Political culture as a culture of oblivion

Abstract

If dealing with our past is a significant segment of every culture then politics could be defined as directing our memory. Starting with Nietzsche's notion of ressentiment and Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, this article aims to show the ways and conditions under which politics articulates the goals of a culture. A healthy, active, productive culture shapes a sovereign and self-conscious citizen, a free individual who can react. The culture of ressentiment, on the contrary, creates a community of vassals who, according to the Nietzsche-Deleuzian formula, do not activate their reaction, all in the name of a petrified past. To the petrified and instrumentalized memory Nietzsche opposes the power of forgetting as a certain cure.