Wanted, Dead or Distracted: On Ressentiment in History, Philosophy, and Everyday Life

The philosophy one has does not depend solely on the kind of person one is. It depends more essentially on the time in which one lives and, above all, the way in which one belongs to the time.

—Ernst Bloch

 

It is the precarious nature of this moment in American history that makes pessimism more obvious than prescient of late. Sitting in a café in a Canadian province unknown to most geographically challenged Americans, I found myself, in the week following September 11, predicting the inevitable rhetoric of a president I did not select, who, as an acquaintance from Houston once commented, always looks like a schoolboy trying to control his bladder in front of the teacher when faced with the demand of an impromptu speech. Despite a certain jaundiced acceptance of the necessity of folly in American political life, I was nevertheless surprised by the alacrity with which George W. Bush jumped on the most egregious cliché of U.S. foreign policy: the image of the sheriff who would smoke the outlaw Osama bin Laden out of his cave. "Wanted, Dead or Alive," he said, and the tabloids amplified his dust. In a recent photograph featured in the Los Angeles Times, he sported a white cowboy hat, and I found myself filled with a paradoxical mix of amusement and dismay.

I speak of folly because I happened to be reading Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals during that particular week, which lent a bitterly ironic cast to my sadness over those events. It is in the "Second Essay," on "'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and the Like," that he lays bare the absurdity of given values that conflate personal responsibility and morality as such with the ability to honor a financial debt. The barbarism of this logic is revealed in the valuation of physical punishment as a justified and unquestioned response to unpayable debts: in the event of your failure to honor your debt to me, I am entitled to a pound of your flesh. The path is thereby laid for the creditor to "inflict every kind of torture and indignity upon the body; for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt." The compensation is the measure of "voluptuous pleasure" the creditor achieves in "being allowed to vent his power freely upon one whom is powerless." It is thus here, as Nietzsche observes, that the "uncanny intertwining of the ideas of 'guilt and suffering' was first effected [which] by now may be inseparable." ¹

I have said that Bush resorted to a cliché when he called for swift military action by rehashing Wild West metaphors. It is, perhaps, a platitude of an academic ilk to see Nietzsche's allegorical staging of the primordial imbalance between the "morally responsible" creditor and the haplessly indebted as an allegory for history, which, in the eyes of Marx at least, is the history of class struggle. From the standpoint of The German Ideology, the arbitrary measure of flesh-to-be-extracted will appear to lose its arbitrariness in the course of Europe's passage from feudalist to capitalist modes of ownership and production. The juridical apparatus that reproduces and cements this mode will eventually render the savage logic of such punishment conventional and thus inevitable (just as Nietzsche predicted). In a postindustrialized society, the lender's own narratives of self-justification will thus seem "natural," whereas the debtor's wrath will appear as grotesquely "unnatural" and therefore uncanny in comparison, because it confronts us with the gruesome specter of torn-open flesh that shadows the prospect of any torturous extraction. To link the names of Nietzsche and Marx in this way is, thus, to see the ideology of flesh-for-debt moralism as the visceral spur of capitalism's disgusting yet occluded history.

Ressentiment is the word that Nietzsche might have used to designate this "spur" that is complicated by the envy that...