ABSTRACT
Ressentiment is a term which arose in Alexis de Tocqueville’s France but was appropriated and pressed into service in a distinctive almost petulant way by a newly emerging German nation shaped and forged by Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck to designate a kind of posture of scornful superiority in the face of a strong competitor. It was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), however, who invested the term with a distinctive meaning which he discovered in one of Dostoyevsky’s memorable characters in Notes from the Underground – a stunning portrait of modernity’s peevish malaise: an ‘offended, beaten down, and derided mouse… [which] immerses itself in cold, venomous, and above all, everlasting spite’ – which Nietzsche so despised in institutional Christianity and held responsible for the worst features of Wilhelmine Realpolitik and its attendant nationalist, imperialist and anti-Semitic aberrations. In short, the German style democracy, infected by ressentiment, promised much but could only deliver false transcendence: a strange world of phantasms.
The present chapter also draws on the insights of René Girard (1923–2015) whose mimetic and scapegoat theory and the notion of pacific mimesis, I will posit, when combined with Nietzsche’s mimetic pathology and his understanding of the Greek agon, expose the powerful dynamics that are capable of producing a genuine transformation that both re-territorialises and generates positive futures – a process which Nietzsche identifies with ‘overcoming’ and ‘becoming.’ Without this kind of process, as will be seen, we are left with what Girard calls ‘[a] false infinity of mimetic rivalry.’
