On ressentiment and its role in cultural traumas 

Nicolas Demertzis´ new book studies cultural traumas and ressentiment, supplemented with case studies from Greek political culture. Demertzis argues that these topics should be discussed together, because “traumas break and remake social bonds and, in that sense, they evoke, inter alia, hatred, anger, fear, sorrow, resentment or ressentiment, on the one hand, and solidarity, dignity, compassion, and sympathy, on the other” (p. xiii). A challenge is to identify features of cultural traumas whose participants can reach emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution on the one hand, and those traumas whose participants end up in ressentiment on the other. 

Demertzis states, following Alexander and others (2004), that “a cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel that they have suffered a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, engraved in their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (p. 31). A traumatizing event “has to undergo a process of social signification; namely, it has to be publicly signified, to get articulated into the paths of public discourse, and to become socially accepted and defined as ‘trauma’” (p. 32). The discursive negotiation of the meaning of a trauma constitutes a ‘trauma drama’ with “three fundamental elements: retroactively selective memory, largely negative emotion, and identity. The essentials of this process… are, equally: victims, perpetrators, and blame attribution.” (p. 34). Interestingly, ressentiment has the same key elements. 

So what are the features of trauma dramas that avoid ressentiment, or result in it? Demertzis offers some remarks and cues. First, it is important whether a cultural trauma emerges from a real or an imagined event. Cultural traumas emerging from events such as the Holocaust or the South-African apartheid belong to the former category where the victim status of the inflicted group can be established without much contestation. The real basis distinguishes cultural traumas proper from self-victimisation emerging from events that are imagined or narratively embellished beyond recognition. Victim status may be more contested in the latter case, whereas cultural traumas in which the perpetrators accept blame for the injury inflicted on the victims and are willing to apologise and compensate for it may “accord platforms for amelioration of sufferings and reconciliation of rival parties” (p. 35). Without recognition of blame and repair, the victims of even uncontested cultural traumas remain in a powerless position. Here ressentiment looms large, similar to self-victimisation where it seems to be the default option. 

Another difference concerns the forgetting and forgiving of the traumatizing event. Forgetting and non-forgetting are possible responses to trauma, along with revenge and demand for justice. “Like revenge, reparation through restorative justice is underpinned by resentment but not by hatred or wrath; instead, grief, sorrow, and hope play important roles. When traumatized victims are given the chance to narrate their suffering and pain publicly, they are able to regain their lost dignity; in addition, perpetrators are also heard, and through their true remorse and apology… are reconnected with their humanness” (p. 94). Reconciliation paves the way to forgiveness and mourning, the final stage of healing. Non-forgiveness, in contrast, associates with ressentiment when it results from “the victims’ inability to overcome the alluring position of victimization… [which] perpetuates powerlessness, self-pity and moral hypermnesia premised on the victim’s resistance to dealing with the past in a healing way” (p. 104). 

But what is ressentiment and how does it develop? Demertzis follows Scheler (1961) who called ressentiment “a self-poisoning of the mind” characterizing it both as a psychological “mechanism” relating to the transvaluation of desired but unattainable objects (p. 65) and as a “lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects” (p. 4). Similarly, Demertzis defines ressentiment as “an unpleasant complex moral sentiment with no specific addressees, experienced by inferior individuals including a chronic reliving of repressed and endless vengefulness, hostility, hatred, envy, and resentment due to the powerlessness of the subject in expressing them, and resulting, at the level of moral values, in the disavowal of what is unconsciously desired” (p. 132). Hostility, envy, and indignation are then constituents of ressentiment for Demertzis. Yet ressentiment is something else, for it develops only when “anger, envy, hostility, hatred and/or resentment…. are incorporated and mutated into ressentiment insofar as the transvaluation process is put into motion initiated by the subject’s incapacity to act out” (p. 136, my italics). Transvaluation is carried out by defense mechanisms of displacement, projection, and attribution, and it constitutes the core of ressentiment for Demertzis. Even so, this does not turn ressentiment into a mechanism. Instead, Demertzis suggests that ressentiment is a “cluster emotion” or “complex sentiment” (p. 132). 

Unfortunately, this view of ressentiment generates more questions than answers. First, it leaves the relationship between ressentiment and its constituent emotions unexplained. It is not clear, in what sense envy, hatred, and indignation that are chronically repressed and relived in ressentiment are its constituents if they must be “incorporated and mutated” in order to become ressentiment. Once incorporated and mutated, what is left of these emotions? If they lose their identities and are amalgamated into ressentiment that is something different – an objectless negative affect – they appear to be ingredients of ressentiment rather than its constituents. Alternatively, if envy, hatred, and indignation remain part of ressentiment even after the transmutation, they can be manifestations of ressentiment if the latter is understood as a sentiment, an affective attitude that manifests as thematically related emotions and attitudes, as Aeschbach (2017) suggests. However, this interpretation leaves “incorporation and mutation” in ressentiment redundant or mysterious. What is their function if the emotions that are supposed to undergo these processes still remain its manifestations or constituents? 

Due to problems of this kind, I have analysed ressentiment as an emotional mechanism whose function is to transform the self and its values by the means of several idiosyncratic defences that depend on the ego-strength of the individual. Ressentiment, in this view, is driven by envy, shame, and inefficacious anger, with their feelings of inferiority and impotence, while resentment, indignation, and hatred, reinforced and validated by social sharing, are its outcomes (Salmela & von Scheve 2017; Salmela & Capelos, 2021). 

But if ressentiment is an attempt to get rid of an old self and its values, how should we understand the ressentimentful person´s inability to forget the original injury or injuries. According to Demertzis, there is an “obsessive repetition of past memories, anxiety, embitterment, and depression” (p. 135) in ressentiment. However, this does not seem plausible, given that ressentiment aims at changing the meaning of a painful situation when other forms of change seem to be blocked. I suggest that a ressentimentful person interprets his or her feelings of inferiority and powerlessness as symptoms of victimhood that allows their transmutation into moral emotions of resentment, indignation, and hatred at others identified as victimizers. This transmutation puts victimhood into the core of ressentiment, explaining why a ressentimentful person cannot forgive and forget. Not-forgetting can be understood as “nursing of grievance” that serves the perpetuation of victimhood, as proposed by Hoggett (2018). 

Yet ressentiment is not a stable condition. Demertzis argues that transvaluation and the defence mechanisms implementing it are never complete but “lean towards what Scheler calls value delusions and illusions” (p. 129). The fragility of the transmuted self and its values creates the need for their validation. I have argued that this validation is paradigmatically available from like-minded peers in interaction rituals, demonstrations, rallies etc. in which political actors provide targets for the other-directed negative emotions (Salmela & von Scheve 2017). This tendency of ressentiment to collectivization explains why ressentiment as individually conceived is “not conducive to mobilization and explains political inaction rather than political action”, as Demertzis (p. 158) observes, has been identified to motivate several political orientations or movements, including reactionism both on political right and left (e.g. Capelos and Demertzis, 2018), right-wing populism and extremism (e.g. Latif et al. 2018; Salmela & von Scheve 2017; Mishra 2017), as well as fundamentalism and fanaticism (e.g. Langman & Morris 2003; Posłuszna & Posłuszny 2015). Demertzis acknowledges the importance of collectivization for ressentiment by referencing some of this literature as well as in his discussion on emotions and populism. Yet his most elaborate support to this thesis comes from his detailed analyses of politics of ressentiment in Greece. 

References: 

Aeschbach, S. (2017). Ressentiment – An Anatomy. PhD Thesis. University of Geneva. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:103621 

Alexander, J.C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, J. N. and Sztompka, P. (Eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Capelos, T. & Demertzis, N. (2018). Political action and resentful affectivity in critical times. Humanity & Society 1–24. DOI: 10.1177/0160597618802517. 

Hoggett, P. (2018). Ressentiment and grievance. British Journal of Psychotherapy 34(3), 393–407. 

Langman, L. & Morris, D. (2003). Islamic terrorism: From retrenchment to ressentiment and beyond. In H. Kushner (Ed): Essential readings on political terrorism: analyses of problems and prospects for the 21st century. New York: Gordian Knot Books. 

Latif, M., Blee, K., DeMichele, M., and Simi, P. (2018). How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups. Humanity & Society, 42(4): 480–501. 

Mishra, P. (2017). The Age of Anger. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Posłuszna, E. & Posłuszny, J. (2015). The trouble with ressentiment. Ruch Filozoficzny, 71(4): 87–104. 

Salmela, M. & Capelos, T. (2021). Ressentiment: A complex emotion of an emotional mechanism of psychic defences? Politics and Governance, 9(3) (in print). 

Salmela, M. & von Scheve, C. (2017). Emotional roots of right-wing political populism. Social Science Information 56(4), 567-595.

Scheler, M. (1961[1915]). Ressentiment. Translated by L.A. Coser. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.