Ressentiment
The man of ressentiment experiences every being and object as an offence in exact proportion to its effect on him. Beauty and goodness are, for him, necessarily as outrageous as any pain or misfortune that he experiences.
"One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything - everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound".
The man of ressentiment in himself is a being full of pain: the sclerosis or hardening of his consciousness, the rapidity with which every excitation sets and freezes within him, the weight of the traces that invade him are so many cruel sufferings.
And, more deeply, the memory of traces is full of hatred in itself and by itself. It is venomous and depreciative because it blames the object in order to compensate for its own inability to escape from the traces of the corresponding excitation. This is why ressentiment’s revenge, even when it is realised, remains "spiritual", imaginary and symbolic in principle.
This essential link between revenge and memory resembles the Freudian anal-sadistic complex. Nietzsche himself presents memory as an unfinished digestion and the type of ressentiment as an anal type.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.116
[...] we must beware of those who condemn themselves before that which is good or beautiful, claiming not to understand, not to be worthy: their modesty is frightening.
What hatred of beauty is hidden in their declarations of inferiority. Hating all that is experienced as lovable or admirable, diminishing by buffoonery or base interpretations, seeing traps to be avoided in all things: always saying, "please don't engage me in a battle of wits".
What is most striking in the man of ressentiment is not his nastiness but his disgusting malevolence, his capacity for disparagement. Nothing can resist it. He does not even respect his friends or even his enemies. He does not even respect misfortune or its causes.
Think of the Trojans who, in Helen, respected and admired the cause of their own misfortune. But the man of ressentiment must turn misfortune into something mediocre, he must recriminate and distribute blame: look at his inclination to play down the value of causes, to make misfortune "someone's fault".
By contrast, the aristocrat's respect for the causes of misfortune goes together with an ability to take his own misfortunes seriously. The way in which the slave takes his misfortunes seriously shows a difficult digestion and a base way of thinking which is incapable of feeling respect.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.117
In ressentiment happiness "appears essentially as a narcotic drug, rest, peace, 'sabbath', slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively".
The man of ressentiment does not know how to and does not want to love, but wants to be loved. He wants to be loved, fed, watered, caressed and put to sleep. He is the impotent, the dyspeptic, the frigid, the insomniac, the slave.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.117-18
The man of ressentiment is the man of profit and gain.
Moreover, ressentiment could only be imposed on the world through the triumph of the principle of gain, by making profit not only a desire and a way of thinking but an economic, social and theological system, a complete system, a divine mechanism.
Morality in itself conceals the utilitarian standpoint; but utilitarianism conceals the standpoint of the passive third party, the triumphant standpoint of a slave who intervenes between masters.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.118
The imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual accusation. All this replaces aggression.
Here we rediscover the dreadful feminine power of ressentiment: it is not content to denounce crimes and criminals, it wants sinners, people who are responsible.
We can guess what the creature of ressentiment wants: he wants others to be evil, he needs others to be evil in order to be able to consider himself good. You are evil, therefore I am good; this is the slave's fundamental formula, it expresses the main point of ressentiment from the typological point of view, it summarises and brings together all the preceding characteristics.
This formula must be compared with that of the master: I am good, therefore you are evil. The difference between the two measures the revolt of the slave and his triumph: "This inversion of the value-positing eye . . . is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile world". The slave needs to set the other up as evil from the outset.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.118-19
We ask: who is it that begins by saying: "I am good"? It is certainly not the one who compares himself to others, nor the one who compares his actions and his works to superior and transcendent values [...] The one who says: "I am good", does not wait to be called good. He refers to himself in this way, he names himself and describes himself thus to the extent that he acts, affirms and enjoys."
He who affirms and acts is at the same time the one who is: "The root of the word coined for this, esthlos signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true". "He knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification.
[...] the good "only looks for its antithesis in order to affirm itself with more joy". This is the status of aggression: it is the negative, but the negative as the conclusion of positive premises, the negative as the product of activity, the negative as the consequence of the power of affirming.
[For the slave] The negative becomes "the original idea, the beginning, the act par excellence". The slave must have premises of reaction and negation, of ressentiment and nihilism, in order to obtain an apparently positive conclusion. Even so, it only appears to be positive.
This is why Nietzsche insists on distinguishing ressentiment and aggression: they differ in nature. The man of ressentiment needs to conceive of a non-ego, then to oppose himself to this non-ego in order finally to posit himself as self. This is the strange syllogism of the slave: he needs two negations in order to produce an appearance of affirmation.
We already sense the form in which the syllogism of the slave has been so successful in philosophy: the dialectic. The dialectic, as the ideology of ressentiment.
"You are evil, therefore I am good." In this formula it is the slave who speaks [...]They begin by positing the other as evil. He who called himself good is the one who is now called evil.
This evil one is the one who acts, who does not hold himself back from acting, who does not therefore consider action from the point of view of the consequences that it will have for third parties.
And the one who is good is now the one who holds himself back from acting: he is good just because he refers all actions to the standpoint of the one who does not act, to the standpoint of the one who experiences the consequences, or better still to the more subtle standpoint of a divine third party who scrutinises the intentions of the one who acts.
"And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble and just".
This is how good and evil are born: ethical determination, that of good and bad, gives way to moral judgment. The good of ethics has become the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality. Good and evil are not the good and the bad but, on the contrary, the exchange, the inversion, the reversal of their determination.
Good and evil are new values, but how strangely these values are created! They are created by reversing good and bad. They are not created by acting but by holding back from acting, not by affirming, but by beginning with denial. This is why they are called un-created, divine, transcendent, superior to life. But think of what these values hide, of their mode of creation. They hide an extraordinary hatred, a hatred for life, a hatred for all that is active and affirmative in life.
They have invented the good wretch, the good weakling: there is no better revenge against the strong and happy.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.119-22
Related posts:
Remembering / Forgetting
A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment. This active super-conscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting.
Psychology's mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character.
Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as "no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression", "an apparatus of absorption", "a plastic, regenerative and curative force."
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113
[...] there are two simultaneous processes: reaction becomes something acted because it takes conscious excitation as its object and reaction to traces remains in the unconscious, imperceptible.
Let us suppose that there is a lapse in the faculty of forgetting: it is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened, excitation tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious and conversely, reaction to traces rises into consciousness and overruns it.
We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action, reaction prevails over action.
Even the functional decay of the faculty of forgetting derives from the fact that it no longer finds in one kind of reactive forces the energy necessary to repress the other kind and to renew consciousness.
We rediscover the definition of ressentiment: ressentiment is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to be acted: a formula which defines sickness in general. Nietzsche is not simply saying that ressentiment is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment.
The man of ressentiment is characterised by the invasion of consciousness by mnemonic traces, the ascent of memory into consciousness itself.
[...] when reactive forces prevail over active forces in this way they themselves form a type. We can see that the principal symptom of this type is a prodigious memory. Nietzsche stresses this incapacity to forget anything, this faculty of forgetting nothing and its profoundly reactive nature [...]
As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not "react": his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.113-15
The type of the master (the active type) is defined in terms of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions.
The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment; several characteristics which determine this second type follow from this.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.117
Related posts:
The Eternal Return
What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes. "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being - high point of the meditation".
It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity.
In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.48
Related posts:
The Ascetic Ideal
The will to nothingness from the beginning, inspires all the values that are called "superior" to life.
This is Schopenhauer's greatest error: he believed that the will is denied in all values superior to life. In fact, it is not the will which is denied in superior values, it is the superior values that are related to a will to deny, to annihilate life.
Thus interpretation makes its discoveries by excavating three layers: knowledge, morality and religion; the true, the good and the divine as values superior to life. All three are connected: the ascetic ideal is the third moment, but also the sense and value of the other two moments.
Morality is the continuation of religion but by other means; knowledge is the continuation of morality and religion but by other means. The ascetic ideal is everywhere, but its means change, they are no longer the same reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.97-8
[...] the ascetic ideal expresses the will which makes reactive forces triumph.
The sense of the ascetic ideal is thus as follows: to express the affinity of reactive forces with nihilism, to express nihilism as the "motor" of reactive forces.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.144-5
Related posts:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)