Cain's ressentiment

The emotion felt by Cain when the Eternal approved the sacrifice offered by his brother Abel and rejected his own (Gen. 4:4–5) is described in the Bible as that of “a great anger” (vayyihar).¹ Cain’s face thereupon becomes abruptly downcast; it “falls” (vaiéplou panav), though no word expresses the violence of what he feels. Cain’s face “falls” simply because his brother’s offering was acknowledged and his own rejected, for no apparent reason. The commentators of the Jewish tradition have proposed various explanations — often rich and suggestive, sometimes apologetic — to account for this rejection.² I shall not analyze them here, however, in order to inquire more precisely into the meaning of the particular emotion Cain feels, an emotion that, shortly afterward, leads him to the fratricidal act. This inquiry must be conducted in the traditional manner, decisively emphasized in Hasidism, by asking what this Cainite emotion signifies for us, in us — an emotion so often intimate to the psyche that it seems, as in this narrative, endowed with an uncontrollable violence and destined to make us commit the irreparable.

Biblical narration, generally speaking, almost always remains laconic as to the description of the emotions and feelings of the actors in sacred history. It suggests the presence of affects; it does not dwell on them; it gives us to read how an emotion or a feeling induces this or that gesture rather than naming them precisely, and it does not offer a reflection on the link between what a given character feels and his gesture or act. Yet it is particularly remarkable that this link is very precisely evoked, by God Himself (vv. 6–7), in the passage presently under study. The emotion felt by Cain has, to be sure, almost always been linked to the jealousy that, according to a possible etymology, his name announces;³ but the narrative itself evokes only “a great anger.” It evokes a great irritation, a heating-up, whose violence first ravages Cain’s face, stuns it, and makes it fall: his gaze can no longer rise toward anything but the offense he experiences in finding that his brother’s offering was accepted and not his own. He does not, however, call into question the One who disdained him, nor does he inquire into himself, into what, in his conduct, might possibly explain this rejection. Still less, of course, does he ask why his brother, by his intention and by his offering, merited this recognition. He feels only “a great anger” of such magnitude that it dooms him to the “sin crouching at (his) door” which “longs to (reach) him” without his wishing to struggle against it (vv. 6–7). The offender is not God; the source of suffering is not in him; it is wholly concentrated in the unbearable presence of the one — Abel, the breath, the vapor — whose offering was accepted.

Far from being a “creator of values” — such as kindness or the forgiveness of offenses — in the way Nietzsche describes how ressentiment lies, in his view, at the origin of the morality of slaves,⁴ Cain’s ressentiment toward Abel creates nothing. It becomes a desire for vengeance, a desire to destroy the one by whom — and not because of whom — his inadequacies, indeed his inner turpitudes, have been brought to an unbearable visibility for him. Cain’s “great anger,” in fact, cannot be dissociated from the joy, the satisfaction, indeed the pride and, perhaps, the contempt toward him that he seems to imagine in his brother. Now the narrative says nothing of this: we know that Cain feels a “great anger,” we know nothing of what Abel feels. Perhaps he felt “grief” for his brother? Perhaps he could not even express his joy because of this “grief”? Whatever may be the case with these hypotheses, it changes nothing of Cain’s ressentiment: he reacts to what he imagines to be an offense of which his brother is the cause or, more exactly, the substitutive and involuntary cause. He will seek to take revenge, to eliminate the one who has doomed him to this muffled anger — perhaps confused, by those who, like Abel, regard it with a “great grief,” as the rabbinate’s translation strangely proposes, seeming to adopt that point of view. In killing Abel, he will want to defy and destroy the feelings he imagines in him: Abel’s joy must not exist — if it exists — since he suffers from it, since it is an intolerable assault on his being. That Abel does not manifest it — he who is described as “vapor” or “breath” — changes nothing of this ressentiment. Cain’s powerlessness to change the course of things — his offering was not accepted, his brother’s was — provokes his anger. He feels its violence all the more intolerable in that his brother seems legitimately entitled, for his part, to feel joy. This anger, bound to the shame before what he experiences as an affront (boch venecalem), according to the commentary of R. David Quimhi (Radaq),⁵ then gradually transforms into a desire for vengeance, and the act by which this vengeance is to be accomplished — fratricide — is supposed to efface the anger, the affront, and the shame of having been supplanted by Abel, who had not, however, taken the initiative of the sacrifice but had followed Cain in this undertaking (vv. 3–4). He had imitated his sacrificial gesture but without knowing his motivations, and this is why the sages who, as always, solicit the unspoken of the biblical narrative, imagine a profound difference between their respective motivations: the one (Cain) is said to have seen in the sacrificial gesture a measure for his own safeguard; the other (Abel), a measure of praise and thanksgiving for the life received. Cain’s ressentiment would be all the stronger in that he had been outdone on the very terrain of which he had had the initiative (offering a sacrifice), and because he had been, for his part, incapable of imitating his brother on the more secret plane, unshareable as such, of the intention or desire that presides over acts.

Nothing assures us, however, that the murder will efface the whole set of affects Cain feels: shame, anger, grief at the moment of the affront — that is, of the preference, undue in his eyes, shown to his younger brother. Ressentiment certainly often grows with the powerlessness to take revenge;⁶ but it seems, as far as Cain is concerned, that the “great anger” that leads him to murder, through his refusal to “do better” (tétiv) as the Eternal nonetheless advises him (v. 7), is in no way “compensated” and a fortiori “effaced” by Abel’s disappearance. Cain does not want to better himself; in this instance it does not occur to him in the slightest to inquire into the possible reasons for his rejection by the Eternal, or into how he might present an offering that, in turn, would be accepted. Since he feels offended, Cain does not think that a change of attitude on his part could attenuate, or even repair, his intimate, gnawing wound: no future seems destined to exist that would bring balm to so much shame, anger, indeed grief, if one opts for the rabbinate’s translation. Cain sees only his rejection; he sees only what he imagines to be his brother’s inadmissible joy, indeed his feeling of superiority over him. For no one, in fact, knows what Abel felt at the moment his offering was favorably received. But Cain wants in any case to destroy this joy and this feeling, to eradicate its living source — unless one must think that he desires to “acquire” (according to the etymology of his name proposed by his mother in verse 1), for himself exclusively, that which, in Abel, in his intentions, in his preparation of the offering, as certain commentators say,⁷ allowed him to win this recognition, to Cain’s detriment, Cain thinks. Now it is indeed the dramatic powerlessness to acquire what makes another than oneself live, desire, succeed, and sometimes rejoice, that sustains ressentiment and that, where the occasion arises, leads certain people to murder. For how, in fact, is one to acquire for oneself that which is at the source of another’s life and conduct? How is one to lay claim to it? When the face “falls” because it seems one is deprived of what makes another than oneself live and succeed, no gesture — even a murderous one — can lift it up: Cain will go on seeing Abel’s success, there where he himself has failed, as the cause of his misfortune. No word — not even that of the Eternal in this narrative — has the force, in fact, to make this face rise toward another reality, to make it look higher and elsewhere, and thus to attain a certain freedom: his own, not his brother’s.

What stupefies Cain and wounds him, before making him a murderer so that the stupefaction and the wounding may cease, is, more than the rejection of his own offering, the unthinkable and intolerable consideration that his brother’s offering was accepted. How is it possible that this ephemeral brother (Abel, the vapor) should have a consistency such that it favorably impresses the Eternal? Where does he find, in himself, the strength to perform gestures more beautiful or more generous than his own? With what secret vitality (hiout), inappropriable by anyone, is Abel endowed, to succeed where he himself fails? It is indeed Abel’s very existence that provokes Cain’s ressentiment; it is his existence that does him harm and casts an immense shadow over his own. Who knows whether, in Abel’s absence, his own offering might not have been accepted? The brooding of ressentiment is endless… and so are its ravages upon oneself and upon others.

These two figures of humanity that are Cain and Abel form a terrible couple, powerless to thwart the plot that binds them to each other, and deprived of any future. Cain (in us) never ceases to kill those who, he imagines, have more luck than he and enjoy a recognition he does not have but, he reckons, ought to have; Abel (in us) never ceases to disappear under the effect of the insatiable malice of ressentiment, never ceases to founder into unreality (the vapor), either because he undergoes Cain’s all-too-real misdeeds, or because he feels guilty for arousing such anger — disguised as immense grief, if one is to believe the rabbinate’s translation — to the point of no longer knowing how to dare to be, to the point of confounding his existence with guilt. How would he not be guilty of provoking so much ressentiment in another? The Bible knows this, when, in the genealogy of humanity it proposes, it explains that the human created in the image and likeness (tselem; démout) of Elohim (Gen. 1:26) descends neither from Cain nor from Abel, but from the third child of Adam and Eve, from Seth (cheth) granted (chath) by God “in place of Abel” (tahat Hevel), Cain having killed him (Gen. 4:25). Cain’s posterity will indeed disappear in the flood, and it is to Seth that Adam transmits his image and his likeness (demouto vetselmo) (Gen. 5:3). This suggests, then, that the human cannot emerge so long as the grip of ressentiment on the psyche endures, and so long as one remains shut up within the fatal couple — murderer/victim — whatever the ways, brutal or subtle, in which murder and being its victim are experienced by the one and the other. The human is called to clear a new path, freed from this capture or this transfixion of the one by the other, which remains unfailingly sterile, devoted to the sole prestige of death.

It remains, of course, that the history of the profound misdeeds of ressentiment cannot be effaced thus. Cain and Abel are endlessly reborn, as everyone knows on his own account or observes around him. And yet it is in every man and every woman that the third figure of humanity (Seth), the one that escapes the imaginary of this mimetic and fatal duality, must clear a path.

According to Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, it is because the Jew attempts to inscribe his humanity in this third way — or at least is called, par excellence, to do so — that he draws upon himself, in turn, the relentlessness of ressentiment. “The Jew, bearer of an essentially signifying destiny, implies an essential revelation that concerns every man, and it is because every man tends to turn away from this essential revelation, to divert himself, that he unleashes himself with fury upon the Jew.”⁸ The man of antisemitic ressentiment — even when he is sometimes a philosopher — “projects onto the Jew what he does not want to be, and wants to take from the Jew what he is.”⁹ He seeks, in vain, to appropriate what makes him live, while attempting to discharge his own evil onto him. Antisemitic ressentiment is exacerbated all the more in that the Jew, despite his sufferings, strives to overcome evil and, in a way incomprehensible to himself sometimes as well, to “choose life” (Deut. 30:19). Archetype of a humanity wounded but living and creative, the Jew is said to fascinate, for better and for worse, those who would like to appropriate his secret. This ressentiment, as we know, often attacks the idea of election, and it leads people to reproach the Jews, vehemently, with what Cain already reproaches Abel, mutely and then violently: why are “you” accepted? Why am I not too? What have you done that is special that I have not done? What secret do you hide that allows you to believe yourself loved by God, even in your misfortune? The revolt against what appears to be an undue preference, and against the feeling of superiority the antisemite attributes to the Jews, does not cease, even if one explains to him, patiently, texts in hand, that this is a complete misreading of the idea of election. It is useless to show him that election is a responsibility that concerns the whole of humanity, and that God Himself, in the Bible, tells the Jewish people that it is the least of all peoples.¹⁰ The antisemite sometimes even comes to feel a paradoxical ressentiment toward any solicitude shown for the Jew’s suffering throughout history. He happens to envy this suffering and to want to rival it.

To feel ressentiment toward another’s creativity, toward his accomplishments — out of powerlessness to find in oneself the source of one’s own creativity, the energy to realize one’s own works, on the scale of one’s own talents — then takes the form of a ressentiment before the suffering of this other, even when, like Cain, one was its cause, direct or indirect. In the biblical narrative Cain does not, moreover, weep for Abel’s death; he worries about the consequences of his “torment” (avoni) (v. 13) for himself;¹¹ he is afraid that his destiny as a wanderer and fugitive will expose him, in turn, to violent death (v. 14). The ressentiment of the antisemite, as E. Amado Lévy-Valensi rightly analyzes it, bears upon his own humanity, which he does not know how to fulfill, upon his powerlessness to live in spite of sufferings, and upon his powerlessness to create. He desires to rid himself of his evil by projecting it onto the Jew, and he seeks — in vain, of course — to appropriate in return the secret that makes him live, the extreme and as-yet-unknown enjoyment of which he imagines he could feel if it were at last his own. In his powerlessness to realize it, he denigrates and accuses, but he can also feel the temptation to murder, as Sartre unambiguously maintains.¹² The twentieth century shows, moreover, tragically, that this is true “to the letter,”¹³ and it is not certain, unfortunately, that the twenty-first century will be safe from the terrible malady of antisemitic ressentiment.

Ressentiment does not let itself be vanquished by arguments and by good advice. It is not enough, as God Himself does, to tell Cain to do better (tétiv) so that his face may rise again, while there is still time. Cain’s fallen face — fallen upon the existence of Abel, which had remained insignificant (hevel) until then, but had suddenly become, at the instant of its acceptance, an intolerable existence for him — cannot rise again. Cain cannot look elsewhere and, from then on, cannot find the path of his own creativity. He cannot respond to the call to realize the human in himself. He therefore performs the fatal gesture (v. 7) so as no longer to see Abel — that is, so as no longer to confront his powerlessness to be like him, to be him. This story, which, as we well know of course, 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. The Bible, for its part, valorizes neither the executioner nor the victim; it proposes a difficult path, more solitary no doubt, which, beginning with Seth, must make it possible to escape this ressentiment by prompting each man and woman to seek in himself (in herself), and not elsewhere, that which holds him (her) in proximity to the source of life and which thus allows him to bring his part to life, his part of human life. His part — not the whole part, not the other’s — the part that he (she) alone can give.

Notes