Time and ressentiment

Though it is not always pleasant to live in, the age is interesting to think. Far from being handed over to the tedium of the end of history or to “lukewarm thought,” our societies of late modernity are worked through by astonishingly radical questions. Radical in the sense that they often bear on the foundations of what makes us subjects and of what constitutes us as a society. In a context marked by a pronounced individualization of the relation to meaning and to values, the dilemmas that take shape upon the rubble of the ideological simplifications of the Cold War era demand an impressive level of reflexivity and of psychic energy. It is unfortunate that the spirit of militancy, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the growing rigidity of disciplinary compartmentalizations should so often obscure their quasi-anthropological depth. On the consistency of the answers we may be able to bring to them probably depends the future of democracy as a culture. Our contemporaries’ relation to time constitutes one of these questions. Memory, forgetting, the crisis of the future, the collapse of the living past, presentism, transmission, the heritagization of the past, the tyrannies of urgency and of immediacy, temporal dispossessions of every kind for the past quarter-century — the sum of reflections produced both by the sciences of culture and by those of nature on these problems is impressive. Has one ever seen a society deploy such reflexivity upon its own temporality?

The unthinkable duty to forget

As one sees, the unhappy condition of the man of ressentiment usefully reminds us that forgetting marks not only the victory of nature’s time over men, that of the executioners, or that of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth. It also expresses the faculty of resilience of a subject capable of tearing himself away from his pathos, for if one had to keep the memory of misfortune direct, vivid, and intact, one would live no longer; at best, one would survive. “Forgetting: at once absolute injustice and absolute consolation,” wrote Milan Kundera.¹ Nietzsche, Freud, or Fromm would readily agree on this death-dealing dimension of an excess of recollection, restoring its share of truth to the adage of happy peoples who have no history. In a word, neither societies nor individuals can do without forgetting.

So be it. Does this mean that one can advocate forgetting? In so massive a form, the question hardly makes sense. It is with forgetting as with memory: its uses are diverse.² Neither the duty of memory nor that of forgetting could take the form of the categorical imperative. There are politics of memory as of forgetting, but no free society could demand forgetting.³ The argument is none other than that advanced by Locke in favor of tolerance: forgetting does not depend immediately on the will; to demand it would be to violate the inner forum; it would, finally, be to compel insincerity and to push one to disobey the voice of conscience.

How could one limit the recovery of memory? Tzvetan Todorov rightly recalls that “only totalitarian regimes or the tyrannies of old have attempted to regulate [it].”⁴ Machiavelli harbored no illusions on this point, he who suggested to the Prince that, in republics, “the memory of their ancient liberty neither leaves them nor can leave them at rest: so that the surest way is to destroy them or to dwell in them.”⁵ The “work of mourning”⁶ today belongs to the expressions of barroom philosophy: the one who does not accomplish it at top speed is suspected of putting ill will into “bouncing back.” To what extent does the mourning of a loved one imply the necessity of killing the dead, in Daniel Lagache’s expression? It permits the distancing of the excess of destructive emotion aroused by the memory of the departed, without that memory — any more than the fact of the departure — being thereby effaced from our present. Faced with the abyss of the state of nature, does political amnesty, as a means of defusing civil wars, imply forgetting? Given the bloody historical convulsions that made modern conflictuality in Europe, historical memory — Renan already underscored this⁷ — always risks dividing. The political question begins precisely here: it is that of the historically changing equilibrium of cohesion and diversity. What are its limits, its indices of resistance? The answers vary according to political circumstances. The deepening of pluralism,⁸ linked notably to the recently acquired capacity to overcome the Franco-French wars whose violence one has trouble imagining today, no doubt permits, better than before, that one cultivate further the particular traditions and, more generally, the references to the past — whether it be the Dreyfus Affair, Vichy, the Resistance, Gaullism, or again slavery and its abolition, etc.

Ressentiment is but one of the manners of relating to the past. As Scheler writes, “this rumination, this continual re-living of the feeling, is very different from the pure intellectual recollection of that feeling and of the circumstances that gave rise to it. It is a re-living of the emotion itself, a re-feeling.”⁹ In this sense, to emancipate oneself from the pathological memory of ressentiment, just as the fact of granting forgiveness does, frees one from the “burden that the past makes weigh upon the future,” but in no way implies total forgetting. Considerably nuancing the Nietzschean charge¹⁰ in favor of the therapeutic function of memory, Paul Ricœur often underscored that the forgetting implied by forgiveness is “the forgetting of the debt and not the forgetting of the facts.”¹¹

Passion for vengeance, desire for justice

This is to say that, between several series of contrary requirements of meaning, it is difficult to clear a passage and to find the right tone. When ideologues without nuance get involved, the results are disastrous. People then attack shamelessly “the Holocaust industry,”¹² “the religion of the Shoah,”¹³ “the malefactions of the theme of antisemitism,”¹⁴ etc. The fact remains that, faced with the deviations of instrumentalized memories — let us think of the recent debates on the memory of slavery and the attacks on Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau¹⁵ — it is impossible to avoid reflection on the dark side of the memorial phenomenon, one aspect of which derives notably from ressentiment. Pierre Nora recently expressed his disquiet in the face of the proliferation of representations that summon the past only in terms of “general criminalization” or “generalized victimization.”¹⁶ The problem he raises goes far beyond the question of ressentiment, to which we will return briefly. Nevertheless, victimary temporality — this is one of its possible wanderings — always risks abolishing itself in the interminable brooding over the past, which in turn keeps good company with vengeful passions.

“The desire for vengeance is the most important of the sources of ressentiment,” observed Max Scheler, following Nietzsche.¹⁷ It is not only that the man of ressentiment is a hypermnesiac. More disturbingly, his hateful memory cries out for vengeance. In the life of individuals, as in the history of societies, the accumulation of ressentiments, of grudges, of humiliations constitutes one of the most dangerous explosives there is. Its delayed-action effects are of a frightening power of cruelty: nationalist ressentiments, parodies of justice in revolutionary enthusiasm, hatreds of the bourgeois — the examples of these are all too numerous on the scale of the two centuries past.

Let us pause for a moment on the problem of the vengeful passions, for it allows us to grasp a crucial dimension of ressentiment, giving a glimpse of one of the modalities of exit from it. One may approach it starting from Kant’s Anthropology: “the hatred that results from the wrong one has suffered — that is, the desire for vengeance — is a passion that arises irresistibly from human nature, and, however bad that passion may be, the maxim of reason that rests on the legitimate desire for justice, of which the desire for vengeance constitutes an analogon, comes to mingle with this inclination, thus making of hatred one of the most violent passions and one of those most deeply rooted in the human soul: a passion that, when it appears extinguished, nevertheless always leaves subsisting, secretly, a hateful feeling called rancor, like a fire smoldering beneath the ash.”¹⁸

Cruel and unjust, the passion of vengeance is not foreign to the sentiment of justice. While constituting its heteronomous perversion, the passionate desire for vengeance mingles with the legitimate desire for justice. To follow this trail, it would be possible to go back to the moral sentiment of the man of ressentiment: injustice. Wounded, powerless, chewing over his rancor, he would aspire to take justice into his own hands. In the same vein, Fromm holds that vengeance partakes of magical reparation. “Man seems to take justice into his own hands when God or the secular authorities fail. Everything happens as though, through his passion for vengeance, he raised himself to the role of God and of the avenging angels. The act of vengeance can be his greatest moment, precisely because of this elevation of his own ego.”¹⁹ Beyond a rancor tirelessly brooded over, is not the man of ressentiment, at bottom, an indignant man reduced to silence?²⁰ He melancholically ruminates a loss, but also the bitter memory of injustice. A hypermnesiac, he cannot forget; but perhaps he does not want to either, especially if he is waiting for the damages to be recognized and for justice to be done him. In the absence of justice, faced with the frequent predatory muteness of the one who inflicted the harm on him, he claims his due in the suspended temporality of an awaiting of reparation. “Is it possible,” wondered Y. Yerushalmi, “that the antonym of forgetting is not memory but justice?”²¹

To develop this point would lead us too far. One would have to treat the currently debated question of historical justice²² and to broach the problem of the democratic transition over its long duration. For if the need for justice seems universal, its contents (the just, the unjust, the legitimate, the illegitimate…) vary as a function of cultures. Through the notion of the essential equality of men, democracy — as a making-sense of the world, as a manner of thinking oneself and of thinking others — operates a revolution of practices and of mores. There is no doubt that this must have long appeared fundamentally unjust to the partisans of the old state of things. The great family of anti-modern ressentiments finds here its historical origin. One example will suffice: the egalitarian entry of the Jews into society was perceived as unjust and illegitimate by those who shared a hierarchical conception of the social order founded on natural inequality. It is this refusal of equality, of similitude, and of comparability that is expressed explicitly in the racism of the established groups treated by Norbert Elias’s theory of ressentiment.²³ More broadly, democratic modernity gave birth to inexpiable conflicts between different conceptions of the just and legitimate order, in an interweaving of egalitarian ressentiments (indignation in the face of real inequality) and anti-egalitarian ones (indignation before the egalitarian principle and the practices that follow from it).²⁴

If the perspective traced is pertinent, it follows that to demand forgetting and repression amounts not only to perpetuating the wound but to deepening it further. One would wish for traumatized persons that they manage to forget the injustice and the pain in order to part with them and to live again at last; one would like their suspended time to set itself in motion again. One would, on the other hand, be ill-advised to demand forgetting, in particular if the violence — let us think of the Armenians and the genocide of 1915 — has still not been recognized in its just measure and qualification. In fact, forgetting accompanies the life of individuals as that of societies, for better and for worse. The injunction to forget, for its part, goes well beyond this observation. “One must forget” is often a rebuff addressed to the narrative of misfortune. It ratifies the trauma as destiny. It naturalizes it, in a way, by demanding that one renounce both recognition and reparations, that one accept the forever irreparable character, on the symbolic plane, of injustice. From this point of view, it is not only violent. It is also the most counterproductive there can be. Indeed, Axel Honneth insists greatly on this: one of the specificities of moral wounds resides in the withdrawal or the denial of recognition that affects self-esteem as much as the very capacity to act. Of course, one cannot make it so that the experience did not take place. There is always something irreparable. But by barring communication, one forbids one of the modalities of moving beyond ressentiment, which passes notably through recourse to a “third party” within the framework of an intersubjective process of recognition. Deafness as a response to ressentiment only hinders the path of the reconstruction of the self. For the three dimensions of time to be able to recover their breath, for the past to be the object of a labor inseparably psychic and cultural, intersubjectivity — the one authorized by friendship, by associative or political life, by institutions when they do not function in a death-dealing manner — must be preserved. The existence of milieus of memory is one of its conditions of possibility, especially when there exist, as is often the case, fluid relations of dialogue between the worlds of university knowledge and memorial effervescences.

On a few false dilemmas linked to the real problem of compassion

For two or three decades, our societies seem to grant more and more importance to victims. To analyze the reasons for such a displacement exceeds the framework of this article, so we will confine ourselves to tracing a few avenues of reflection. Where one tried to account for misfortune by turning toward God, then toward history and politics, one seems to orient oneself toward law and justice. If the first half of the European twentieth century foundered in the dogmatic metaphysics of history, the end of the century was melancholic, seized by a post-modern fatigue of history, sobered of revolutionary voluntarism and of its pretension to deliver history. The nineteenth century had inaugurated the words in -ism; the end of the twentieth cultivates the prefix post²⁵ and questions itself on the “ends of…”. At the beginning of the 1970s, Emmanuel Berl observed a process of “desacralization of history.” In another register, Cornelius Castoriadis diagnosed a crisis of historicity.²⁶ The bankruptcy of the totalizing ideologies that Raymond Aron had called secular religions, the crisis of the future of which people began to speak from the 1980s onward, the collapse of the collective utopias — all this contributed to the narrowing of the temporal horizons onto the present.²⁷ Henceforth, one of the most fertile hypotheses consists in suggesting that we are emerging from a cycle begun in the eighteenth century, that of history, in order to enter a cycle dominated by law, human rights becoming “the active focus of meaning of the democracies” and “the organizing norm of collective consciousness.”²⁸ Would the search for fixed points or for absolutes be orienting itself toward the foundations in law, there where generations turned toward history — which would expose us further to the risks of the deviations of the ethnocentrism of the present?²⁹

As Caroline Eliacheff and Daniel Soulez Larivière note, before the 1980s the word victim was part neither of the psychiatric vocabulary nor of the psychoanalytic one.³⁰ In politics, one spoke of the oppressed, the exploited, or dissidents. With reason, they underscore that the victimary current results, in part, from a growing pain of democracy and that it feeds on democratic individualism. Tocqueville had shown, in effect, that the equalization of conditions created the feeling of the similitude of men. Contrary to the aristocratic experience of the world, which limited essential similitude to the members of a caste, democratic equalization extends to all men the notion of the fellow human being. Compassion takes root in this new experience of similitude and of comparability.³¹

It is one thing to criticize the perverse effects of “victimization” in order to limit its scope — by underscoring, for example, the simplism of binary and moralizing visions.³² Such an internal critique permits the work of maturation of democracy by fleshing out the reflection on the uses of compassion. It is another thing to oppose to it “aristocratic” or “Machiavellian” solutions that condemn compassion as such. To want to do battle with compassion would be to have done with the universalist idea of the essential similitude of men, brought back to light with the exit from the inegalitarian and hierarchical order (but which one finds conceptually in monotheism). It would be to break with the feeling of human fraternity, or, to speak like Durkheim at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, with that feeling of horror that “whoever attacks a man’s life, a man’s liberty, a man’s honor” inspires in us.³³

Our debates often remain well below the real stakes, and it is always astonishing to see to what extent we easily succumb to the blackmail of single alternatives. Far from problematizing the world, the spirit of militancy covers over the anthropological questions that work through democratic culture. Binary visions reduce the discussion to false dilemmas: either justice or compassion; either politics with Machiavelli or the softening of mores with Tocqueville; either the preservation of national cohesion or pluralism and diversity; either society or the victims; either political action turned toward the future or the recollection of “the image of the enslaved ancestors” (W. Benjamin) and the desire to render justice to the past; either salutary forgetting turned toward active life or the melancholic passivity, laden with ressentiment, of the victims; either universalism without mediations or relativist particularism.

Contrary to the totalizing visions of the world that perhaps continue to haunt us unbeknownst to ourselves, the life of democratic societies does not unfold in one-dimensionality. So long as they have not lost the sense of liberty, these societies find their breath in the dissociation of the spheres (public/private, political/moral, scientific/ethical, etc.). We know well that compassion is not justice, that emotion is not reason, that human rights are not yet a politics. From Machiavelli to Hannah Arendt, political reflection rightly mistrusts the role of the heart in politics. Compassion is not a political virtue, but a world without compassion, which would no longer permit the victims of historical catastrophes to make their voice heard, would be quite simply unlivable. The real problems begin only from the moment when one confronts the tragic of the political and existential condition, by exploring the ever uncertain and provisional manners of conjugating heterogeneous requirements (political power/respect for the individual, political realism/ethical requirement; universalism/particularity, justice/compassion, etc.).

That there exist practices of intellectual terrorism, attempts to submit history to politicized memories, or to reduce freedom of thought to a few simplistic ideological requirements, is a fact. In what way should the preoccupation with law, the horror of injustice, compassion as an essential component of democratic sensibility, lead necessarily to this? The militancy of memory is not the only one concerned; in a more subtle manner, and yet…, the university is far from escaping it. By conducting discussions on the basis of the deviations that one perceives all too well, one risks losing sight of the benefits (for identity reconstructions but also for knowledge) of the cultural labor of temporalization that has been operating, both in the west and in the east of Europe, over the last decades on the basis of the democratic pluralization of memories. Since the memory of the Shoah constitutes one of the anchoring points of these discussions, one need only read the testimonies of the descendants of survivors to observe that, despite the problems linked to the transgenerational transmission of trauma, the elaboration — at once psychic and cultural — of the past happily issues into something other than the suspended time of ressentiment or that of an exacerbated particularism.³⁴ Like all labor of meaning, taking the paths of science, of literature, of religion, of political militancy…, on the scale of the half-century past, the variety of responses to the heritage of trauma is such that to reduce the whole of this creativity to rumination or to communitarian withdrawal quite simply makes no sense.

On the plane of knowledge, as Pierre Nora recalls in the cited article, the evolution that leads, since the 1970s, toward a historiographical broadening of objects and methods — issuing into the taking into account of minorities and of the oppressed of all kinds — is already an old one. It arose from the encounter between the heritage of a century of genius but cruel, and the deepening of democratic sensibility. The unprecedented destructiveness of the twentieth century weighs in an obsessive manner — the contrary would be astonishing — but the debt toward the dead has also been embodied in the infinite scruple of the historian. Against a shortsighted positivism, it must be repeated that, in the domain of the sciences of culture, the problem never comes from an excess of passion (subjectivity) but from a defect of discipline or of intellectual and argumentative rigor. Far from the abuses of a particularizing memory, subject to the relativism of identity logics, the works of Pierre Vidal-Naquet or of Léon Poliakov, two historians shaken by the war, show that these passions keep good company with knowledge. Vidal-Naquet liked to cite Chateaubriand: “When, in the silence of abjection, one hears resounding only the chain of the slave and the voice of the informer, when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his disgrace, the historian appears, charged with the vengeance of the peoples.” As for Léon Poliakov, who devoted his life to “brushing history against the grain” (W. Benjamin) in order to explore that long unthought underside of European history that was antisemitism, he often said that he had set out from the most particularist question there is: “why did they want to kill me?” But far from the historical meditation on a singular experience, that of the Shoah, enclosing reflection in a victimary egocentrism, it nourished in him a gaze scrutinizing the whole of European history and the type of humanity that issued from it. Witness the universalism of the questioning that characterizes his works on racism, the myths of origins, alterity, or again causality.

On the political plane, the hope of reparative actions for historical injustices³⁵ runs up against inextricable difficulties. However, these actions are not turned solely toward the past. “Remembrance is but the reverse side of hope,” wrote Georges Gusdorf. The preoccupation with justice points toward the idea of a “decent society,” in Avishai Margalit’s expression, which often remains infra-political but which does indeed sketch a project. Would the notion of crime against humanity be the negative compass for orienting oneself in the twenty-first century? Such a reference, absolutized in the political order, raises many questions and disquiets. Is it more dangerous to orient oneself as a function of the worst than to act in the utopian conviction of realizing the best? One of the most interesting questions, to which the years to come will bring their answer, is to know whether the memorial effervescences will remain cloistered in the backward-looking universe of their particular identities, or whether a dialogue can develop between them, giving rise to the emergence of a sphere of intersubjectivity knotted around a project of being together. Far from all denial, rising from the singularity of the experiences of the past toward the universality of common projects, such a cultural trajectory would surely assure the moving beyond of ressentiments.

The criminalization of the past, evoked by Nora, poses a more general problem that we will content ourselves with raising in conclusion. One could nuance the disquiet of his diagnosis by showing that the renewed interest taken in the Righteous, in affinity with the contemporary demand for ethics, attests that the will to render justice to the past does not lead solely to reconstructing the past as blackness or anti-value. What remains troubling — a terrible irony of the tormented history of the twentieth century — is that the names of the tyrants are not effaced “forever and ever.” Quite the contrary: as symbol or caricature, they seem far more alive in European consciousnesses than the great names of culture. Odious characters, bureaucrats without soul or visions, win their immortality; the ethical or cultural “heroes” are known only to specialists. Everyone has heard of Papon and of Eichmann, a hollow and uninteresting character. Who keeps present to mind the memory of Aristides de Sousa Mendes and Chiune Sugihara? If the thing is quite understandable, the problem remains: to force the line, what does it mean for a society to cultivate morbid representations while leaving the sources of identification and of life fallow? What does it mean for a culture to keep alive the repulsive images of the murderers, abandoning to the museums the models of exemplarity and of positive identification that save faith in man and that allow us to hope that unreason and cynicism, nihilism and brute force, will not have the last words?

Notes