To think that the study of ressentiment can help us understand a number of the forces at play in the world we live in: that is the wager we have made in this issue of Plurielles. Ressentiment, as old as man himself, the product of wounds, conflicts, and humiliations — real, imaginary, historical, or mythic — often springs from a feeling of powerlessness, from the impossibility of responding, of acting, or of taking revenge, of repairing the wrong suffered or what is experienced as such; and this gives rise to an endless brooding, a craving for retribution, and a hatred that is sometimes murderous. On the individual level as on the collective, it is often proportionate to what the expectation, the trust, the belief in the other once was — be that other an individual, a State, or a social institution. Time seems to have no effect on its violence, which is proportionate to the frustration felt and to the wound.
Germany, in the modern and contemporary world, has shown us dramatically what the consequences of a “culture of ressentiment” can be. That is the title of Rita Thalmann’s contribution. She shows, in effect, how this “culture of ressentiment” was at work in Germany from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, feeding the racist and antisemitic theories that were to culminate in the Shoah. We thus understand far better what the sources were that fed Nazism, and how it was able to develop in this country which was, in Robert d’Harcourt’s phrase, “the land of failed revolutions and of successful counter-revolutions.” Moreover, in a book that has just been reissued, Philippe Burrin revisits the history of Nazism in the light of ressentiment.1
At the individual level, ressentiment, even when it does not express an obsessive desire for vengeance, can have a destructive effect on the person who feels it. Seloua Luste Boulbina, drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, and also Kafka, and studying among other things the condition of the colonized subject, analyzes an asceticism that develops in him against a backdrop of impossible revenge. But if it is the price of dignity, it is also a poisoned remedy, for it expresses “powerlessness in social relations” — and this even though it is a way of sublimating that powerlessness.
Does ressentiment have only this negative dimension of vengeful brooding? Questioning the Bible — our most ancient Jewish heritage, which is also that of humanity — Catherine Chalier evokes Cain’s ressentiment against his brother Abel, a ressentiment that was the cause of the first murder in the history of humanity, as it is recounted to us in the book of Genesis. For her, this story, which extends into our lives, private and collective, surely teaches that only the man or woman who avoids the trap of comparison with others and of rivalry (even on the murky terrain of suffering) has any chance of escaping Cain’s ressentiment. This remains true in thought as in the real or mythic history of groups.
Rivon Krygier, however, returning to traditional Judaism’s stance toward ressentiment and vengeance, reminds us that for the Talmud there is, in the wish to respond to violence, another dimension — one that is likewise present in ressentiment — and that is “the will to restore justice.”
Paul Zawadzki studies the role of memory in these long processes. He asks whether time, and notably forgetting, may help to heal ressentiment, for, as he reminds us, “neither societies nor individuals can do without forgetting…” And yet he too recalls that ressentiment, so bound up with the passion for vengeance, is not foreign to the legitimate desire for justice, citing this sentence of Yerushalmi’s: “Is it possible that the antonym of forgetting is not memory but justice?”2
An illustration of what ressentiment can be in an unexpected situation is given to us by a literary example: an excerpt from a novel by the Polish writer Andrzej Szczypiorski, which shows us what the ressentiment of a Goy against a Jew can be.
In our immediate present, the demand for recognition and reparation on the part of victims or of distant descendants — as is the case with certain claims concerning slavery — can be illuminated through the prism of ressentiment. Pierre Nora had stressed, in 2006, in an interview with Le Monde 2, that reparations for the victims of past centuries — who have therefore been dead for centuries — would open the way to endless processes; and Michel Zaoui, who examines this question in the light of the reparation claims during the recent Lipietz v. SNCF trial, concludes in the same vein: one must know how to bring the cycle of ressentiment to a close.
In another context, Jean Beckouche, who works in Palestine and Morocco within the framework of Médecins du Monde, analyzes in an interview situations of suffering present in conflicts and their human consequences. Daniel Oppenheim, for his part, examines the doctor–patient relationship, its asymmetry, and the feelings of frustration that can arise on that occasion, asking how this relationship might be kept from crystallizing into ressentiment. Finally Janine Altounian, recalling that ressentiment is still a bond between victim and executioner, notably in crimes against humanity, seeks a third position in order to free the subject (the descendant of victims of collective murder) from this dependency. For her, “only the appropriation, in the position of subject, of the data of one’s own history renders moot the alternative ‘ressentiment or forgiveness,’ each of whose options is foreign to that subject.”
The moral as well as the political effects of ressentiment, individual as well as collective, have thus never ceased to manifest themselves down to our own day. Returning to our present-day society on the cultural and political planes, four contributions. Michelle Fellous shows us how the conflict of memories can produce ressentiment. A study by Régine Azria on Jewish art and the problem of figuration, in the face of the traditional prohibition on representation. A contribution by Daniel Lindenberg on the evolution of the French Jewish community. A reflection by Philippe Zard on Alain Badiou and his strange discourse concerning the Jews, a discourse that brings us back to the question of ressentiment.