Elisabetta Brighi
I joined the DPIR at the University of Westminster in August 2014 as Lecturer in International Relations. After receiving a doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), I was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) and later the first 'Bennet Boskey' Junior Research Fellow in International Relations at Exeter College, University of Oxford. I then held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University College London (UCL), the University of Milan 'La Cattolica' and the University of Naples 'L'Orientale'.
My field of expertise encompasses international security (war, irregular warfare, terrorism; urban security; the aesthetic and materiality of security); international political theory (pragmatism; new materialism; mimetic theory and international relations); and foreign policy (theoretical approaches to foreign policy; European foreign policy; Italian foreign policy).
Phone: +44(0)2079115000 (x-64644)
Address: Department of Politics and IR
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street (room 402)
London W1T 3UW
My field of expertise encompasses international security (war, irregular warfare, terrorism; urban security; the aesthetic and materiality of security); international political theory (pragmatism; new materialism; mimetic theory and international relations); and foreign policy (theoretical approaches to foreign policy; European foreign policy; Italian foreign policy).
Phone: +44(0)2079115000 (x-64644)
Address: Department of Politics and IR
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street (room 402)
London W1T 3UW
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Beyond resentment, Peter Sloterdijk wrote of the recent return of another forgotten thymotic element, namely rage. After decades of suppression or attempted transcendence, the ongoing economic crisis and recrudescence of global terrorism have demonstrated the centrality of rage as well as its potential role in revolutions and emancipatory political struggles. Finally, Martha Nussbaum has also agreed that anger has once again become not just ubiquitous but also ‘popular’. Yet, she is much less convinced that negative emotions such as resentment and rage have a role to play in democratic politics. Are we truly living in an age of resentment? And where does this negative emotion sit within René Girard’s mimetic theory? In this paper I will argue, firstly, that resentment emerges as an important affect within mimetic theory, one intimately linked to Girard’s understanding of the triangular nature of desire and the perversely imitative dynamics sitting at its heart. Girard’s reading of resentment does indeed illuminate aspects of our global modern condition. However, I will also argue that Girard’s conceptualisation of resentment is somewhat narrow when it collapses resentment into ressentiment. In so doing, it not only obscures alternative generative mechanisms of resentment whose imitative import is limited, but it also negates the political value of resentment. Resentment can stem not only from highly mimetic forms of identifications, but can emerge as something other than the mere operations of envy and mimetic rivalry. Not all resentment, in other words, is about ressentiment. As I argue below, this matters not only in conceptual and theoretical terms, but also in political terms – the way in which one escapes or transcends resentment is different depending on whether this is a mimetic or anti-mimetic sentiment.