ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of a widespread discourse that warns of the slide from resentment to ressentiment, legitimating the former and dismissing the latter. This sanitary distinction not only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of the depoliticization of others but also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key role in the evaluation of the reactive attitudes: their rationality (from Aristotle to Smith and Butler to Rawls), their authenticity (Kierkegaard, Flaubert), and their justness (Nietzsche). It is then argued that the first two problems are ill-posed. These problems concern differences in degree and are therefore always prone to the relativism of what, retrospectively, can be called the resentment-ressentiment complex in liberal political theory. The true problem with retributive passions concerns a difference in kind, not between resentment and ressentiment, but between active affects and reactive affects. This Nietzschean demoralization of the problem of reactive attitudes by means of a historico-systematic reorientation leads to the concluding claim that, while moral sentiments and political actions are always entangled, only the latter constitute the ground of social justice.
