RESSENTIMENT IN THE POSTCOLONY

Abstract

In this paper I track the deployment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment by three major thinkers in postcolonial theory, namely Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Achille Mbembe. My argument is that while postcolonial theory has used ressentiment in a captivating way, which may have the potential for accounting for how contemporary moral culture conditions racism, nativism and xenophobia, the deployment remains incoherent. The postcolonial deployment of ressentiment begins with an incoherent reading of Nietzsche by Fanon, a mistake which is creatively appropriated by Said and Mbembe. As ressentiment travels into the postcolony Nietzsche’s insights are discarded and the term is transformed through Hegelian and psychoanalytic schematics that take morality to be a universal and prescriptive code, the very problem that Nietzsche was attempting to overcome. For Fanon, ressentiment explains how colonial projection or the racial gaze is internalized by the colonized subject to produce a relation of self-hate. Said and Mbembe consequently take up the term to explain how colonial moral schemas are internalized and inverted to produce a reactive relation to the other on the basis of a good/evil moral schema. The solution for all three thinkers is an overcoming of Manichean racism through inculcating a universal set of values based on reciprocal recognition. Although they change the meaning of the term, these thinkers still claim to be using the term as originally configured by Nietzsche. Moreover, they also fail to indicate how ressentiment can be overcome or lead to recognition by providing a transitional space between markedly different ontologies of natural and social life. I argue that the deployment of ressentiment neither marks a Nietzschean turn nor a coherent transformation for problems in the postcolony.

Keywords:

• ressentiment
• Manichean racism
• recognition
• nativism
• victimization

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This research paper was made possible by a doctoral scholarship provided by the National Institute of the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

1 All citations of Nietzsche’s texts follow the referencing method prescribed by the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. After the abbreviated text title, the number cited refers to an aphorism in the text, not the page number. For all other citations, I have followed the MLA referencing method prescribed by Angelaki.