented. The focus turns obsessively to the self and its expected ability to reset and

reconfigure towards personal success, achievement and happiness.2Rather than a moment of

appearance and truth, failure is thus denied and rendered barren.

(*) Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2015 Millennium Annual Conference on Failure and

Denial in World Politics, London, 17-18 October, 2015 and at the 2015 European International Studies

Association Conference on The Worlds of Violence, Giardini Naxos, 23-26 September 2015. Many thanks to

the discussants and panel participants for their insightful comments and questions.1See Psychology Today, The Gift of Failure, available at

https://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201408/the-gift-failure(20 December 2015).2For critical commentaries on positive psychology, see Sam Binkley, Happiness, positive psychology and the

program of neoliberal governmentality, Subjectivity4 (2011): 371-394; Sam Binkley, Psychological life as

enterprise: social practice and the government of neo-liberal interiority, History of the Human Sciences24, no.3 (2011): 83102; Paul Verhaeghe, What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society

(London: Scribe, 2014); and Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital(London: Verso, 2014).

1
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As noted by critical scholarship, these new topographies and technologies of the self mirror, channel

and manage political and social practices that are today global in reach.3Emotions are, after all, not

just a private reality but a social and cultural one too the psychic and affective landscape changing

with the changing social and political condition.4As Mark Neocleus among others argued, neoliberal

citizenship is nothing if not a training in resilience.5Embracing, rather than resisting failure, and

bouncing back from it forms the basis of subjectively dealing with the uncertainty and instability of

contemporary capitalism as well as the insecurity of the national security state.6The excesses of an

ever expanding security agenda and of hyper-capitalism at a time of austerity require huge

emotional work so that these can be accommodated and maintained, rather than undermined, lest

the system becomes awash with the negative affect of failure. Failure is, after all, a toxic emotion. Its

occurrence breads a host of reactive red emotions such as shame, humiliation, anger and

resentment. Its appearance often reveals a lack or loss of face, of dignity, of self-respect. Its

trauma constructs hierarchical subjectivities around blame and responsibility, victims and

perpetrators, worthy superiors and unworthy inferiors.

Contemporary global politics is awash with failure. The failure of a liberal post-Cold War New World

Order, the failure of financial and monetary systems, the failure of climate change governance, the

failure of the Global War on Terror, the failure of the Arab Spring, the failure of multiculturalism, the

failure of EU migration policies the list goes on. While on the one hand globalisation has rendered

political processes complex, disaggregated, unpredictable, prone to accident and to the

multiplication of risk (including the risk of failure),7their inherent vulnerability is often amplified

tactically and capitalised upon by entrepreneurs of populism and managers of unease to suit the

interest of the day.8Within the sociology of late modernity, Zygmut Bauman and Ulrich Beck argued

3Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France1977-1978(New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge De France, 1978-79

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Thomas Lemke The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault's Lecture at

the College De France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality, Economy and Society30 (2001): 190-207; and NicholasKiersey, Everyday Neoliberalism and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Post-Political Control in an Era of Financial

Turmoil, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, no. 4 (2011): 23-44.4 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology,

Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works(London: Penguin Books, 1985), 388 and C. Wrights Mills, The

Sociological Imagination(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959]). For a contemporary assessment, see

Iain Wilkinson,Anxiety in a Risk Society(London: Routledge, 2001).5 Mark Neocleus, Resisting Resilience, Radical Philosophy178 (2013), 4.

6Ibid., 5.

7James Der Derian, Global Events, National Security, and Virtual Theory, Millennium: Journal of International

Studies30, n. 3 (2001): 669-690; Patricia Owens, Accidents Don't Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-

Technology Humanitarian War, Millennium: Journal of International Studies32, no. 2 (2003), p. 595; Louise

Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).8Chantal Mouffe, The End of Politics and the Challenge of Right-Wing Populism, in Francisco Panizza,

Populism and the Mirror of Democracy(London: Verso, 2005) and Didier Bigo, Globalized (In)Security: The

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that such failure is experienced not only at the global level, but increasingly at the level of the

everyday and of the individual.9In fact, late modernity is a time not only of individualisation, but of

tragicindividualisation: the individual must cope with the uncertainty of the global world by him- or

herself. Here individualization is a default outcome of a failure.10

Starkly accountable yet

dramatically impotent, the individual is nakedly and tragically individuated.11

We thus come to a

paradox. While individuals are at the receiving end of global processes that can and often do fail

them, individuals are also expected to embrace those failures in the name of resilience, happiness,

or a future possibility of success.

There is, however, a third sense in which the individualisation of global politics may be defined as

truly tragic. The failure, or loss, of states monopoly on legitimate violence is cascading into forms of

contemporary violence that project the individual to the foreground and coalesce around theeveryday. As the recent wave of terrorist attacks testifies, against a background of failure and crisis,

individual self-radicalisation fuelled by failure and resentment becomes a path to violent

empowerment. The possibility of individual violence has thus entered the circle of systemic failure.

The affective politics that regulate such circle becomes, therefore, the ultimate horizon of a global

politics in which battlefields and theatres of war, after disappearing or going virtual, have

reappeared in the shape of the individual emotional landscape.

In this paper I investigate how the globalisation of failure intersects the globalisation of resentment

and the diffusion of individualised forms of political violence. I shall do so through the lenses of

contemporary terrorism, and in particular the fifth wave, micro-structural terrorism as evidenced

in the 2015 double terror attacks in Paris. The first part of the paper charts the rise of global

resentment in its interaction with changing forms of violence and against the background of the

multiplication of failure and cascading grievances. The second and third parts examine the place of

resentment in the affective and moral economy of the global age by unpacking this concept along

two axes. The first axis maps the distinction between resentment and ressentiment and seeks to

field and the Ban-Opticon, in Didier Bigo and A Tsoukala (eds.), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty. Illiberal practices

of liberal regimes after 9/11(Routledge: Abingdon, 2006), 10 - 48.9Zygmut Bauman, Liquid Modernity(Cambrige: Polity Press, 2000) and The Individualized Society (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2001); Ulrich Beck, World risk society(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) and Living in the world risk

society, Economy and Society35, no. 3 (2006): 329-345; Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim,

Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences(London: Sage, 2001).10

Beck, Living in the world risk society, 336.11

Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 402. See below for a fuller

investigation of Browns arguments on individualisation and ressentiment. For a recent critique of the

individualization thesis, see Rolf Becker and Andreas Hadjar, Individualisation and class structure: howindividual lives are still affected by social inequalities, International Social Science Journal 64, no. 213-214

(2013): 211223.

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rescue the former from the relative hegemony of the latter. By contrasting the readings of Adam

Smith, Joseph Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and their contemporary epigones, it fleshes

out the distinction between resentment geared towards justice and that driven by envy. The second

axis explores the gap between resentment and ressentimentfrom the point of view of the

entanglements of identity and difference. By drawing on the writings of William Connolly, Wendy

Brown and Ren Girard, it evaluates different configurations of the relation between self and other

and assesses the strengths of the claim concerning an ever expanding diffusion of ressentimentin

late modern times. The paper closes with a reading of the Paris terror attacks of 7 January and 13

November that seeks to disentangle the different forms of resentment mobilised in the acts. By

raising the issue of the moral value of resentment, the paper ultimately seeks to address the

question of how to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-hegemonic and self-

affirming political practices.

Resentment and contemporary political violence: between failure and grievance

To survey the landscape of political violence today is to take in the enormous transformations in the

ways in which violence has being operating politically over the last century. A hundred years since

the First World War, violence seems to be less and less contained by war and its rules. The crisis of

war is the crisis of the sovereign state and its most important founding principle the monopoly on

the legitimate use of violence. The paradox of contemporary war is that while it may be everywhere

ubiquitous in time and space it has lost its shape and turned into an increasingly emptier

signifier. The hollowing out and fragmentation of war, however, has certainly not marked the end of

violence. It is calculated today that 90% of all violent deaths occur outside situations of conflict and

war: of the 500,000 violent deaths per year, only 10% can be blamed on conflict and war.12

Rather

than being contained by war, today the vast array of insecurities and forms of violence that affect

the global human condition are refracted across an ever growing number of global processes: from

the global economy and its infrastructures to financial markets and global peripheries.13

Freed from

this yoke, violence travels today across political spaces and along an insecurity continuum that defies

distinctions between inside and outside, public and private.

12See Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011. Lethal Encounters(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2011), 43ff and Keith Krause, War, Violence and the State, in Michael Brzoska

and Axel Krohn, (eds.), Securing Peace in a Globalized World(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).13

For three complementary perspectives, see Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence(New York: Routledge, 2003);

Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in the Global Trade (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2014); and Paul Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice (East Lansing: Michigan State University

Press, 2015).

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Intersected with the speculative and precautionary turn that made of risk the preeminent rationality

of governance,14

the globalisation of violence has produced a creeping informalisation, privatisation

and, ultimately, individualisation of it. Individuals are thus at the centre of a paradoxical condition:

not only are they at the receiving end of a gamut of violent global processes that exceed the control

of sovereign states or international institutions, but they are more and more held responsible for

their own security, implicated as they are in the everyday averting of risk and insecurity. At the same

time, the very processes that have determined the diffusion and irradiation of violence have also put

individuals in the condition of inflicting and not just suffering significant amounts of violence.

In ways that parallel the ascendance of modern terrorism and its anarchist phase, and on the basis

of recent attacks seen in Norway, the US, the UK and France, scholars have speculated about the

coming of a fifth-wave of terrorism in which self-styled terrorists, lone operators and self-radicalised individuals may become the greatest concern to society.

15Others have looked at new

terrorist movements, such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, as global and yet diffused micro-structures that

combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles

and patterns.16

Rather than on solid institutional and organisational capabilities, the new terrorist

networks rely on a diasporic and horizontal pool of volunteers who act often independently,

sometimes with only the most tenuous association with terrorist movements.17

Violence today is

thus increasingly carried and carried out by individuals. As such, its circulation and flow interpellate

not only the structural and the social, but the personal and intimate, in their reciprocal

reverberations and interlocking economies of affect.

Resentment is arguably at the heart of the moral economy of contemporary terror. It is the

emotional plane around which failures experienced at the individual, social and global level

convergence. As noted by a number of scholars, if there is a thread common to the latest wave of

terrorist attacks, it is arguably the way in which personal resentments resonate with and are

14Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Insuring Security: Biopolitics, security and risk (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2.

15On anarchist terrorism, see Grard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, The History of Terrorism (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2008) and Ayse Zarakol, What Makes Terrorism Modern? Terrorism, Legitimacy, and the

International System, Review of International Studies37, no. 5 (2011): 2311-2336. On lone wolf terrorism,

see Elisabetta Brighi, The Mimetic Politics of Lone-Wolf Terrorism,Journal of International Political Theory 11,

no. 1 (2015): 145-64 and JD Simon, Technology and Lone Operator Terrorism: Prospects for a fifth wave of

global terrorism, in J Rosenfeld (ed.) Terrorism, Identity and Legacy: The Four Waves Theory and Political

Violence(New York: Routledge, 2011), 4465.16

Karin Knorr Cetina, Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies in Theory, Culture &

Society, 22, no. 5 (2005): 214.17

See especially, Barak Mendelsohn, The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-

First Century(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

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embedded in larger political narratives of failure and grievance.18

To start with, scholars

investigating the psychology of terrorism have long agreed that resentment provides one of the

fundamental drivers of radicalization, and a key affective influence in the choice of becoming a

terrorist. I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of

feeling humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or

undo this loss of face.19

A brief and anecdotal survey of recent attacks suffices to illustrate how

failure, grievance and resentment are arguably central themes to the trajectory of attackers. It was

after the failure to secure his membership in the US Olympic boxing team as well as his US

citizenship that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston marathon bomber, decided to trade his existence as

the stay-at-home father of a small girl in a cramped, subsidised apartment on the periphery of

Cambridge, MA, for the identity of bomber and a fleeting place in the spotlight.20

When Michael

Adebolajo took to the streets of south London to kill fusilier Lee Rigby, he video-recorded (and later

penned) his resentment and desire for revenge in simple terms: If you find yourself curious as to

why carnage is reaching your own towns then know it is simply retaliation for your oppression in our

towns (). You people will never be safe.21

After the sequence of gun attacks in Toulouse and

before the 32-hour siege that would end in his death, the unemployed and recently divorced

Mohammed Merah spoke of his resentment against France: against the agents of the French state

and especially the army, who had rejected his application a few months earlier against the new

French legislation banning women from wearing the full Islamic veil, against Frances involvement inAfghanistan, and against Frances alleged protection of Jews, who kill our brothers and sisters in

Palestine.22

Personal resentments and intersect with larger political narratives and are often mobilised together

in an emergent discourse that liberally combines the intimate and the distant. Three wider

dimensions of resentment are particularly relevant. Firstly, there is the failure of full integration in

18 Ramon Spaaij, Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention (New York:

Springer, 2012) and Raffaello Pantucci, A typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary analysis of Lone Islamist

terrorists, The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (London, 2011).19

The renowned psychiatrist James Gilligan quoted in Andrew Silke, Becoming a Terrorist, in Andrew Silke

(ed.), Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and Its Consequences (Chichester:

Wiley, 2003), 40. See also E. G Lindner, Humiliation as the Source of Terrorism: A New Paradigm, Peace

Research 33, no. 2 (2001): 5968.20

Christian Caryl The Bombers World, The New York Review of Books, 6 June 2013, available at:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/bombers-world/21

The Telegraph, Woolwich attack: the terrorist's rant, 23 May 2013; The Telegraph, Lee Rigby trial: full text

of letter given by Michael Adebolajo to Angel of Woolwich, 29 November.22The Guardian, Mohamed Merah: polite neighbour who was turned down by French army, 21 March 2012

and France24, Gunman calls FRANCE 24 hours before pre-dawn siege, 22 March 2012.

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multicultural societies.23

Terror has been invoked as a response to a failure of assimilation that keeps

some members of Western societies away from their holy grail of employment, ownership and

stable family structure, along which success is measured, and close to the peripheries of the social

order. The Tsarnaev brothers story offered an emblematic example of the peripatetic struggle for

acceptance, between displacement and belonging, while the stories of the British jihadis revealed

already decade ago the links between the crisis of the UK model of multiculturalism, the rise of

resentment and the recourse to terrorism.24

Terrorism is seen as powerful way of turning the failure

and lack of integration into a resounding and spectacular success, inverting the hierarchy of power

and worth attached to those models of integration.

For those whose identity is tied to histories and cultures of the Middle East, the second narrative of

resentment relates to the perceived humiliation of Arabs and Muslims at the hands of Westerners,especially the US, since 9/11.

25There is no doubt that the appeal of al-Qaeda and ISIS for young

disaffected Muslim worldwide stems from the grand narrative of humiliation and redemption

vehicled in the official discourse of their leaders. As Jessica Stern has recently noted concerning ISIS,

the narrative of victory most appeals to those who feel they have lost something.26

In identifying

themselves as the brothers who have refused to live a life of humiliation, ISIS frames the

movements grievances in terms of an aspirational parable that turns failure into success, loss into

the recovery of dignity. Its appeal is especially intended for a young generation of Muslims who are

represented as drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation. The rise of

jihad means the chance to join the movement which will remove the garments of dishonour, and

shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace, for the era of lamenting and moaning has gone and

23Christopher Hill, The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies(Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013).24

See respectively, Janet Reitman, Jahars world, The Rolling Stone, 17 July 2013, available at:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717and Shane Brighton, British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: Integration and Cohesion in and beyond the State, International

Affairs 83, no. 1 (2007): 117.25

Khaled Fattah and K.M. Fierke, A Clash of Emotions: The Politics of Humiliation and Political Violence in the

Middle East, European Journal of International Relations15, no. 1 (2009):67-93 and Paul Saurette, You Dissin

Me? Humiliation and Post 9/11 Global Politics, Review of International Studies 32, no. 03 (2006): 495-522.

While the focus of this paper is on Islamic terrorism, a victimary narrative of humiliation is also arguably

common to some attacks of non-Islamic nature, for instance that perpetrated by Anders Breivik in Norway in

July 2011 in the name of a Christendom under attack and humiliated by Islam. See Brighi, The Mimetic Politics

of Lone-Wolf Terror.26

Jessica Stern, What Does ISIS Really Want Now?, Lawfare, 28 November 2015, available at

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-does-isis-really-want-now (20December 2015). Needless to say, this is

articulated in response not only to the humiliating policies of the West, but to the multiple failures withinpolitical Islam and modernization of the Middle East. See Oliver Roy, The Failure of Political Islam(Harvard:

Harvard University Press, 1996).

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the dawn of honour has emerged anew.27

Despite the noticeable strategic, operational and

generational differences, al Qaeda and ISIS are similar in one important respect. Their narratives

weave the personal and social plane together they skilfully manage to embed individual

experiences of failure and resentment in a larger and empowering narrative that promises to turn

shame into power.

Naturally, this feeds into a much deeper and trans-historical reservoir of resentment. Rather than

being focused on the present circumstances of Muslim populations and on developments in the

Middle East since 9/11, this third and final dimension of resentment reaches back in time to

colonialization and hierarchical imperial histories. In the current epoch of renewed global

connectivity, terrorism seems to be travelling along old imperial roads, connecting peripheries to

their old metropolitan cores, only in the inverse direction. That the contemporary wave of terroristattacks mobilises and reactivates a set of grievances related to the history of colonialism is obvious if

one considers that ISIS presented the breaking of the borders created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty

between Syria and Iraq as one of their greatest victory and indeed the symbolic moment of

establishment of the caliphate.28

Additionally, the fact that at least three of the Paris attackers were

of Algerian descent has been noted as being arguably not insignificant.29

Failure generates grievances, and grievances generate resentment. When the former becomes

endemic, the latter takes centre stage. The micropolitics of affect that presides over the ways in

which failure is processed, blame and responsibility are attributed, shame and humiliations are

handled thus require further scrutiny, not least for their repercussions on the macro, or global

political level. This is especially important in those cases where the possibility of accommodating, or

indeed embracing failure, is overtly rejected and where violent retribution is sought instead. A

journey into the nature and place of resentment in the global age is thus required.30

27

A. M. Al-Adnani, This is the Promise of Allah, 29 June 2014, available athttps://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/06/.28

Pieter Van Ostaeyen, The Islamic State Restores the Caliphate, 29 June 2014, available at

https://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/06/.29

See, for instance, Robert Fisk, Frances unresolved Algerian war sheds light on the Paris attack, 16

November 2015 and Alec G. Hargreaves, French Muslims and the Middle East, Contemporary French

Civilization40, no. 2 (2015): 235-54.30

Two important caveats are in order before proceeding further. Although the distinction between causes and

justifications is seldom as clear cut as we would like to believe (see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 82-85), a study into the origins and dimensions of

resentment should be confused neither with a deterministic account of terrorism, nor with a justification of

actions inspired by it. In terms of the former, scholarship has long accepted that terrorism is best understood

in processual terms and as a contingency-ridden multi-causal phenomenon. See respectively, John Horgan, ThePsychology of Terrorism(London: Routledge, 2005); Tore Bjorgo and John Horgan, Leaving Terrorism Behind

(London: Routledge, 2009); and Alex Schmid, Root Causes of Terrorism: Some Conceptual Notes, a Set of

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Resentment or Ressentiment? On the Moral Status of a Global Emotion.

Resentment has a long history and a bad name. It is one of those negative emotions which,

according to historians and philologists, have driven the movement of human development. The

history of resentment can be considered as parallel to that of progress, if not a counter-melody born

from its very failures.31

In this history resentment has an ambiguous place similarly to violence, it is

deemed to be both a creative and a destructive force, a functional or dysfunctional attitude. This

ambiguity is reflected in its uncertain status as a Janus-faced moral emotion. Indeed, one can

arguably recognise two faces to resentment: a virtuous face and a vicious one, separated by a slight

literal variation always in danger of being elided.32

On the one hand, resentment tends to indicate a

legitimate response to a perceived injustice; on the other, ressentiment refers to a metaphysical

mode of being in the world. Due in large part to the recent revival in of interest in the work of

Friedrich Nietzsche, recent political theory has tended to subsume or fold the former into the latter

and discuss resentment predominantly, if not uniquely, as ressentiment. There is value, however, in

redeeming the distinction between the two and rescuing the former from the hegemony of the

Indicators, and a Model Root Causes of Terrorism, Democracy and Security1 (2005): 127136. Not allresentful individuals become terrorists, after all. However, while this means that terrorism is a complex

phenomenon that cannot be explained by a single cause or set of causes, this does not mean that resentment

in causally unimportant. In terms of the latter, as a particularly heinous form of political violence, terrorism

generates deep moral dilemmas its legitimacy has been almost invariably been denied, at least until recently

(see infra, fn. 83). In so far as it violently calls into question pre-given political orders and reveals the presence

of two worlds in one (Jacque Rancire, Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event5, no. 3 (2009), p. 21),

terrorism is often met with inevitable ambivalence.31

Marc Ferro, Resentment in History(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010) and Bernardino Fantini, Dolores Martn

Moruno, and Javier Moscoso (eds). On Resentment: Past and Present(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2013). On casually discovering the literary work that arguably first described ressentiment, namely

Fyodor Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, in February 1887 Friedrich Nietzsche compared the book to a

melody: ein Stck Musik, sehr fremder, sehr undeutscher Musik; [] ein Geniestreich der Psychologie, eineArt Selbstverhhnung des (a piece of music, very strange music, very un-German; apsychological stroke of genius, a cruel jibe of know thyself). See CA Miller, Nietzsches Discovery of

Dostoevsky, Nietzsche Studien 2, no. 1 (1973): 202257 and Walter Kaufmann, Introduction, in Kaufmann,

Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (London: Penguin, 1975).32

A growing body of literature across moral philosophy, anthropology and political theory has reflected on this

variation. See most recently, Michael Ure, Resentment/Ressentiment, Constellations 22, no. 4 (2015): 599

613; Didier Fassin, On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions, Current

Anthropology54, no. 3 (2013): 249-267; Thomas Brudholm, Resentments Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal

to Forgive(Temple University Press, 2008); and Amlie Oksenberg Rorty, The Dramas of Resentment, The

Yale Review88 (2000): 89100. The terminological distinction between resentment and ressentiment is not

always used unambiguously, partly due to the difficulties of translating ressentimentin English without

collapsing this into straight resentment. For a puzzling example of such confusion, see Fassin, On Resentmentand Ressentiment, 260. For an example of a carefully considered choice and an argument for a third way, see

Brudholm, Resentments Virtue, esp. 12-13, 101-03.

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Nitzschean interpretation, so that the virtues and vices of this moral emotion can be explored more

critically.

In its positive incarnation, resentment is the guardian of justice.33

As a moral response, resentment

is not only an appropriate individual response to being unjustly treated, but it is also an

indispensable attitude to cultivate if an overall degree of fairness is to be maintained in society. The

XVIII century Presbiterian theologian Joseph Butler considered resentment as an indispensable social

bond holding society together, a weapon whose function is to to prevent and remedy [] injury,

and the miseries arising from it.34

Considering this sentiment in the context of other moral virtues,

such as charity and compassion, Butler concluded that resentment is needed precisely to allow

injustices to be acknowledged and injuries to be punished, rather than merely forgiven or forgotten.

In some circumstances, resentment therefore wins over charity. Although acknowledging its beastlycharacter, unsocial nature and violent potential, in his Theory of Moral SentimentsAdam Smith

painted a similarly positive picture of resentment. According to Smith, resentment functions as a

necessary corrective to imbalances in justice and as that reparative mechanism which restores

society to a state of harmony and fairness.35

Once restrained and tempered of any of its excesses,

resentment becomes that noble and generous feeling of indignation that inspires the sympathetic

recognition of others and transforms a community of strangers into a community of moral agents

bound by the same nomos.36

Immanuel Kant noted that desire for justice flows irresistibly from the

nature of man. Resentment may be malicious; yet, it is not only a legitimate feeling but the most

vehement and deeply rooted indication of our desire for justice.37

The contemporary political philosophy of scholars such as Jeffrie Murphy, Margaret Walker and

Robert Solomon follows on from these arguments, combining the insights from Adam Smith with a

33The positive role of negative emotions (such as resentment, anger, and rage) in justice is brilliantly explored

in Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Are Envy, Anger, and Resentment Moral Emotions? Philosophical Explorations5, no.

2(2002):148-154 and in two recent and so far unpublished works: respectively, Grace Hunt, AffirmativeReactions: In Defense of Resentment (New York: The New School, 2012), unpublished PhD manuscript; Rupert

Brodersen, Rage, Rancour and Revenge: Existentialist Motives in International Relations (London: London

School of Economics, 2014), unpublished PhD manuscript.34

Joseph Butler, Fifteen sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel(Cambridge: Hilliard & Brown, 1827 [1726]), viii

quoted in Fassin, On Resentment and Ressentiment, 251-52.35

Strikingly, it is in Theory of Moral Sentiments that Smith uses for the first time the now well-known

metaphor of the invisible hand, namely that self-regulating mechanism responsible for restoring harmony in

markets or, as it happens, moral orders. In Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 215.36

We admire that noble and generous resentment which governs its pursuit of the greatest injuries, not by

the rage which they are apt to excite in the breast of the sufferer, but by the indignation which they naturally

call forth in that of the impartial spectator, in ibid., 30.37Quoted in Grace Hunt, Redeeming Resentment: Nietzsches Affirmative Ripostes,American Dialectic3, no.

2/3 (2013): 124n8.

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revived Aristotelian view of resentment and anger as a morally justifiable and useful affects.38

Robert Solomon goes as far as to assert that, as a passion of justice denied [], resentment lies at

the heart of democracy.39

It is the emotional state which, more than any other sentiment, proves

that we care about and are committed to certain moral standards, as regulative of social life.40

What is judged detrimental if not wholly questionable, in these authors view, is thus not the place

of resentment within the moral order. Rather, it is the contemporary prejudice againstnegative

emotions and the overriding fixation for closure that places societies at fault when it prevents them

from acknowledging, deliberating on, and remedying injustices. Therefore, it is the absenceof

resentment in the face of injustice that should be denounced as immoral, especially given that,

according to an interpretation of Hannah Arendts writing on The Origins of Totalitarianism, it is the

very absence of resentment that signals the real end of the human and intersubjective condition.41

There is virtue in resentment, in other words. As Jean Amry stated, there is virtue in the moral

vertigo of resentment that disrupts the moral order and prevents hasty attempts at reconciliation

resentment succeeds where empty compassion fails.42

It is only because of resentment that the

injustice becomes a moral reality and it is only through resentment that an entire community,

including perpetrators of injustice, are swept into the truth.43

Amongst contemporary political philosophers, however, a much less positive understanding of

resentment ordinarily circulates. This is due to the hegemony exercised by the Nietzschean reading

of a quintessentially existentialist notion, that of ressentiment.44

While resentment is understood to

denote a legitimate sense of anger, and a desire for retribution in the face of an injury, ressentiment

indicates the pernicious and self-defeating folding in of this emotion onto itself. Ressentimentis

suspended, delayed or botched revenge, a particularly savage affect designed to deaden the

experience of failure-related pain. As a frustrated, ossified and ultimately generalised form of

resentment, ressentiment plants itself in the psychic underground of the sufferer as a blunt arrow,

kept in permanent tension by the pain or memory of humiliation, yet never released from the bow

38For a brief overview, see Brudholm, Resentments Virtue,10-11.

39Robert C. A Solomon,A Passion for Justice: Emotions and the Origins of the Social Contract(Addison-Wesley,

1990), 270.40

Richard Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),

69.41

Grace Hunt, Hannah Arendt on Resentment: Articulating Intersubjectivity, The Journal of Speculative

Philosophy29, no. 3 (2015): 289.42

Amlie Oksenberg Rorty, The Dramas of Resentment, The Yale Review88 (2000): 89100.43

Jean Amry,At The Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York:Schocken, 1980), p. 70. On Amry, see also Brudholm, Resentments virtue andHunt, Affirmative Reactions.44

Hunt, Affirmative Reactions, 71ff.

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of desire.45

From there, according to Friedrich Neitszche and Max Scheler, ressentiment poisons the

mind of those who suffer from it like a wave on a rock, in a restless movement that blurs past and

present, ressentiment recalls and re-presents the injuries sufferer; resentment, unconsummated and

thus intensified, bounces back as re-sentment.46

Arguably, the fire of ressentimentburns on two

forms of failure and grows taller when stoked by denial. The experience of humiliation and defeat, or

not living up to a standard, provides the first kind of failure and coagulates into resentment. The

failure of satisfying ones desire for retribution and redressing the injustice suffered provides the

second failure and turns a particular resentment into a generic, permanent and ontological feeling of

ressentiment. However, what makes the latter particularly corrosive is a form of denial. Instead of

recognising the value of what is desired, ressentimentinvolves on the one hand, the careful

cultivation of a type of false consciousness predicated on the inversion of the value of what was

originally desired and, on the other, the delusion of an idealized alternative world where the victim

becomes the ruler, and suffering can finally cease.47

According to Max Schelers reading of Nietzsches ressentiment, the engine of thisparticularmode of

being is envy envy of whomever or whatever does not experience the subjects suffering,

displeasure and wrath. Existential envy [] is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it

whispers continually: I can forgive everything, but not that you are that you are what you are

that I am not what you are indeed that I am not you.48

Ressentimentis the affect that underpins

the construction of scapegoats, the exercise of revenge, and the affirmation of a negative or

inverted form of enjoyment. Suffering is taken as proof that someone must be to blame. Similar to

Jean Jacques Rousseaus idea of amour propre, as distinct from amour de soi, for the subject

experiencing ressentiment enjoyment comes more from the misfortunes of others than an increase

45For a phenomenology of ressentiment, see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Natasha

Randall (London: Canongate, 2012 [1864]), esp. 22. For a commentary on Dostoevskys novel as a portrait of a

contemporary lone-wolf terrorist, see Brighi, The Mimetic Politics of Lone-Wolf Terrorism.46

The existence of ressentimentthus demonstrates the artificial nature of the separation between past and

present, which exist one inside the other; the past becomes a present that is more present than the present;

in Ferro, Resentment in History, 128.47

Victimary narratives are therefore central to ressentiment. For a comprehensive treatment of the

mechanisms behind the construction of victimhood and its proliferation in global politics today, see Harald

Wydra, Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), 178-224.48

Max Scheler, Ressentiment(New York: Shocken, 1972 [1912]), 52. For a comparison of Nietzsches and

Schelers rendering of ressentiment, see Nicholas Birns, Ressentiment and Counter-Ressentiment: Nietzsche,Scheler, and the Reaction Against Equality" in Nietzsche Circle (September 2005), available at

http://www.nietzschecircle.com/RessentimentMaster.pdf

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in ones well-being. Imposing ones suffering on others through revenge therefore becomes a way of

actualising ones negative enjoyment.49

What is the relation between resentment and ressentiment? Are they incommensurable emotions,

driven by different passions and seeking satisfaction in different ways, or are these overlapping

variations on the same affect? And which version is more prevalent today? To investigate their

confluence and difference today it is useful to interrogate this affect not only as an individual

prerogative, but as a relation which presupposes a number of entanglements between self and

other, identity and difference.

Resentment, Ressentimentand Reciprocity

The second conceptual axis along which varieties of resentment coalesce concerns the

intersubjective axis of identity and difference. Resentment is not only a reactive emotion, but a

deeply relational one. When considered within the family of failure-induced red emotions, such as

anger, shame and humiliation, resentment presupposes a set of feelings towards an Other, be it

imagined or actual. The resentment that is tied up with a loss or injury is a response to the vertigo of

seeing oneself through the eyes of the other injured, denigrated, maimed. As Jean Paul Sartre

illustrated, experiencing shame and resentment invariably attests to a certain loss of control over

ones identity and proves our degree of vulnerability to the other.50

More than any other, this

experience reminds us of our inescapable intersubjective condition, of how our identity is shaped at

the iridescent boundary between self and other, of how our foundation falls both inside and outside

of ourselves.51

A number of political theorists have traced the origins of resentment and ressentiment in different

configurations of the entanglements between identity and difference. William Connollys writings on

49The readings of ressentiment given by Nietzsche and Scheler overlap yet also differ considerably inter alia,

in terms of the degree of emphasis laid on envy as the underlying motive of ressentimentand in terms of the

possibility of channeling and venting ressentimentinto revenge. As brilliantly argued in Brodersen, Rage,

Rancour and Revenge,156-58, Nietzsche understands revenge to be exclusively in spiritual rather than actual

terms, while in Scheler the possibility of actual revenge stems directly from the misplaced aggression of

ressentiment. ContraBrodersen, however, I argue that one should not infer from this that Schelerian

ressentimentequates to simple resentment incorrectly named and, as such, is not real ressentiment. The

tension of ressentiment is precisely the one that survives after its necessarily partial revenge is consummated.50

Thus, Sartre: Shame is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: I am ashamed of myself before the

Other, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology(New York: Pocket

Books, 1978), 222.51See Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame(Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2014).

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the politics of resentment are a particularly interesting case in point. Connellys concerns with

resentment stem from a long-standing interest in how to ground democratic societies in the

globalisation of contingency of late modernity on an egalitarian and pluralist ethos.52

While

Connolly acknowledges that resentment and moral indignation arguably are indispensable sources

of energy and inspiration for the formation of new political subjects and social movements,53

he

warns about the exclusions and excesses spawned in the process. These may be inevitable in so far

as identity and difference are mutually constituted and in so far as security is, at least to some

degree, pursued in identity. As Connollys formula reads, Identity requires difference in order to be,

and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty []. The multiple

drives to stamp truth upon [] identities function to convert differences into otherness and

otherness into scapegoats.54

Identity politics is always potentially also a politics of resentment. The

politics of resentment is that which deprecates, rages against, and ultimately punishes difference.

Resentment here emanates from a paradox of failure and denial: the failure, or impossibility, to

achieve the fullness of identity, combined with the denial of the requirement of difference in order

for identity to exist. As well-known, the protections advocated by Connolly against the perils of

resentment are to embrace contingency and cultivate critical responsiveness at both the individual

and collective level, while endowing democracies with an agonistic ethos of pluralism.55

If the origins of resentment lie in the entanglements and paradoxes of identity and difference, for

Connolly ressentimentis altogether another matter.56

Relying on a Nietzschean reading of

ressentiment, Connolly places the origins of this affect rather outside of the immediate political fray,

within a second-order, metaphysical plane. Ressentimentis a form of existential resentment against

mortality, time, and the world, against our finitude and the injustice it is commonly perceived to

entail.57

The temptation to ressentimentis bound to the human condition, particularly to the facts

of mortality, profound suffering, grief and the irreversibility of time that mark that condition.58

In

addition to this, and not without ambiguity, however,Connolly provides another route into

ressentiment. Rather than existential, this is a political route which is constituted by a form of

52William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox(Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1991), The Ethos of Pluralization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1995) and Pluralism(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).53

William Connolly, A World of Becoming in Alan Finlayson, Democracy and Pluralism: the Political Thought of

William Connolly (Milton Park: Routledge, 2010), 228.54

Connolly, Identity\Difference, 64, 67.55

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 178-198.56

Connolly, A World of Becoming, 228. Cfr. also Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 213n17.57

William E. Connolly, The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine, Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 877.

However, our existential attitudes to mortality and finitude have repercussions for our political identities; seeConnolly, Identity\Difference, 164-65.58

Connolly, A World of Becoming, 228, emphasis added.

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protracted resentment: ressentimentis stored resentment that has poisoned the soul and migrated

to places where it is hidden and denied,59

it can grow out of an accumulation of justified

resentments and can get dangerously congealed and encoded into the spirit of institutional life,

endangering pluralism.60

Interestingly, for Connolly the contemporary condition is one around which these two routes into

ressentiment converge. Existential ressentiment is heightened by a set of general circumstances

[that] work to intensify [its] cultural temptation. The globalization of capital, with its production of

extreme inequality between and within regions, is one. Another, ironically, is exposure to new

experiences of time that press themselves upon us []. The globalization of capital, a sharper sense

of global contingency and ressentimentare interinvolved.61

At the same time, identity-related

political resentments proliferate, congeal and become amplified in ressentimentvia the working ofglobal resonance machines that intensify and capitalise on forms of violent disciplining of

difference. In a world moving faster than heretofore, in which inequality is rampant, in which

minoritization proceeds at a fast pace, and in which traditional conceptions of time face a host of

counterexperiences, resentment can all too readily slide into ressentiment.62

Although the precise

drivers of this convergence are not entirely or unambiguously explained, the result is that today the

two trajectories of ressentimentconverge and escalate. Today resentment against cultural diversity,

economic egalitarianism, and the future whirl together in the same resonance machine.63

In her writings, Wendy Brown has similarly mobilised the concept of ressentimentto account for the

particular character and formation of identities in late modernity, at a time profoundly defined by

rampant liberalism.64

Although her account of ressentimentowes just as much to a Nietzschean

reading, her arguments present a different configuration of the entanglements between identity and

difference than in Connollys reading. At the heart of the moral triumph of ressentimentin late

modern, capitalist societies Brown places a particular mode of desiring, which is experienced by all

subjects when embedded in the equalising and universalising social and political structure of late

liberal modernity. It is the prior presumption of the self-reliant and self-made capacities of liberal

subjects [] that makes all liberal subjects, and not only markedly disenfranchised ones, vulnerable

59Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 213, emphasis added.

60Connolly, A World of Becoming, 228, 230.

61Ibid., 229, 230.

62Ibid.

63Connolly, The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine, 879.

64

Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 390410, States of Injury: Powerand Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Politics Out of History

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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to ressentiment.65

In particular, the contemporary subject is characterised by a condition of radical

failure and envy. On the one hand, the failure to measure up to the idealised standard of the middle

class, which represents the normalization rather than the politicization of capitalism, [] the

representation of the ideal of capitalism.66

On the other, the envy experienced towards the model

of the sovereign, liberal individual a model which is enthroned in [] the very structure of desire,

despite being denied and denigrated like an absent father.67

According to Brown, the failure and envy mobilised by this kind of ressentiment are not only specific

to the affect of liberal subjects. Rather, like all other forms of resentment, [ressentiment]retains the

real or imagined holdings of its reviled subject and deploys against it a revengeful and yet impotent

will that perversely sacralises, distributes and ultimately only extends the subjects subjugation.68

Three aspects of this failure are worth noting. First, the proliferation and sacralisation of thecondition of victim indeed the attachment to those wounds of exclusion and histories of suffering

which set the very parameters of identity. In noting the rise of a moralizing politics of recognition,

Brown anticipates the coming of that empire of trauma which anthropologists Didier Fassin and

Richard Rechtman identify as being a constitutive cipher of the contemporary moral economy.69

Second, the externalization and displacement of suffering, which involves the production of

scapegoats: a culprit responsible for the hurt, and []a site of revenge to displace the hurt and the

re-enactment, rather than the resolution, of injuries as they are distributed and externalised to

others.70

Third, a failure of the will: identity structured by this ethos becomes deeply invested in its

own impotence, generating only a blunted critique of power and returning incessantly to its own

narcissistic wounds, rather than finding ground for genuine self-affirmation.71

Although specific to

the history of liberal modernity, the impotent attitude of ressentimentappears very close to being a

general and fundamental existential condition in the plastic cage of late modern societies,72

where

individuals are at once saturated by human power and yet increasingly alienated from their capacity

to truly act politically.73

This is because

65Brown, Wounded Attachments, 400-01, emphasis added.

66Ibid., 395.

67Ibid., 396; see also, 409n8.

68Ibid., 394.

69Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

70Brown, Wounded Attachments, 401. A revenge, however, that often does not extinguish ressentiment. See

infra, fn 50.71

Brown, Wounded Attachments, 403.72

Brown, States of Injury, 28.73

Brown, Politics out of History and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (London: MIT Press, 2010). For adifferent take on Browns use of ressentiment, see Simon Glezos, Browns Paradox: Speed, Ressentimentand

Global Politics,Journal of International Political Theory10, no. 2 (2014): 148-68.

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the characteristics of late modern secular society, in which individuals are buffeted and

controlled by global configurations of disciplinary and capitalist power of extraordinary

proportions, and are at the same time nakedly individuated, stripped of reprieve from

relentless exposure and accountability for themselves, together add up to an incitement to

ressentimentthat might have stunned even the finest philosopher of its occasions and logics.

Starkly accountable, yet dramatically impotent, the late modern liberal subject quite literallyseethes with ressentiment.

74

The French American theorist Rne Girard offers yet another perspective on resentment and

ressentiment and the way these are linked to patterns of reciprocity between self and other, identity

and difference. Like Brown, but more than Brown, and echoing Lacans well known formula that

desire is always the desire of the Other, Girard thinks of desire and identity as always retaining

holdings of their models or rivals.75

While this is especially true for liberal and modern subjects, this

is more generally the case for all human beings, whose desires are always and inescapably imitative

and whose identities are constructed mimetically.76

The possibility of rivalry and envy is therefore so

endemic and wired into human relations that in Girardressentimentbecomes the default form of

resentment. Ressentiment occurs whenever mimetic desire meets an obstacle on its way to fruition

and becomes frustrated. This may happen more often than we think if we accept that our models

are also our rivals and that our desire is always ultimately a metaphysical one, namely a desire not

just according to the Other, but a desire to bethe Other.77

If this is rather ambitiously presented by Girard as a sort of general law concerning all human

nature, it is a law that seems to apply especially to modernity and late modernity.78

The proliferation

of ressentiment flows from the triumph of the very operating principles of liberal and capitalist

societies, namely equality and the market, whose competitive effects are now amplified on a global

scale. Both principles operate on and multiply the occasions for comparisons and envy. Further, they

increase the chance of ressentimentsince, one the one hand, the promise of equality and wealth is

74Brown, Wounded Attachments, 402.

75For an introduction to Girards mimetic theory, see John Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader(New York: The

Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003). For an application of mimetic theory to global politics, see Elisabetta

Brighi and Antonio Cerella, An alternative vision of politics and violence: Introducing mimetic theory in

international studies,Journal of International Political Theory11, no. 1, 3-25. For a critical account of Girards

notion of the political, as compared to classical and contemporary political theory, see Elisabetta Brighi and

Antonio Cerella, The Sacred and the Political (London: Bloomsbury-Continuum, forthcoming).76

See Rne Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1966 and Violence and the Sacred(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1977).77

See Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego:Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: MSU

Press, 2013).78See especially Stefano Tomelleri, Ressentiment: Reflections on Mimetic Desire and Society (East Lansing:

Michigan State University Press, 2015).

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frustrated by the reality of inequality and structural imbalances and, on the other hand, the loss of

transcendental points of reference consigns humanity to live and fight its battles internally and

immanently. In resonance with Connolly and Brown,79

Girard states that

we live in a world where many people, rightly or wrongly, feel blocked, or paralyzed, in allaspirations, obstructed from achieving their most legitimate goals. Individual psychology

inevitably ends up resenting this permanent frustration, and the need arises for a term that

expresses this state of affair. [] The word ressentimentseems designed to play this role.80

If Girard recognises the greatness of Nietzsche for having provided the most elaborate

understanding of ressentiment, he cannot follow Nietzsches denunciation of slave morality as a

specific product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. One the one hand, mimetic desire is our lot qua

human beings and therefore it cannot be thought of as property of any specific class, or culture. On

the other hand, Christianity may have accelerated the coming of a hyper-mimetic age but is also

believed to contain antidotes against it.81

What is stirkingly missing from Girard, however, is as thorough a discussion of resentment as we find

of ressentiment. Girard focuses so much on the latter that the former does not figure at all as a

moral emotion. What is missing, in other words, is an account of how legitimate grievances may

emerge as something other thanthe mere operations of envy and mimetic rivalry; an

acknowledgement of the possibility of self-empowerment strategies that do not simply feed the

vicious and violent circle of scapegoating; an account of how self-affirming practices may develop

independentlyof, or prior to the encounter with the other. This is not accidental, however. Given

that politics can no longer save us, Girardian mimetic theory rather controversially advocates to

transcend politics altogether by embracing the grace and non-violence of Christian revelation as the

only way out of the apocalypse of late modernity.82

Quite aside from the fact that non-violent forms

of reciprocity can hardly be reduced to this particular spiritual tradition, the problem that remains is

whether the issue of resentment and ressentimentshould only be considered as an apolitical,

existential and metaphysical one or whether, on the contrary, we should resist the temptation to

transcend it and rather consider it still a deeply moral and political question.

79Although well worth pursuing, a more extensive comparison of the striking contrasts and overlaps in the

political theory of especially William Connolly and Ren Girard is beyond the scope of the present paper. Such

assessment could usefully start from Connollys own critical reading of Girard in The Ethos of Pluralization, 51-

58.80

Rne Girard, Preface, in Tomelleri, Ressentiment, p. ix-x.81

Scott Cowdell, Ren Girard and Secular Modernity(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).82See Ren Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre. East Lansing: Michigan State

University Press, 2010).

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As seen from this brief survey, resentment and ressentimentoccupy different places in

contemporary political theory and are set apart by different configurations the entanglements of

identity and difference, self and other.83

On the one hand, resentment starts from self-affirmation

and from the acknowledgement of difference within the relation that caused injury or loss.

Resentment presupposes a clear sense of ones identity and worth as opponent, quite aside from

whatever may be mobilised in the encounter with the other, which includes also a sense of ones

responsibility in the relation, as well as a sense of possible, adequate and emancipatory (self-

affirming) responses to injury. On the other hand, ressentiment starts by looking outside of oneself,

by incessantly comparing oneself to the other duringthe encounter with the other, expecting and

demanding identity. When the comparison leaves the subject wanting, suffering is interpreted as a

proof of virtue, rather than of responsibility, and revenge becomes the only possible response. The

new identity that is formed, however, will inevitably bear the scars of its original exclusion.

The difference between resentment and ressentimenttherefore remains crucial in terms of its moral

and political implications. Not only do resentment and ressentimentdiffer in terms of whether they

are moved by justice or envy they differ also in terms of whether they presuppose, seek and

cultivate a culture of difference or a culture of (frustrated) identity. The fact that the three

contemporary political philosophers analysed above have converged around an interpretation of

late modernity as a time at which humanity is sliding towards a form of endemic ressentimentdoes

not bode well for our political horizons. Further, what are the consequences of this state of affairs

when the possibility of violence is multiplied and the possibility of revenge becomes not just

imaginary but actual? Is the current wave of global terrorism fuelled by resentment or ressentiment?

Resentment, Ressentimentand Terror: Paris and the World

On 7 January and again on 13 November 2015 Paris was struck by the worst terror attacks in itspeacetime history. If one combines the fatalities from the attack at the Charlie Hebdoheadquarters

and Kosher supermarket carried out in January with the mass shootings at the Bataclan theatre,

suicide bombings at the Stade de France, and shootings at the restaurants of the 10th and 11th

arrondissment, which were all carried out in a coordinated fashion on the evening of 13 November,

it is clear that these attacks represent the worst wave of terrorist violence on French soil since the

anarchist wave of terror in 1890s and the series of Algeria-related attacks of the 1960s and 1990s.

83The following way of distinguishing between resentment and ressentimentowes to Hunts insightful

treatment in Affirmative Reactions, 105-09.

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Seen in a historical perspective, the attacks constitute a new chapter within the trajectory of political

violence in France, one whose political rationalities are hard to dismiss yet not easy to decode. The

attacks were perpetrated by European citizens mostly French nationals of non-European descent,

including Algerian and Moroccan and claimed by ISIL and al-Qaeda in Yemen. All attackers were

later revealed as having links to local jihadi groups in France and Belgium, although some of these

links were loose and unstructured, and a few are believed to have fought with ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

The motivations voiced by the attackers linked their protest against the Charlie Hebdocartoons to

the treatment of Muslims in France, especially concerning the veil ban and discrimination by the

police, to French and US involvement in Iraq and Syria.84

Immediately after the attacks, quite aside from the outpouring of public mourning and the imposing

policy response by French counterterrorism authorities, an uncomfortable debate started to emergewithin public opinions and intellectuals concerning the causes of the attacks and what these

revealed about the societies involved, France especially but global politics more generally.85

Against

the impressive display of national unity and condemnation of the attack which culminated in the

solidarity march (marche republicaine) of 11 January 2015, a few intellectuals questioned the

attempt to rally behind the Je Suis Charlie cry. Amongst these, the sociologist Emanuel Todd

denounced the demonstrations as exclusionary and ill-advised in their attempt to, on the one hand,

deny the reality of deep inequality and discrimination at the roots of the attacks and, on the other,

glorify the French middle-class behind an Islamophobic and myopic defence of the principle of

freedom of speech.86

French authorities, in the person of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, took

an unprecedented step in publishing an excoriating review of Todds book on Le Monde, defining its

arguments as self-flagellating, unnecessarily gloomy and ultimately dangerous for the French body

84On Charlie Hebdo attacks, a good collection of short pieces can be found in Natalie Oswin (ed.), Forum:

Charlie Hebdo and the Politics of Response, Society and Space, 9 March 2015, available at

http://societyandspace.com/2015/03/09/charlie-hebdo-and-the-politics-of-response-a-forum-2/.See also,

Clara Eroukhmanoff, Physical vs Linguistic violence: An unecessary distinction in the Charlie Hebdo case?,paper presented at the European International Studies Association Conference, 26 September 2015. On the

November attacks see, The Telegraph, Who were the terrorists? Everything we know about the Isil attackers

so far, 20 November 2015. Available at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-

the-suspects.html85

See, for instance, Zygmunt Bauman, The Charlie Hebdo Attack And What It Reveals About Society, Social

Europe, 13 January 2015, available athttp://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/01/charlie-hebdo/.86

See Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie?(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) and, for some reactions, Le Monde,

Emmanuel Todd contre les illusions de la France du 11 janvier, 7 May 2015, available at

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-

janvier_4629131_3224.htmland The Guardian, Emmanuel Todd: the French thinker who won't toe the Charlie

Hebdo line, 28 august 2015, available athttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-

charlie-hebdo-line.

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http://societyandspace.com/2015/03/09/charlie-hebdo-and-the-politics-of-response-a-forum-2/http://societyandspace.com/2015/03/09/charlie-hebdo-and-the-politics-of-response-a-forum-2/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-the-suspects.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-the-suspects.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-the-suspects.htmlhttp://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/01/charlie-hebdo/http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/01/charlie-hebdo/http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/01/charlie-hebdo/http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-janvier_4629131_3224.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-janvier_4629131_3224.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-janvier_4629131_3224.htmlhttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-charlie-hebdo-linehttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-charlie-hebdo-linehttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-charlie-hebdo-linehttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-charlie-hebdo-linehttp://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/28/emmanuel-todd-the-french-thinker-who-wont-toe-the-charlie-hebdo-linehttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-janvier_4629131_3224.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/emmanuel-todd-contre-les-illusions-de-la-france-du-11-janvier_4629131_3224.htmlhttp://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/01/charlie-hebdo/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-the-suspects.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996120/Paris-attack-what-we-know-about-the-suspects.htmlhttp://societyandspace.com/2015/03/09/charlie-hebdo-and-the-politics-of-response-a-forum-2/


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politics. A few months later, following the November attacks, Valls further explained his position by

equating attempts to understand the causes of the attacks to mere sociological excuses,

inconsequential and self-defeating since nothing could either explain or justify the actions of the

attackers.87

These debates were not only confined to France. The November attacks and the consequent

decision to join the US-led coalition against ISIS led to an open confrontation in the UK between

those who were eager to establish causes and debate the motivations for the attacks, and those who

rejected these attempts as inappropriate, pointless or dangerous. The influential left-wing

movement Stop the War Coalition, chaired until recently by the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,

came under intense criticism after it released a statement, later withdrawn, which squarely blamed

failed Western interventions in the Middle East for the attacks and deaths in Paris.

88

In response to astatement by Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn during the Commons debate on Syria in which

Benn whipped up support for UK airstrikes by comparing this mission to the anti-fascist campaign led

by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, the same group issued a statement in which it

identified the jihadist movement [as] far closer to the spirit of internationalism and solidarity that

drove the International Brigades than Camerons bombing campaign. This contrasted quite

dramatically with the discourse of the mainstream Left and the Conservatives, which converged

around an outright condemnation of the attacks and of its perpetrators, defined as nothing other

than a fascist death cult.89

The use of political violence by non-state actors has historically often engendered great moral

ambivalence. Of all types of political violence, terrorism was until recently the one traditionally

considered not only the most contentious, but invariably the most illegitimate.90

It is unsurprising,

87See Le Monde, Manuel Valls: Non, la France du 11 janvier n'est pas une imposture, 7 May 2015, available

athttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-

ambiant_4629245_3224.html;Le Point, Manuel Valls: aucune excuse sociale ne doit tre trouve auterrorisme, 25 November 2015, available at http://www.lepoint.fr/politique/manuel-valls-aucune-excuse-

sociale-ne-doit-etre-trouvee-au-terrorisme-25-11-2015-1984728_20.php ; and Xavier Molnat, La sociologie

excuse-t-elle les terroristes?,AlterEcoPlus, 1 December 2015, available athttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-

direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.html .88

The Guardian, Jeremy Corbyn determined to attend Stop the War event, 10 December 2015, available at

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/10/jeremy-corbyn-attend-stop-the-war-event-criticism 89

The Guardian, Hilary Benn makes emotional plea for Britain to bomb Isis fascists in Syria, 3 December

2015, available athttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-

over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syria.90

Michael Walzer,Just and Unjust Wars(New York: Basic Books, 2006), C.A.J. Coady, The Morality of

Terrorism, Philosophy 60 (1985): 4769 and Robert E. Goodin, What's Wrong With Terrorism?(Cambridge:

Polity, 2006). Cfr. Uwe Steinhoff, How Can Terrorism Be Justified?, in Igor Primoratz (ed.), Terrorism: ThePhilosophical Issues(Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2004), 139-156 and Christopher Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to

Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99http://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/10/jeremy-corbyn-attend-stop-the-war-event-criticismhttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/10/jeremy-corbyn-attend-stop-the-war-event-criticismhttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/william-hague-breaks-with-cameron-over-use-of-ground-forces-in-syriahttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/10/jeremy-corbyn-attend-stop-the-war-event-criticismhttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.alterecoplus.fr/en-direct-de-la-recherche/la-sociologie-excuse-t-elle-les-terroristes-201512011020-00002614.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/05/07/manuel-valls-nous-devons-resister-au-pessimisme-ambiant_4629245_3224.html%23sCRLZcYVdUMjc5yT.99


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therefore, that the double Paris attacks would continue along this common interpretative path and

generate such contrasts and ambivalence. Due to the strong and diffuse resistance to acknowledge

the political and moral significance of terrorism, however, its role has been often denied only at

societies own peril.

One way to read these predicaments is to inquire whether resentment or ressentimentcan explain

them. In particular, if we refer back to the distinctions teased out in the second and third section of

the paper, we can start raising a number of important albeit uncomfortable questions: can the Paris

attacks be read as expression of legitimate resentment, motivated by a desire to re-establish

standards of justice, and even necessary to the maintenance of fairness in society? Far from

proving the attackers lack of commitment to certain moral standards, did the attacks provide a

moral vertigo necessary to sweep us into the truth of otherwise invisible crimes and injustice, toparaphrase Jean Amry? Alternatively, were the attacks a form of revenge produced by a frustrated,

misdirected and generalised resentment better understood as ressentiment? Were these the result

of a sense of perceived inferiority, or impotence, and the expression of a narcissistic fantasy aimed

at violently inverting a negative power differential? Was radical envy rather than a sense of justice at

the heart of these attacks a moralizing envy only magnified by and further concealed behind

exclusionary victimary narratives?

It is hard to deny that the violence seen in Paris demonstrated once again the power of resentment

and that terrorism should be understood as a particularly dramatic power to make resentment

felt.91

Genuine resentment towards a specific set of issues was after all expressed in the statements

and testimonials left by the attackers, all too often casually dismissed in the media as rants. These

manifested the degree of anger ad extreme unease towards three specific sets of issues: the limits of

multicultural integration and the conditions of Muslims in France; the failures, excesses and crimes

of post-9/11 Western policies and interventions in the Middle East; the uncomfortable legacy of

colonial history. As painful reminder of how these issues remain unresolved, resentment and the

violence that this generates can hold up a mirror to societies often too tempted to achieve closure

prematurely and unfairly, if not ignore injustices altogether. As recognised by Adam Smith and

Joseph Butler, more than reconciliation or forgiveness it is the expression, rather than repression, of

this resentment and its sympathetic recognition by others that potentially turns a community of

strangers into a community of moral agents bound by the same nomos.

91Annette Baier, Violent Demonstrations, in R.G. Frey and C.W. Morris (eds.), Violence, Terrorism, and Justice

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.

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As Connolly warns, however, the more this process of recognition is delayed or stalled, however, the

higher the likelihood that such resentment may fold in onto itself, ossify and re-present itself as

ressentiment. When ressentiment takes over, justice leaves the scene and revenge takes over the

aim of depriving and making others suffer becomes more important than affirming ones worth.

Depriving innocent civilians of life and the enjoyment theoreof, as happened in Paris, constitutes a

powerful clue of a resentment turned ressentiment. And yet, there is an additional way in which the

face of ressentimentmay be recognisable in the attacks.

Slavoj Zizek advanced a reading of the Charlie Hebdoattacks that provides an interesting account of

the role of envy in the confrontation between Islamic terrorists and the West, as well as the relation

between identity and difference.

Do the [Charlie Hebdoterrorists] really fit this description [of fundamentalists]? What they

obviously lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from

Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment andenvy, the deep

indifference towards the non-believers way of life. If todays so-called fundamentalists

really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-

believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he

hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonists search for happiness is self-

defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are

deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. [] The

fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists conviction of their superiority

and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global

consumerist civilization. [] The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve

their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that,

secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.

Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true racist

conviction of their own superiority.92

Rather than demonstrating a clash of civilisations and a desire to assert irreconcilable differences,

in Zizeks account the encounter between Islamic terrorists and the West seem to function according

to a hyper-mimetic and imitative logic, which is the logic of envy and ressentiment. It is the relentless

comparison and frustrated desire of identity, rather than difference including religious difference

that fuels ressentiment and its violent expressions. This, however, can hardly be understood as a

condition exclusive to terrorists. Rather, as the paper has illustrated, a number of scholars converge

in identifying this as the increasingly global condition of societies under the spell of a failed or fake

egalitarianism and on the verge of an uncontrollable explosion of ressentiment.93

92Slavoj iek,Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?, The New Statesman, 10 January 2015,

emphasis added, available athttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacre-are-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity93

Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds.), The Truth o

Documents

The Globalisation of Re-sentment