Saturday, December 12, 2020

Ressentiment

 


Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.

For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions available, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to building programs meant to bring about reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.
"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”

This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.

You have seen Hanns Chaim Maier, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Améry and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under a name conceived in anger that renounced his Austrian-German provenance, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. He would be Jonah, waiting for Nineveh to be destroyed. Unlike Jonah, though, he recognized, gradually, that neither destruction nor true repentance would come for Nineveh. By the nineteen-sixties, it was clear that destruction, revenge, nor any cosmic equaling of the balance was going to happen.

In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’

Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.

As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.
Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves objects of horror for the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”

However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.

This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.
This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?

2.

Tact – or Takt in German – goes back to the Latin word tangere, touch. The OED traces the “figurative” sense of “discrimination” back to touch as well, a “keen faculty of perception” given by the fingers, which in turn gives us, as well, a sense for what is fitting and proper. The OED leads us to that moment in the eighteenth century where, under the Shaftesbury-ian impulse, aesthetics is conflated with taste. Fingers, the tongue, the skin, with this we release the flavors of the world, we stroke, we feel in the dark. The blind  man in Diderot’s Letters on the Blind could read the world by its wrinkles and cracks. By this we are guided.

 

By these senses, too, the torturer is guided. Our touch, our skin, our sensual discriminations, by these things he gains access to our pain, to that loss of self and self worth that comes with the administration of pangs, of beatings, of cutting, of humiliations. The tortured find that they can’t bear it.

 Améry’s essay warns the reader, from the outset, that the question of tact and the theft of tact is going to operate as a sort of timing device here, giving the essay the rhythm of, say, the swinging of a whip, interrupting the higher flights of analysis and synthesis, with personal references to the torture of having his arms twisted high above his back, or to the Flemish SS officer Wajs beating him with a whip, or a shovel handle, or to the Auschwitz officer Bogen, who was tried in 1958 after controversially being “de-nazified”, for the murders and tortures associated with the Bogen swing: an iron bar on cables across which a person would be bent and beaten with crowbars, the force of the beating cause the bar to swing up and back, until only a human jelly remained.

 In these juxtapositions, what surface is being torn? Perhaps that surface that lies, infinitesimally thin, between the reader and the page.

 Ressentiment is not formally connected with the destruction of tact in the construction of the former in the essay, but by association. It is by association that Améry builds his vindication of the resentful instance, leading us to a conclusion that condemns the happy forgetfulness on which the post-war liberal society has been built.

 “At bottom, the fears of Scheler and Nietzsche were not justified. Our slave morality will not triumph. Ressentiments, the emotional source of every authentic morality, which will always be a morality for the oppressed – they have little or no chance to poison the victors in their evil works.”

 In this conclusion, we spot an untruth. That untruth takes the “strong”, the victors, to be immune from their own sense of grievance. How could the man at the handle end of the whip be resentful? This, I think, is a casualty of the radical inequality that Améry establishes between the perpetrator and the victim. When Améry remarks that the German people who he encountered in his transits from camp to camp in 1945 were stony faced about the cadavers they saw and more than willing to gleefully appropriate the “Jew coats” that were stripped off the prisoners, these were the ‘strong’ in a very limited sense.  The whole consciousness of these complacent supporters of murder and torture on an industrial scale was moved by ressentiment, as well. The emotional source of every authentic morality may, as well, be the emotional source of every authentic crime. By projecting backwards into ressentiment the desire to re-establish tact – a common, a communistic touch – its power and extent are, I think, illogically limited.  

My objection stems, in fact, from Améry’s insight into the heart of ressentiment – its struggle against “natural time”.  For Améry, the struggle is about reversing time and its effects, not in order to produce some alternative past in which one assassinates Hitler or prevents the disaster of 1933, but, rather, to produce a permanent state of revulsion against the horror of the Camps, one that perfectly reproduces the first effect of the horror: permanently wounding time.  This seems to me consistent, as well, with the ideology, the emotional style, of the “victors”. They do not cynically evoke wounds that they do not feel – they, instead, feel them, according to all historical evidence.  The idea that ressentiment does not have to be the only emotional source of authentic morality – that instead revolution itself, the slave’s revolt, can be that source – is put to one side by Améry as an ultimately non-serious dream, even an insult to the tortured.

 

But what an extravagant daydream I have let myself fall into! I Didn’t I see passengers at the train station in 1945 turn pale in anger in the face of the piled up corpses of my comrades and turn threateningly on our and their  torturers?  Didn’t I see, thanks to my ressentiment and, through the effect of its traces, thanks to the German cleansing, time turn backwards?  Wasn’t it a German man who seized the shovel, that instrument of beating, from the SS man Wajs? Didn’t a German woman come forward and and car for the wounds of those who were tortured, broken and crazed? What didn’t I see in the unrestrained past, in the past turned backwards into the future, the forever overcome past!   

Nothing of the sort happened, I know, in spite of all the honorable efforts of the German intellectuals, who really wanted in the end to be what the others held them to be: rootless. All intelligible signs indicate, that natural time will refuse the demands of our ressentiment and  will finally extinguish it. The great revolution? Germany will not make up for it, and our resentment will come up empty.“

This is a powerful indictment. And yet, it doesn’t lead to any act of further solidarity. If ressentiment were really the emotional source of the slave revolt, shouldn’t that morality recognize other victims? It is here where I would like to lack tact as a reader. For it seems that  out of the moral uniqueness of victimhood, its hell, Améry wants to preserve the uniqueness of the concentration camps, of the perpetrators. He does not want to share with colonial peoples, or the Armenians, or anybody,  the status of the ultimate victim – for this would take away the moral uniqueness of his victimhood, would force him to share the pain he has shored for himself and his comrades alone.  This would lead him out of the unique opposition between German culture and German barbarism that is one of the motifs of the new liberal order, the way in which the slogan “never again” reduced to - never the Germans again.

“But the particularity of a highly civilized people with reliable organizations and almost scientific precision achieving the murder of millions will become regrettable, and even come to be found in no ways unique, proximate to the murdering expulsion of the Armenians by the Turks or the horrifying violence of the French colonial forces. Everything will be buried in a summary “century of Barbarism”. As we, incorrigibly refusing to learn, unreconcilable, historically hostile reactionaries in the literal sense, stand there, the victims, as survivors we will all finally seem to represent merely the cost of doing business.”

This is brilliant. Yet in the end, I, a reader who can only bow to those who were tortured at Auschwitz, or in Turkey, or Algeria, must reply in an untactful way from out of a life in which none of the pains I have ever experienced have come close to those I have read about. For the hoarding of victim status, the ressentiment that excludes the Armenian and Algerian victims, leads not to the authentic moral values of the slave morality, as Amery says, but to the use of ressentiment for all the wrong purposes. The victim comes not to prevent future victims, but to classify who and who is not the most victimized. A bureaucracy that can only lead to disaster.
I don't like where Amery's essay ends up. It reminded me of the onion chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In this chapter, Alyosha goes to visit Grushenka, Dmitri's mistress. She tells him a story:

'Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I'll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day."

 

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