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Showing posts from December 6, 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. F or 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.

On Jean Améry's Resentment 1

  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, 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 programs urging 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