Juvenescence - Robert Pogue Harrison
Yes-Saying and No-Saying
I have taken up Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s ‘psychological problem’ of Yes-saying and No-saying in recent weeks particularly as the toxicity of our culture appears to accelerate in the wake of the inauguration. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche lays out the challenge in stark clarity: ‘The psychological problem with the Zarathustra-type is how someone who says No to everything to an inordinate degree, does No to everything to which hitherto everyone said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit’. [1]
In other words, how can I prevent my constant need to say No to this toxicity from becoming the deep and prolonged embrace of ressentiment? To do so would be to replay Nietzsche’s Eternally Recurring cycle of Western nihilism and its paroxysms of dormant and active vengeance.
This is the problem of our age, it seems to me, at least for someone of my age who grew up with a relative stability of institutions. [2] This may not be the problem of others of this age, especially those who are chronologically younger than me. They cannot possibly share the same age as me with respect to the relative stability of institutions. They consume different information and likely have very different expectations about what politics owes to the people. For me, the current situation is deeply alien and alienating. For those of another age, perhaps they feel quite at ease, or maybe indifferent altogether.
In Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, Robert Pogue Harrison helps me find a way of navigating this ‘psychological problem of the Zarathustra type’ that Nietzsche so powerfully diagnosed for us in his untimely way. I’d like to use this essay to undertake this navigation. It will be an exercise and experience of ‘great health’ as Nietzsche formulated it in The Gay Science, which he also quoted in full in that very section of Ecce Homo that I started with.
My focus will be on the experience of heterochrony. Like other essays I’ve posted on particular books, this will not be a review, which always seems to require a more or less juridical stance to the work under observation. Of course I don’t go in for that kind of monologue here. Rather, I want to work through the power of heterochrony and its relation to vengeance more thoroughly than I have in other posts. In this way, this essay is more inspired by Juvenescence than a summary of it. There are plenty of LLM’s that will provide good summaries.
Ressentiment and Time
In his 1953 lectures on ‘Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’, Heidegger argued that at the heart of Eternal Recurrence is the problem of man’s redemption from ‘the spirit of revenge’. One of Nietzsche’s innovations was to connect our Western experience of time with ressentiment — our weakened desire for revenge and the pervasive conditioning of time that results from it. To redeem mankind from this spirit requires Zarathustra to show us how to ‘overcome our ill-will toward time’. [3]
For Heidegger, this ill-will is bound up with the problem of Being and Time. Our desire for Being is a desire for overcoming Time. The Da (there) of Dasien constructs the adventure of Being as a quest for a permanent state of Being (Sein). Harrison has a wonderful phrase for this in Juvenescence: ‘the constant finishing action of time’ (3). This desire for Being to permanently overcome Time is at the heart of the Western onto-theological adventure of Being, which constructs Time as a linear quest to achieve permanent Being.
Heidegger found in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the sustained attempt to show how this ill-will toward time is the very mode of Being that must be overcome if humanity is to be redeemed from the spirt of revenge, which (quoting Zarathustra) ‘up to now that was man’s best reflection; and whenever there was suffering, there also had to be punishment.’ [4]
Heidegger’s reading of Zarathustra as redemption from revenge highlights the importance of time to Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment. I’ve argued in other posts that ressentiment must be understood temporally, not spatially. It is a conditioning of time that can, if prolonged, add up to ‘the man of ressentiment’ as a ‘psychological type’. With Heidegger’s analysis we get a much more deeply embedded version of ressentiment in time itself as an ‘ill will toward time’.
Given the importance of this ill-will toward time, it is no wonder that both Nietzsche and Heidegger lay the problem of vengeance at the doorstep of Christianity. Here’s how the story goes: as the immanent eschatological claims of an itinerant Apocalyptic Jew became (or aged into) the institutions of a formalized religion, the dominant experience of time in the Western world became fundamentally linear and finite — i.e., time is stretched between Genesis and Apocalypse.
This linear-finitude makes time monochronic. Everything and everyone is subsumed into this temporality that is marching toward a total and complete end. The fact that this end is also a totalizing judgment on all of creation means that there is no escape and that all meaning is tied to this temporality focused on the eventual judgment of man by his Creator. [5]
There was a problem, however, with this eschatological time line. As this understanding of time aged and the eschaton appeared to be delayed, time changed once again. Time aged its way into something else: it became an existential problem for humanity. Let’s put it this way: if time is about to come to end at any moment — ‘like a thief in the night’ — what are we to do in the ‘meanwhile’? When the kingdom of God (basilea tou Theo) is near at hand (engiken), as Jesus says in his first recorded words in our earliest Gospel, then the meanwhile is experienced as immanent kairos, not as streched out chronos. Mark 1:15 uses kairos as Jesus’ third spoken word: ‘Peplerotai ho kairos’ (‘The time is fulfilled’).
The ‘meanwhile’ of the kairos announced in Mark 1:15 has a much different meaning in the first decades after the death of Jesus than it would even a generation later. Christianity dealt with this problem of the expanding meanwhile by relentlessly imposing circularity within this eschatological linearity. There is historical evidence for this. As Christianity became the Empire’s official religion, far from abolishing ‘pagan’ rituals, like Kalends, it took them over and remade them to serve Christian purposes. It also filled the calendar with many new rituals. In doing so, institutional Christianity imposed many circularities within linear time — i.e., the liturgical calendar. [6]
Heterochrony thus reappears as the mixture of cyclical and finite-linear time. The more permanent the meanwhile appears to be, the more this heterochony becomes experientially necessary. As Christianity ages, it creates the instruments of its own staying power — the Nicene Creed, liturgies, permeant churches, and a professionalized priesthood. Augustine’s City of God becomes the first full expression of the need for a permanent and stable institution for an indefinitely long meanwhile. [7]
Time as a Function of Age
We have just experienced a good example of Harrison’s differentiation of time and age. Because time is a phenomenon just like any other in the universe, it ages. Therefore, we should start to see ‘time as a function of age’ and not the other way around (Juvenescence, page 1). Christianity’s experience of linear-finite time doesn’t age so well when the eschaton doesn’t happen. Consequently, humanity needs to start making itself at home in the meanwhile. The intensity of kairos is giving way to the monotony of chronos as the dominant understanding and experience of time.
Because of its legacy of the desired end of time as the reward of salvation, the ill-will toward time lingers as time ages. Ressentiment can be understood, with Heidegger, as the lingering desire for time to die and eternal salvation to arrive. Time, redemption, and eternity are bound together such that redemption can only be understood as a permanent state of Being that seeks an end to time.
This is a complex story, and I am not doing it justice with such a short treatment. For my purposes it illustrates how time and institutions are deeply bound together. To descend into this history in the West, as Nietzsche and Heidegger did, is to begin to experience the power of heterochrony and to think of time as a function of age.
Heterochrony, Democracy, Sophia
Time has always been crucial to humanity’s institutions and is not a Christian innovation. When Cleisthenes instituted his democratic reforms in late sixth-century Athens, remaking time was essential to the endeavor. A new ten-month calendar structured the coming and going of members of the Council of 500. The calendar sought to guarantee the presence in the city of 50 Council members at all times. The prytanes, as the members were called, each had to commit to being in Athens during one of these segments of the calendar. [8]
The imposition of measurable time is always the control of motions and therefore a function of how those motions age.
This calendar did not supplant or replace the existing lunar calendar of festivals and celebrations for the gods. It simply ran alongside it, thus emphasizing the human capacity to consciously and intentionally experience multiple temporalities — i.e., heterochrony. Many have argued that the lack of strong institutions uniting the Greek poleis into a collective political body was a key ingredient in the emergence of democratic reforms of the sixth century BCE. Christian Meier puts it succinctly:
Gradually, politics moved into the foreground. The need to find institutional ways to prevent uprisings, conflict, and civil war became more urgent. As these efforts showed success, there was a demand for more. All of Greece became a field of experimentation. What happened in one place was watched in another; similar rules required different adaptations; where some had failed others tried to do better. (Athens, 147)
Thus the Greek’s political innovation and Cleisthenes’ heterochronic time emerged as direct responses to the problem of vengeance and to the lack of strong institutions to manage it.
One could argue, and many have including Meier, that the Greek practice and concept of sophia (wisdom) and its concerns with dike (justice) are part and parcel of this political innovation. The upshot is this: in the Greek origins of sophia, dike, and politea we find a profound absence of existing institutions as the home and creator for these values. In the absence of stable institutions that impose temporality on a geographically broad and diverse population, the Greeks seemed to have had a profound capacity to experience heterochrony consciously and deliberately. [9]
The Greeks in this way demonstrate to us the power of a heterochronic experience with respect to dealing with vengeance. We lose something vital in our thinking if we lose this connection.
Renewal or Destruction?
While ‘revenge’ and ‘vengeance’ aren’t explicitly central to Juvenescence, the problem of institutional destruction certainly is. Insofar as our democratic and Modern institutions were under pressure in 2014 — which seems to be coming to fruition in 2025 — our experience of time is undergoing destruction. Also insofar as those institutions can trace their lineage back to Solon and Cleisthenes through the Federalists, we ought not lose our respect for their origins in sophia and dike as means to mitigating the problem of widespread vengeance in a population lacking functional institutions.
We are living through a bizarre mixture of temporalities that appears incapable of imagining anything other than, on the one side, the recovery of a lost greatness (MAGA) and, on the other, desperately holding onto traditional constituencies that are moving on. The current culture — exemplified by the rigorous sorting activity of social media — asks us to take sides. What side am I to take if one of them seems hell-bent on the destruction of the welfare state while the other seems unable and/or unwilling to modernize it?
The problem is this: we don’t know where all this is leading. It is entirely possible that the utter devastation of our ossified institutions is necessary because the more ‘progressive’ party has been unsuccessful (and arguably uninterested) in doing anything other than merely ‘administering’ the institutions. If we treat the situation as driven by a fixed and firm underlying logic of history, we risk becoming Zarathustra’s fool staring at a circular time from its outside, making us mere spectators of a fate we believe is already written.
“You spirit of gravity!” I said angrily. “Do not make it too easy on yourself! Or I shall leave you crouching here where you crouch, lame foot — and I bore you this high! (‘On the Vision and the Riddle’, Adrien del Caro trans. 126)
Stepping into Augenblick where the line of the future and the line of the past collide in an Eternally Recurring present is more in order.
In Juvenescence, Harrison does exactly that.
He wonders ‘about the juvenescence contemporary society is undergoing’. Have we just witnessed in the last election Walter Benjamin’s figure of ‘the destructive character’ who ‘knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away’? This character differs from ‘Nietzschean ressentiment, since “his need for fresh air and open spaces is stronger than any hatred” . . . His purpose is to simply “find a way through” the encrusted accumulations of the world’s history, which he sees as so many obstacles thwarting his impulse to “make room”’ (115-8).
It seems to me, and I’ve argued this in a previous post, that a combination of Nietzschean ressentiment and Benjamin’s acedia is appropriate for understanding modern reactionary movements in the US. All the great projects are behind us, and those who are on the winning side of those projects are entitled to the frictionless fruits of superabundant progress. This is Benjamin’s acedia. Ressentiment, far from being absent, lies in wait as a dormant vengeance that can rise up and defend its right to the spoils of acedia. [10]
Now that ressentiment is in power, has it become mênis—the amoral and unhinged vengeance undertaken on those in power merely as an assertion of status. I’ve argued this elsewhere, and it continues to ring true as MAGA’s composition of time.
This special understanding of time—as the play of ressentiment, mênis, and acedia—sits at the foundation of the US. The Declaration of Independence announces the end of history: the infinite and unending abundance of progress (i.e., the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness) has found its political and economic home. As Harrison points out, the Declaration makes a self-evident claim to the power of reason unencumbered by the weight of history. The editorial change from the phrase ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ to ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ is a crucial change in our orientation to history: ‘At stake is the difference between a matter of faith (on which universal agreement, in the wake of Protestantism’s fractures, is impossible) and the self-justifying claims of reason (on which all men, being equally capable of reason, can and must agree)’ (98-9).
This change in orientation is a sea-change in historical consciousness and therefore how time is experienced by a citizenry whose Declaration calls a new nation into being out of the depths of a repressed past. To put it another way, the Declaration calls for a mode of political power that should have been present all along because reason has been there all along. The declaration of this self-evidence announces a new nation that is older than the oldest nations because it is founded on a true and authentic human power of reason that finally is recognizable through the clearing fog of history.
The Declaration claims to be the founding document that finally clears the fog. In doing so, the US becomes the first nation to declare itself the full and authentic representatives of a humanity that has always been there: ‘in its newness, America is as old as the oldest nations of the earth’ (111).
If human reason has always been there — always been self-evident — then history can only be understood up to the now of the Declaration as a repressive force. Embedded in the notion of ‘self-evident’ is the recognition that whatever is declared ‘self-evident’ does not need any help from history to make itself known. History can only hold it back, as Kant makes clear in ‘An answer to the question, Was ist Aufklarung?’ where Aufkarung is declared to be ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’.
The self-evident has thus been held back by our self-incurred repression.
This is the Enlightenment legacy of the US, and it embeds a Cartesian temporality into our national consciousness as we will see. In short, this consciousness believes in reason an an ahistorical property of the human being — in fact its only necessary property — and can be accessed directly without the laborious effort of looking back at the past. As Descartes does in the opening paragraphs of his Meditations, we can merely declare the past irrelevant to simply access our self-evident reason. (This is, I believe, the controversial point that Michel Foucault was making about Descartes when he argued that Cartesianism does away with the need for askesis.)
Crucial for our understanding is that this temporality requires the occasional destruction of the weight of history in order to rejuvenate the power of reason. This is its power and its danger: we will never know at the outset of the destruction whether it will become creative or nihilistically fatal. At the time of publication in 2014, Harrison tells us, ‘It is too early to say’ (116).
Perhaps it will always be too early to say.
Again, this is the problem Nietzsche posed to us in his untimely way. This is why we need to get the ongoing mixture of No-saying and Yes-saying right.
Tightrope Walking
I emphasized ‘ongoing mixture’ in my previous sentence quite deliberately. The interaction of N0-saying and Yes-saying must be understood temporally, not spatially. Spatial thinking would treat the mixture as a problem of balance. That is to make it much too easy on ourselves. We would fall into the trap of ‘work life balance’ and ‘mindfulness’ as coping mechanisms for the frenetic acceleration of times that run through us.
This is just another ill-will toward time. We end up somewhere stuck between Zarathustra’s image of the camel — the beast of burden who allows the weight of culture to be heaped upon it — and the tightrope walker who has become fragile as he performs a balancing act neither moving backward nor forward.
To put it more succinctly: metaphors of equilibrium and balance also get us into the stuck temporality of the tightrope walker of Zarathustra’s Prologue — stuck in-between the towers as mere entertainer for the crowd. The more balance and equilibrium demanded of us by crowd, the more fragile we become as the equilibrium becomes increasingly untenable as the weight piles on.
Nietzsche’s image of the tightrope walker has been a recurring theme for Time as Practice. Too often, the Übermensch is treated as a tightrope walker, but this image is not univocal for Nietzsche. The misunderstanding, I believe, has to do with trying to trap the image in the being-becoming binary. The tightrope walker of the Prologue has ‘made danger his vocation’ but now perishes of that vocation.
What are we to make of this? Becoming (tightrope walking) is a fragile being, as Zarathustra makes clear: ‘even a fool call cause your undoing’. Tightrope walking cannot, therefore, be seen through metaphors of equilibrium or balancing. There must be a movement toward the other tower, even when we cannot (and should not) know what the other tower is. The other tower cannot be Being, because that would make tightrope walking into an ill-will toward time.
Nor can it be tightrope walking as a value unto itself. This would make us focus on equilibrium and balance, which equally become ill-will toward time. We fight against the frantic pace of time by trying to hold all of the threads — all of the tightropes we are walking — into some sort of stasis.
This is why it is crucial for us to see in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra an attempt to move beyond any binary opposition, including Being and Becoming. This binary leaves us trapped in the fragile in-between, and we mistake Becoming as the antidote for Being. All that happens is we end up relying on metaphors of balance, relativity, and equilibrium to try and overcome time. The ill-will toward time thus remains.
Rather than tightrope walking, we must better understand Zarathustra’s message as exactly what Nietzsche said it was: the ongoing and never-finished problem of saying No to a toxic culture without that No-saying becoming the entrapment of ressentiment.
This is a problem of great health. I believe Harrison has captured one of its modalities as rejuvenation.
Rejuvenation
My strong ‘unentitled opinion’ is that the largest change in American society in the last three generations is this: we no longer see ourselves and our institutions as capable of genuine rejuvenation. This makes it very, very precarious when faced with the kind of destruction of institutions that we’ve been witnessing.
Evidence: Not only have we not made any meaningful changes in the US Constitution since 1971 when the voting age was set at 18. This came at the end of the 1960’s, which saw three meaningful changes, two of which had to do with expanding the right to vote. It is simply unimaginable that we will make any meaningful changes in the foreseeable future. I see this ossification as a composition of time and the end of collective rejuventation.
This ossification — exemplified by the dominance of ‘originalist’ philosophies of reading (e.g, Scalia) — is directly related to our inability to rejuvenate ourselves, our nation, and our Constitution.
Rejuvenation is not the old versus the new. It is the capacity to keep that which is youthful in us alive and well as we age. The current age of our institutions, from one historical vantage point, stretches back to the Enlightenment. From another vantage point, it stretches back to Ancient Greece and the reforms of Cliesthenes that went under the name isonomia — equality.
Isonomia is not the equivalent of democratia. Scholars of Ancient Greece have long made this clear. The latter is a decision-making method distributed across a body of citizens. Isonomia is a way of isolating individuals from their given cultural identities, especially those that are given to vendettas.
As we saw above, the late-sixth century reforms attributed to Cleisthenes remade time. Alongside the new calendar, isonomia became a mode of a citizen’s identity. In fact, the new calendar doesn’t work without isonomia. This suspension of prior identities doesn’t destroy them so much as it allows for another mode of identity to be grafted onto the others. This new identity orients to the polis. As such, it is a new dimension of heterochronic experience that allows one to suspend other identities to be a citizen among other isonomic citizens. To reiterate, this suspension does not negate or destroy the other identities that one inhabits. Rather, it invokes a new orientation to those identities through the new calendar, the centrality of the agora, and the repartitioning of the Attic peninsula into demes, tribes, the Council of 500 (Boulé) and the Assembly (ekklesia).
What was required of this isonomia was not simply the erasure of the other perspectives one might carry with them — by virtue of being a member of a deme or a tribe or an aristocratic family with long standing allies and rivalries. Isonomia require one to orient to the polis and other citizens through sophia (wisdom) and dike (justice).
Wisdom and Genius
The distinction between wisdom and genius is at the heart of Harrison’s Juvenescence. We shouldn’t, however, take these terms as psychological entities. Nor should we eternalize them as instances of Platonic forms. They are terms that allow Professor Harrison to weave a complex but compelling vision for how renewal and rejuvenation work. His message is one that resonates with this project, Time as Practice: ‘Genuine newness entails the rejuvenation, rather than the repudiation, of that from which it seeks freedom and independence’ (97).
Wisdom and genius are not hard oppositions pitting a veneration of the past against a blind faith in geniuses who create the future. This would be to spatialize these terms and wall them off from each other. No, that is not it. Harrison is telling a temporal tale that I’ve been trying to tell in this project. ‘Can a society dispense with wisdom altogether and entrust its fate to genius alone, without self-destructing? Can it lose its historicity and still posses a future?’ (43-4).
Rather than squaring off wisdom and genius against each other, Harrison argues that we should see them as functions of age.
Footnotes
[1] I’m using the Stanford University Press edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche for my English translations. See Volume 9, page 286 for this passage.
[2] No doubt the current destruction has its lineage in the Reagan 80’s that had already accelerated what had been set in motion by Nixon’s marshaling of ‘the silent majority’ against the protesters of the Vietnam War. Thus starts the ‘culture wars’, while his undermining of public confidence in politics accelerates with Watergate. TIME Magazine, shortly after Nixon’s invocation of the silent majority, named Mr. and Mrs. Middle America its Person of the Year for 1969. The erosion of culture and our politics was just getting underway without yet being completely demolished.
[3] See David Ferrell Krell’s translation of this lecture in Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger, Volumes One and Two, Harper One.
[4] This is from ‘On Redemption’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[5] This is a complex story, and few tell it better than Hans Blumenberg whose under appreciation in the US remains baffling to me. Part IV of The Genesis of the Copernican World is the most thorough treatment by anyone on the reconceptualization of time from Aristotle to through Newton. ‘Secularization’, which is a lecture largely responding to Carl Schmidt’s misuse of this term, captures the complexity of time as Christianity evolved from Jesus to its institutionalization: 'As time moves on and the imminent end doesn’t arrive, time becomes a theological problem in need of a more systematic and coherent treatment: ‘For because the immediate expectation was directly and perceptibly disappointed by the continuation of history and the life of the individual, and by the continued existence of the world, it [Christianity] finds itself compelled to perform artful modifications to its content and to its acute threat.’ (Hans Blumenberg, ‘Secularization,’ History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, Bajohr, Fuchs, Kroll trans., Cornell University Press, 2020.). Augustine is the major theological and philosophical player in systematizing a way of living in this time that is increasingly appearing to be permanent.
[6] Robert A. Markus has an excellent discussion on how this need for recurring cycles within Christianity’s composition of linear time led to an extensive proliferation of ceremonies and rituals as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. See his chapter on “Kairoi: Christian Times and the Past” in The End of Ancient Christianity.
[7] In The Genesis of the Copernican World, Blumenberg unfolds the consequences of this expanding meanwhile for the experience of time in the Middle Ages. Unlike Aristotle’s time, there is no fundamental motion that anchors time as uniform and countable. Without the guarantee of an unmoved mover, it is difficult to find anything that would be the source of uniformity. Time threatens to disintegrate into infinite times, and man is faced with living in a radically contingent universe: ‘The breadth of the Scholastic discussion of time can be described as resulting from the disintegration of the original unity of the Aristotelian definition of time into the two elements, numerous motus [ number of motion] and lotus caeli [motion of the heavens]. . . It leaves open the question of whether only one motion underlies the concept of time — and whether this is an arbitrarily chosen motion, or the set-apart guaranteed motion of the heavens, the motus regularis et certus et nobis notissimus [motion that is regular and dependable and best known to us] — or whether, in the last analysis, all motions equally make the concept of time possible, according to the formula tot tempora quot modus [there are as many times as their are motions], where the unity of the concept of time would be nothing but the abstraction of what all ‘times’ have in common. With the rudimentary notion of time as numerus motus, the concept of time and the measure of time no longer necessarily coincide. Where the measure of time receives a nominalistic interpretation, it becomes possible to trace the concept of time back to inner experience.’ (470-1)
[8] This is a very well understood story, but a good entry point into it can be found in Pierre Leveque and Pierre Vidal-Niquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant’s review and extension of this work in an essay entitled, ‘Space and Political Organization in Ancient Greece’, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort trans., Zone Books 2006.
[9] The origins of these concepts and practices are not and cannot be understood through the historical consciousness of a knee-jerk Marxist who would see ‘ideology’ as the expression of a superstructure riding on top of the deterministic economics of the infrastructure.
[10] Harrison’s interviews with Girard for Entitled Opinions remain among the best and most efficient introductions to Girard’s thought. Listen to ‘Rene Girard ritual and sacrifice in the scapegoat’ and ‘Rene Girard: Why We Want What We Want’. One the issues of philosophy and religion as ‘art of living’ and self-help, I’m quite sympathetic to this and don’t wish to denigrate this effort. It has been quite influential in my own return to this material during the COVID pandemic. As my engagement has continued, I’ve come to realize how vital is the commitment to remain focused on the problem of violence and vengeance that is at the heart of philosophical and religious experience.
[11]
[…] I am telling a slightly different story about ressentiment than Nietzsche did. Neitzschean ressentiment occurs when the desire for vengeance remains alive but in a weakened state. It can’t act, so it sublimates its desire in self-poisoning ways often yielding ‘the man of ressentiment’. When Nixon invoked the ‘silent majority’ (and got an immediate 30% increase in approval), he showed that vengeance is not weak in the US but dormant. It lies in wait to protect its right to the acedia that comes with believing we live at the end of history and are entitled to the fruits of endless progress. Anything that interferes with that acedia will be met with a resurrected vengeance that was using ressentiment as its incubator not as its repressor.