ABSTRACT
Centered on Nietzsche’s rivalry with the priest for the title of physician of culture, this chapter elaborates a critique of the global reign of psychology as the language and politics of the priest. The task of philosophy is to protect the unconscious activity of a body that is at odds with consciousness and that must be protected from moralizing judgments. Herein lie the good taste of the philosopher, their rank as a psychologist, as well as their right to certain problems. In its raw state, ressentiment is hardly a worthy problem. It allows only for cursory contempt. Yet it becomes interesting in the combat with a contemporary psychopower that profits from its interpretation, mediation, and multiplication – a struggle carried forward by Nietzscheans such as Foucault and Deleuze. Itself not free from ressentiment, pastoral power establishes itself through ressentiment’s infinite contagion. The role of the philosopher, by contrast, is to maintain the pathos of distance in the physiological composition of forces. This chapter therefore elaborates how the very acts of diagnosis and perspectival switching must not only produce the condition for ressentiment’s overcoming through themselves but also experiment with a new innocence beyond the culturally ingrained sense of guilt and punishment.
