On Resentment andRessentiment

Abstract

Whereas the anthropology of morality and ethics has been mostly focused on values and actions oriented toward the good and the right, and has generally assumed that its object could be separated from the political, the purpose of this article is to apprehend reactive attitudes in response to an injury or an injustice, therefore displacing these common presumptions. A distinction based on ethnographical findings is proposed between two such attitudes. On the one hand, ressentiment, in the Nietzschean lineage, corresponds to a condition related to a past of oppression and domination: it is exemplified through the South African blacks in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the AIDS controversies. On the other hand, resentment, in the Smithian tradition, amounts to a situation in which a social position generates frustration and acrimony: it is illustrated via the French policing of poor neighborhoods and immigrant populations in the context of the 2005 riots. Ressentiment as historical alienation and resentment as ideological alienation characterize two forms of moral sentiments and modes of political subjectivation. Their study, in reference to Jean Améry’s work on survivors of the Nazi regime, contributes to an anthropology of what Primo Levi called “grey zones.”