ABSTRACT
The passage to modernity radicalized the gap between desire and enjoyment, affecting both the build-up of distress and its eventual release. The chapter accounts for how punishment operates under conditions of ressentiment, and transforms the pain of angry and embittered spectators into pleasure. As opposed to later commentators on ressentiment, Nietzsche accorded a central role to punishment. Punishment was the ultimate devaluation of the other and provided the audience with a vehicle of moral self-transformation capable of bridging the widened gap between desire and enjoyment. Criminological research on the evolution of criminal justice in the post-1960s Western world offers a wealth of examples, which are analysed to illustrate the build-up of tension, in terms of perceived injustices and actively withheld recognition, and the eventual release of tension through revenge and revaluation. The imagined revenge on those who were seen to obstruct their way of life was especially charged with enjoyment, precisely because of the underlying pain and impotence. It was a self-revaluation through proxy, as the audience depended entirely on the criminal justice apparatus of the state to exact the revenge. For the first time, however, recognition was immediately provided by a punishment which they felt to be their own.
