Slavoj Žižek and Nietzschean Ressentiment
Slavoj Žižek – The Big Other Doesn’t Exist (Spring – Fall 1997):
These vicissitudes signal that, today, “the big Other doesn’t exist” is more radical than the usual one, synonymous with symbolic order: this symbolic trust, which persists against all sceptical data, is more and more undermined. The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called “culture of complaint” with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn’t exist, i.e. as if impotence is no excuse. The more the subject’s structure is “narcissistic,” the more he blames the big Other, and thus asserts his dependence on it. The “culture of complaint” thus calls on the big Other to intervene, and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc., although how exactly this is to be done is a matter of different ethico-legal “committees”). The specific feature of the “culture of complaint” lies in its legalistic twist, in the endeavor to translate the complaint into the legal obligation of the Other (usually the State) to indemnify one for what? For the very unfathomable surplus-enjoyment of which I am deprived, whose lack makes me feel deprivileged. Thus, is not the “culture of complaint” today’s version of the hysterical impossible demand, addressed to the Other, which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds its existence in its complaint:”I am insofar as I make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery”? The gap here is insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true “radical” (“revolutionary”) act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act (i.e. displacing the need to act onto it), suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act. What is wrong with the complaint of the truly deprivileged is that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address It: they, translating their demand into legalistic complaint, confirm the Other in its position by their very attack.
Slavoj Žižek – Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism (October 28th, 1999):
Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the first case of a military intervention in a country with full sovereign power, undertaken not out of any specific economico-strategic interest but because that country was violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group. To understand the falseness of this, compare the new moralism with the great emancipatory movements inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These were movements directed not against a specific group of people, but against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised practices; they involved a positive, all-inclusive stance that, far from excluding the ‘enemy’ (whites, English colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it to do something that would restore its own moral dignity. The predominant form of today’s ‘politically correct’ moralism, on the other hand, is that of Nietzschean ressentiment and envy: it is the fake gesture of disavowed politics, the assuming of a ‘moral’, depoliticised position in order to make a stronger political case. This is a perverted version of Havel’s ‘power of the powerless’: powerlessness can be manipulated as a stratagem in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimise oneself as being some kind of (potential or actual) victim of power.
Fabio Polidori – An Interview with Slavoj Zizek (2000):
What bothers me apropos of the recent comeback of human rights is that they rely on what Nietzsche identified as the moralistic ressentiment and envy: they imply the fake gesture of the disavowed politics, of assuming a ‘moral’, depoliticized stance in order to make a stronger political case. We are dealing here with a perverted version of what, in the good old days of dissidence, Vaclav Havel called the «power of the powerless»: one manipulates one’s powerlessness as a stratageme in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in our politically correct times, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimize oneself as being some kind of a (potential or actual) victim of power. This stance is not assertive, but controlling, leveraging, bridling – like the ‘ethical committess’ in sciences popping up everywhere today, which are mainly concerned with how to define the limits and prevent things (say, biogenetic engineering) from happening. So, in this perspective, every actual ACT is bad: when Serbs cleanse Kosovo of Albanians, it’s bad; when NATO intervenes to prevent it, it’s bad; when the KLA strikes back, it’s bad – every excuse is good, since it allows us to claim that, of course, we await and want an act, but a proper moralistic act the conditions for which are just never here – like the proverbial falsely enlightened husband who, in principle, agrees that his wife can take lovers, but complains apropos of every actual lover she chooses «Ok, you can have lovers, but not THIS one, why did you have to pick up precisely THIS miserable guy!?»
See also:
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (page 85, chapter Terrorist Resentment)
Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
Alenka Zupančič – The Shortest Shadow; Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two
Nietzsche and the Political
