ABSTRACT
With increasing numbers of people living without 'a world' to inhabit, ressentiment abounds. Ressentiment and jouissance are tied, knotted together as a negative sinthome, a failure of 'becoming', and a failure of the real schizo project of radical transformation. The discourse of ressentiment leads us to the contemporary discourse of the victim: the other will hurt you. There are real victims of misfortune or evil, but the ideological recalibration of the senseless real into virtual recrimination creates a burgeoning slave culture with an expectation of abuse, harassment, victimisation and exploitation leading quite 'rationally' to pay-offs and compensation and worse, to violence and terrorism. Verleugnung causes the segmental loss of reality – great chunks of the real go unnoticed. Unlike Verleugnung which denies the negative, 'becoming' takes nihilism to the full in order to overcome in full, beyond good and evil.
