The Oakdale Rodeo Part 2: The Characteristics of Ressentiment

In Nietzsche & Philosophy, Deleuze in just a few pages brilliantly captures the “topology” and “characteristics” of ressentiment. As I read the topology, I found myself in the analytical exercise of trying to understand his abstract description of Nietzsche’s use of conscious and unconscious, reactive and passive forces. But when I arrived at the section on “Characteristics of Ressentiment,” a whole different experience of reading Deleuze and Nietzsche took over. I had more of an aesthetic experience than the analytical and exegetical experience of the “topology” section. Specifically, my mind went right to the Oakdale Rodeo and my ressentiment-driven reaction to the crowd.

In this meditation, I want to try to understand my reaction through Deleuze’s characteristics of ressentiment because 1) I want to better understand ressentiment and its dynamics as they inhabit me, and 2) I want to better understand how Deleuze viewed the world. To start, let me take each of the characteristics and situate my reaction within them.

“Inability to admire, respect or love (BGE 260, GM I 10). The memory of traces is full of hatred. (117)

My ressentiment was fueled by memories — memories of youth and my frustration of having grown up in a place that always seemed so backward and spiritually and psychologically debilitating. The “man of ressentiment” does not forget. Forgetfulness is healthy and an active principle in Nietzsche’s psychology (GM II 1). It goes to work on impressions so that they don’t hang around too long. Without an active principle of turning impressions into “traces” and lodging them in the unconscious, action becomes stultified.

How does this work? We must understand Deleuze’s interpretation of “normal reactions” in Nietzsche’s psychology/physiology of the human being. According to Deleuze’s reading, normal reactions drive desires that can be discharged as action. This is important because, as we’ll see with ressentiment, reactions don’t necessarily yield outwardly driven actions. Reactions can turn inward to cut off action. When this turning inward becomes more than just cutting off action — when it becomes the cutting off the desire for action — ressentiment is being bred. But let’s not get too far ahead of the argument. An example of normal reaction: if I desire a hamburger, I go and buy the hamburger and eat it. My action (buying and eating the hamburger) is a reaction to another action (hunger), which is itself a reaction to other physiological and psychological forces. The action/reaction dynamic is an infinite regression that can never be traced to a final cause. This is crucial to both Deleuze and Nietzsche, but I will set that aside for the moment.

Ressentiment starts with the undermining of normal reactions. Not only does it cut off reaction, but it cuts off the desire to react. Desire and intention are its real targets, not the action itself. I turn my desire for the hamburger into self-blaming for wanting to eat something bad for me. I try to cut off my desire for the hamburger by turning against it as a personal flaw. This becomes full-on ressentiment when this turning back of momentary desires becomes a prolonged hatred of my desire for the hamburger in order to eradicate it completely. Taken to the extreme, I characterize my desire as the evil sin of gluttony. At this point, my ressentiment is in full flower, and it has created within me my very own “bad conscience” about my gluttonous desire for a hamburger. Accordingly, I become good when my ressentiment yields a victory over my hated desire — when I’ve overcome this evil within me.

The important point here is that my ressentiment is a sign of my goodness as I overcome the evilness of my desires:

It [ressentiment] gives revenge a means: a means of reversing the normal relation of active and reactive forces. This is why ressentiment itself is always a revolt and always the triumph of this revolt. Ressentiment is the triumph of the weak as weak, the revolt of the slaves and their victory as slaves. (117)

As a sign of my goodness, ressentiment must become a permanent condition of my identity. It must stick. For Deleuze, this power of ressentiment forms a type of subjectivity in opposition to the “master” type of subjectivity. The master has normal reactions — he/she has “the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions.” This is normal in the sense that Deleuze wants to contrast it to ressentiment as abnormal and thus the object of his critique. The subjectivity that is activated by ressentiment doesn’t just redirect his/her frustration into an imaginary desire for revenge. The power of ressentiment is to never forget — to activate memory as a permanent self-observational state that cuts off even the desire to act. The compensation for that cutting off is a morality based on who is good (me) and who is evil (others who are responsible for my frustration). These others don’t even need to be people. These others can be abstract forces — the economy, “the government,” good or bad luck, the universe, and anything that conspires to keep me in a state of submission. Ressentiment’s power is to turn that submission into a badge of honor, which I cannot and should not ever forget because it is my very identity.

We must remember that for Nietzsche “forgetting” is active (GM II 1). It is not a passive and inert quality of the human mind. It is a force that needs to work in order for us to get on with daily life. Imagine never being able to forget anything. You’d be carrying all of your impressions around with you all of the time. Going back to my hamburger, I’d never forget the eating of the hamburger or the desire for it that drove the action. You’d be dysfunctional, which is exactly what ressentiment does. It activates a permanent memory of frustrations and holds onto them without discharging them as action. The result is a self-poisoning that results from holding onto these frustrations as feelings of permanent and personal injustices.

This is a critical point: my feelings become the permanent indicators of these personal injustices: “The man of ressentiment experiences every being and every object as an offense in exact proportion to its effect on him” (116; emphasis added) He goes on to quote Ecce Homo:

One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything — everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound. (EH I 6)

My ressentiment at the Oakdale Rodeo was intensified as an inability to forget the perceived injustices of the others in this crowd stretching back to my youth. This was no abstract judgment of people willing to sell t-shirts saying “Black. Gun. Matter,” or to turn a long-standing tradition of the Rodeo into a political rally for Trump. This was personal because it is the culture from which I came. I am part of it and have sought an aggressive break with it as a long-term project for my own life. Perhaps my reaction is an overreaction — it did not appear that the t-shirt guy was doing a brisk business; and there certainly was not any overt Trump 2024 or “stop the steal” on display. I imagined a lot of this and overemphasized it to fuel ressentiment as my sense of good over evil.

For all this, I was not outwardly hostile. This lack of hostility is a key characteristic of ressentiment, which turns hostility into judgment: “What is most striking in the man of ressentiment is not his nastiness but his disgusting malevolence, his capacity for disparagement.” I sat quietly feeling like a napalm strike would have been appropriate retribution even if I had been an unfortunate casualty. Sometimes the good must be sacrificed to eradicate the evil. Ressentiment and nihilism are conjoined twins.

And here we arrive at another characteristic of ressentiment:

The imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual accusation. All this replaces aggression…. We can guess what the creature of ressentiment wants: he wants others to be evil, he needs others to be evil in order to consider himself good. (119)

Without ressentiment, the others in the crowd would not be seen as evil. I would have seen them as mistaken or merely as a self-contained culture that has yet to mature. I could have just seen the situation from the perspective of a blond beast who would see his/her goodness not in contrast to “evil” but in contrast to “bad” as Nietzsche made the distinction: bad means inferior but does not rise to the level of true evil. Another way to think of this is savage versus civilized where the savage retains some aspect of an authentic humanity that can be appreciated, if only from a safe distance. Contrasting the savage to the civilized at least preserves some dignity for the savage as a more “natural” and “authentic” human. The savage isn’t necessarily evil, just inferior.

Ressentiment starts from seeing the other not merely as bad but as a pervasive type of evil subjectivity. I saw the crowd not as mere savages with some core of human dignity. They were a pervasive type of subjectivity that itself was fueled by its own ressentiment. With no evidence whatsoever, I connected this crowd with those who perpetrated the insurrection of January 6, 2021. I don’t think I was completely wrong on this connection, but it certainly wasn’t a data-driven and scientific opinion at the moment. It was pure intuition, intensity, and ressentiment.

This brings me to the third and final characteristic of ressentiment:

Passivity. In ressentiment happiness “appears as a narcotic drug, rest, peace, ‘sabbath’, slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively” (GM I 10). In Nietzsche “passive” does not mean “non-active”; “non-active” means “reactive”; but “passive” means “non-acted”. The only thing that is passive is reaction insofar as it is non-acted. The term “passive” stands for the triumph of reaction, the moment when, ceasing to be acted, it becomes a ressentiment. (117-8)

This is a difficult passage to unpack, but it can be stated in simple terms: passivity occurs when one’s reaction cuts itself off from taking the action that it desires. When this kind of passivity triumphs over the desire to take action by short-circuiting desire itself, it is on its way to becoming ressentiment. Passivity, therefore, is a kind of reaction that turns against itself as it absorbs the desire for action and turns it back into a judgment on one’s own desires and intentions. In this sense, it is a kind of non-action as an action against oneself and one’s own desires. I don’t just walk away from the hamburger; I have to muster a countervailing reaction that turns the desire to act into a desire to not act. I walk away in self-judgment as I try to cut off the desire to eat the hamburger. I have made myself passive in the face of a desired action.

Merely turning back the desire for action to a negation of that desire is not, in itself, ressentiment, but merely its beginnings. Cutting off bad and unproductive desires isn’t necessarily a self-poisoning hatred of oneself. I might not want the hamburger because I had one for lunch, and I’m just asserting a reasonable amount of self-control. [October 19, 2022 Addition: I might try to cut off my desire for the hamburger not because it is evil but because I’ve come to realize that factory farming is responsible for a significant amount of greenhouse gasses. In this case, I’m under no obligation to see my desire for the hamburger as “evil.” Rather, I can see that desire as complicit in a heating planet and therefore worthy of being cut off. This is not, of course, a Stoic disposition to see the hamburger as a “preferred indifferent.” As a globally oriented soul, I would like to cut off the “preferred” part to hold onto the “indifferent” part.]

It is therefore not necessary to see a desire to cut off action always as ressentiment. More needs to happen for true ressentiment to occur. Mainly, this negating reaction must happen over the long haul, and the dynamics of the long haul are crucial to understanding ressentiment. This revaluation of my desires must become total and continuous — ressentiment must soak into one’s very identity as a “bad conscience.”

This is when “bad conscience takes over the job of ressentiment” as a permeant condition of the soul. (128). Thus we have a process that occurs over time through a continuous practice that yields a firm relationship among one’s “conscience,” one’s “interiority,” and one’s “soul.” None of these are eternal qualities of human nature. Rather, they are effects of practices that channel energies in particular ways. “Passivity” as Deleuze formlates it is not simply the cutting off of these active forces: it is the long-term denigration of one’s intentions and desires as the basis for one’s actions thus leaving one in a state of inertia.

This is a very different kind of passivity than one would find in Buddhism or certain forms of Christianity. Here I need to be careful. We are on the verge of a wholesale condemnation of spiritual practices that seek openness and receptivity as essential to growth. A legitimate but ungenerous reading of Nietzsche would find in this denigration of passivity a preference for action and effort. We’d find at the bottom of Nietzsche’s thought a binary hierarchy privileging the life of action over passivity as inertia. We’d thus be tempted to find in Nietzsche preferences for the “overman” as a dominating heroic figure like Sartre saw in Stalin and Heidegger saw in Hitler, or 70 million American voters saw in Trump in 2020. We must be careful to avoid this most un-Neitzschean of moves. We must hold onto the complexity of Nietzsche’s thought, as Deleuze does, and not give in to seeking binary value judgments lurking in his texts.

The passivity that is highlighted by Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is a passivity that turns away from the world and embraces a passive nihilism. In my terms, this is a denial of one’s horizontally oriented soul. The hatred of the required “hostile world” (GM I 10) turns inward such that a permanent self-loathing becomes the condition of one’s victory over the world. Passivity is a cutting off of oneself from action in the world because one does not want to be a part of it. This creates the exclusively vertically oriented soul that I’ve been struggling with in Christianity in my latest meditations. The passivity to the world results from an inwardly directed intensity that affirms oneself as it cuts oneself off from a presumably inhospitable world. As Nietzsche so clearly put it in the Genealogy: “slave morality always first needs a hostile external world” (GM I 10; emphasis added). Love is not a strong enough power to achieve this level of intensity. Anger and hatred embraced and channeled over the long haul are much better emotional sources. Vertical Christianity will always have a difficult time reconnecting horizontally with the world. It will take a great deal of effort to reorient the Christian soul to the world without resorting to ressentiment. I believe that MLK achieved this, but only through a direct confrontation with Nietzsche and the relationship among the will to power, ressentiment, and Christian love. But I must save this for a later meditation.