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Wikipedia provides the following definition for the term:
Nietzsche, who brought the term into more precise usage, gave a more compelling history of the origins of such feeling in On The Genealogy Of Morals:
In sum, réssentiment is the agitation a man feels against those whose social positions are superior to his own. He rankles against privilege, even where it is well-earned; he castigates any hierarchy he does not number in.
And he does this primarily by inventing an imagined oppression. He gives the lash to the hand he wants so badly to crack it over himself.
Two recent examples, one from each end of the political spectrum in America, will suffice to demonstrate this fact.
The Christian Reverend Al Sharpton has pledged to organise a "march for justice" in the case of Trayvon Martin. But what is justice if not law, the antithesis of all marches? Nietzsche anticipates this inversion of "justice":
Ressentiment (French pronunciation: [rəsɑ̃timɑ̃]), in philosophy and psychology, is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. It is the French word for "resentment" (fr. Latin intensive prefix 're', and 'sentir' "to feel"). Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.
Nietzsche, who brought the term into more precise usage, gave a more compelling history of the origins of such feeling in On The Genealogy Of Morals:
The man who, from lack of external enemies and resistances and forcibly confined to the oppressive narrowness and punctiliousness of custom, impatiently lacerated, persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself; this animal that rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage as one tried to "tame" it... this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner, became the inventor of the "bad conscience.
In sum, réssentiment is the agitation a man feels against those whose social positions are superior to his own. He rankles against privilege, even where it is well-earned; he castigates any hierarchy he does not number in.
And he does this primarily by inventing an imagined oppression. He gives the lash to the hand he wants so badly to crack it over himself.
Two recent examples, one from each end of the political spectrum in America, will suffice to demonstrate this fact.
The Christian Reverend Al Sharpton has pledged to organise a "march for justice" in the case of Trayvon Martin. But what is justice if not law, the antithesis of all marches? Nietzsche anticipates this inversion of "justice":
The most decisive act, however, that the supreme power performs and accomplishes against the predominance of grudges and rancour - it always takes this action when it is strong enough to do so - is the institution of law, the imperative declaration of what countsin general as permitted, as just, in its eyes, and what counts as forbidden, as unjust...
"Just" and "unjust" exist, accordingly, only after the institutions of law... to speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be "unjust," since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploration, destruction, and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character.... A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means of struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general... would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.