ABSTRACT
Occasioned by the return of ressentiment in contemporary political discourse, this book sets out from the observation that ressentiment is a political concept with different polemical meanings. The tension between its enormous descriptive power, its truth, and its mutually contradicting ideological performances, its plausibility, necessitates a set of immanent criteria with which to interpret and evaluate them: by what right do we possess and use the concept of ressentiment, and what makes the phenomenon worth knowing? Answering these questions requires a return to Nietzsche in an effort to inherit a taste for the ‘physio-logic’ of perspectival difference. By pitting philosophy against psychology, this chapter develops two provocations concerning Nietzsche. The first is that there is no positive correlation between ressentiment and justice. The second is that Nietzsche is not a psychologist and therefore not particularly interested in ressentiment. In making an initial distinction between four conceptual personae, or ‘types’ – the priest, the physician, the person of ressentiment, and the diplomat – the chapter further develops the method of dramatization that Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche as a new method for discourse analysis. It concludes with a consideration of the relevance of this method for a Marxist political epistemology of ressentiment.
