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
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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
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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
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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
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Neutral
[...] it is assumed in the major premise that the bird of prey is able to not manifest its force, that it can hold back from its effects and separate itself from what it can do: it is evil because it does not hold itself back.
It is therefore assumed that one and the same force is effectively held back in the virtuous lamb but given free rein in the evil bird of prey. Since the strong could prevent themselves from acting, the weak could act if they did not prevent themselves.
Here we have the foundation of the paralogism of ressentiment: the fiction of a force separated from what it can do.
It is thanks to this fiction that reactive forces triumph. It is not sufficient for them to hold back from activity: they must also reverse the relation of forces, they must oppose themselves to active forces and represent themselves as superior. The process of accusation in ressentiment fulfills this task: reactive forces "project" an abstract and neutralised image of force; such a force separated from its effects will be blameworthy if it acts, deserving, on the contrary, if it does not.
[...] force, which has been divided in this way, is projected into a substrate, into a subject which is free to manifest it or not. Force is neutralised, it is made the act of a subject which could just as easily not act.
Nietzsche constantly exposes "the subject" as a fiction or a grammatical function. All subjects - the Epicureans' atom, Descartes' substance or Kant's thing-in-itself - are the projection of "little imaginery incubuses".
[...] the force thus neutralised is moralised. For, if it is assumed that a force is able to not manifest the force that it "has", it is no more absurd to assume, conversely, that a force could manifest the force that it "has not".
"Just as if the weakness of the weak - that is to say their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality - were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act"
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.123-4
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Bad Conscience
Responsibility - Irresponsibility
Tyrrhic - Odinic
Reactive - Active
The imputation of wrongs and responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the ressentiment - this is the pious interpretation of existence.
"It's your fault, it's your fault", until the accused, in turn, says, "it's my fault" and the desolated world resounds with all these moans and their echoes. "Everywhere where responsibilities have been sought it is the instinct of revenge that has sought them [...]”
Nietzsche does not see ressentiment (it's your fault) and bad conscience (it's my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) as simple psychological events but rather as the fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general.
Nietzsche takes on the tasks of providing a new ideal, a new interpretation and another way of thinking. "To give irresponsibility its positive sense", "I wished to conquer the feeling of a full irresponsibility, to make myself independent of praise and blame, of present and past".
Irresponsibility - Nietzsche's most noble and beautiful secret.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.21
For a long time we have only been able to think in terms of ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous.
We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price.
There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion.
Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.35
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Reactive / Active
Reactive - Active
Tyrrhic - Odinic
What Nietzsche calls weak or slavish is not the least strong but that which, whatever its strength, is separated from what it can do.
The least strong is as strong as the strong if he goes to the limit, because the cunning, the subtelty, the wit and even the charm by which he makes up for his lesser strength are part of this strength so that it is no longer the least.
Thus reactive force is: 1) utilitarian force of adaptation and partial limitation; 2) force which separates active force from what it can do, which denies active force (triumph of the weak or the slaves); 3) force separated from what it can do, which denies or turns against itself (reign of the weak or of slaves).
And, analogously, active force is: 1) plastic, dominant and subjugating force; 2) force which goes to the limit of what it can do; 3) force which affirms its difference, which makes its difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.61
Inferior forces are defined as reactive; they lose nothing of their force, of their quantity of force, they exercise it by securing mechanical means and final ends, by fulfilling the conditions of life and the functions and tasks of conversation, adaptation and utility.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.40
The reactive is a primordial quality of force but one which can only be interpreted as such in relation to and on the basis of the active.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.42
Thought does not need a method but a paideia, a formation, a culture. Method in general is a means by which we avoid going to a particular place, or by which we maintain the option of escaping from it (the thread of the labyrinth).
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.110
Everything that separates a force from what it can do he calls law. Law, in this sense, expresses the triumph of the weak over the strong. Nietzsche adds: the triumph of reaction over action.
[...] hierarchy also designates the triumph of reactive forces, the contagion of reactive forces and the complex organisation which results - where the weak have conquered, where the strong are contaminated, where the slave who has not stopped being a slave prevails over the master who has stopped being one: the reign of law and of virtue.
We make Church, morality and State the masters or keepers of all hierarchy. We have the hierarchy that we deserve, we who are essentially reactive, we who take the triumphs of reaction for a transformation of action and slaves for new masters - we who only recognise hierarchy back to front.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.58, 60-1
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Artist-Poet-Shaman-Philosopher
[...] philosophy itself does not throw off its ascetic mask as it grows up: in a way it must believe in this mask, it can only conquer its mask by giving it a new sense which finally expresses its true anti-religious force.
The people are certainly not always wrong: they have a foreboding of the essence of the philosopher, his anti-wisdom, his immoralism, his conception of friendship. Humility, poverty, chastity - we can guess the sense that these wise and ascetic values take on when they are revived by philosophy, by a new force.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.5-6
Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy.
Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? [...] turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion.
Philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification. And we should not be too hasty in proclaiming philosophy's failure in this respect. Great as they are, stupidity and baseness would be still greater if there did not remain some philosophy which always prevents them from going as far as they would wish, which forbids them — if only by yea-saying — from being as stupid and base as they would wish. They are forbidden certain excesses, but only by philosophy.
If philosophy's critical task is not actively taken up in every epoch philosophy dies and with it die the images of the philosopher and the free man.
It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and the deepest truths live and rise up. The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not temperate zones or the moral, methodical or moderate man.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.106-7, 110
The species activity of culture has a final aim: to form the artist, the philosopher. All its selective violence serves this end, "I have to do with a class of men whose teleological conceptions extend further than the well-being of a State".
The principal cultural activities of Churches and States form in fact the long martyrology of culture itself. When a State encourages culture "it only encourages it in order to be encouraged itself, and it never conceives that there is an aim superior to its own good and existence".
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.109
Stupidity and baseness are always those of our own time, of our contemporaries, our stupidity and baseness. Unlike the atemporal concept of error, baseness is inseparable from time, that is from this rapture of the present, from this present condition in which it is incarnated and in which it moves. This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world.
Thinking actively is "acting in a non-present fashion, therefore against time and even on time, in favour (I hope) of a time to come"
There is no eternal or historical philosophy. Eternity, like the historicity of philosophy amounts to this: philosophy always untimely, untimely at every epoch.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.107
Related posts:
Criticality
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