Politics and Resentment
25th October 2012
Freeberg reinvents Nietzsche.
I reflect on it for a few days and a few nights, and realize I can’t think of any political agenda, in my lifetime, leftward-leaning that doesn’t have something to do with resentment.
Nietzsche, being an academic intellectual, uses the fancy French term ressentiment, but it’s the same tune.
Ressentiment is not to be considered interchangeable with the normal English word “resentment”, or even the French “ressentiment”. While the normal words both speak to a feeling of frustration directed at a perceived source, neither speaks to the special relationship between a sense of inferiority and the creation of morality.