Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentiment

Modes of Regression The Case of Ressentiment abstract Ressentiment seems to be one of the key concepts of our time. But what is the use of the con­ cept of ressentiment for understanding and analyzing the rise of antigender, antimigrant, antiegalitar­ ian, antidemocratic, homo­ and transphobic, and masculinist as well as anti­Semitic and anti­Muslim sentiments, as they are articulated in populist movements all over the globe in varying constellations and to different degrees? This essay argues that, although it is a productive category for the diagnosis of our times, ressentiment alone is too weak a tool for critical theory. In order not to lose its force and not to become a psychologizing and individualizing interpretative term, ressentiment needs to be understood as a mode of regression and therefore should be embedded in a theoretical framework for understanding crisis that allows us to address the social structures that enable, necessitate, and nourish ressentiments. keywords ressentiment, regression, authoritarianism, progress, crisis, critical theory Ressentiment seems to be one of the key concepts of our time. References to res­ sentiment are clearly “in the air.” It has been pointed out repeatedly that “the strengthening of authoritarian­based ressentiment is one of the most disturbing developments of recent times” (in the words of Sabine Hark and Judith Butler).1 As Wendy Brown notes in an illuminating analysis, ressentiment is a “vital energy of right­wing populism,”2 an effective mechanism for the trigering of emotions, one that gives contemporary neo­authoritarianism its explosive power. “Rage against ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice,’” social democracy, and even formal inclu­ sion and equality are animated and fueled by “the resentments . . . of agrieved power.”3 And Joseph Vogl has just recently titled his “short theory of the present” Capitalism and Ressentiment,4 taking ressentiment to be the fundamental outcome of the restructuring of the world by financialized capitalism. But what is the use of the concept of ressentiment for understanding and analyz­ ing the rise of antigender, antimigrant, antiegalitarian, antidemocratic, homo­ and CRITICAL TIMES | 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 DOI 10 . 1215/26410478-10030204 | © 2022 Rahel Jaeggi This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 501 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 RAHEL JAEGGI CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 502 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 transphobic, and masculinist as well as anti­Semitic and anti­Muslim sentiments, as they are articulated in populist movements all over the globe in varying constella­ tions and to different degrees?5 Although I think of ressentiment as a productive category, a first step toward an analysis of the character of authoritarian­populist social mobilization, the diagnosis of our times along the lines of ressentiment alone is too weak a tool for critical the­ ory. Ressentiment alone has neither the analytical nor the normative strength to dis­ tinguish between emancipatory and antiemancipatory movements (for those of us who still use this terminology) and to address the structural dimensions underlying the destructive tendencies in question.6 In order not to lose its force, ressentiment, I will argue, needs to be understood as a mode of regression and therefore should be embedded in a theoretical framework for understanding crisis that allows us to address the social structures that enable, necessitate, and nourish ressentiments. If the concept of ressentiment (in its public use) is in danger of becoming a psychol­ ogizing and individualizing interpretative pattern that leads us toward despair, we should strengthen our insights into the structural elements of ressentiment in order to analyze, criticize, and possibly change the situation we are confronted with. The concept of regression, much like that of ressentiment, has had a kind of comeback in recent years. In the spring of 2017, a volume called The Great Regression appeared, published simultaneously by five European publishing houses.7 In this volume, leading contemporary theorists took on pressing questions about Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the United States and the worldwide strengthening of authoritarian, right­wing populist, and neofascist movements.8 However, with a few exceptions, the concept of regression is not explicitly reflected upon in these essays and is instead just taken for granted. But in what sense is it appropriate to describe the contemporary political and social situation as an age of regression? What is it that we “regress” from if we don’t want to rely on an idea of linear devel­ opment that might be difcult to defend? If the popularity of both terms is motivated by the urgent and sometimes des­ perate attempt to understand our time, we also have to take into account that these concepts involve patterns of interpretation with a specific theoretical background and specific consequences, embedded in overarching conceptual, philosophical, and historical frameworks that are not self­evident. It is therefore unsurprising that some remain hesitant to use these terms: there are those who are taken aback by the implications of “regression” (since it is obviously the other side of some idea of progress), while others resist the Nietzschean flair associated with the concept of ressentiment. My essay will not offer any extraordinary new insights at the empirical level or add to any biting diagnosis of our times. I also have no new revolutionary insights on the pressing question of “What is to be done?” (In some respects, at the level of 1) Concepts useful to critical theory should enable us to understand social struc­ tures, not individuals or individual actions alone. 2) As concepts lend themselves to social critique, they will have normative implica­ tions. However, they should not be moralizing in the sense of evoking what Hegel called the “empty ought.” 3) Finally, and here again I agree with Haslanger, they should orient us toward social change instead of resignation to fate.11 In short, concepts should help us to explain how we got to where we are—and how the current state of affairs is not without alternatives. They must help us to decipher the conflicts of our time as crises and to sharpen these crises into conflicts. JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 503 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 political activism, what is required of emancipatory movements seems all too self­ evident.) My paper instead works at the conceptual level; it aims to investigate the usefulness and the theoretical implications of the concepts discussed. Taking this approach responds to the circumstance that we are not just faced with extraordinary and unprecedented challenges regarding the ways we confront our times. Rather, we are, in our attempts to develop an appropriate “diagnostic practice” (as Hans Sluga calls it),9 also confronted with meta­questions concerning the fundamental theoretical concepts and frameworks for our political thinking, the conceptual tools for a critical theory of our times. The difculty of our current situation is that neither the well­known concepts nor the well­known critiques of those concepts seem to be of any help here. To simply take for granted the narra­ tives located in the notions of progress, history, reason, and regression, or critical concepts such as ideology or false consciousness, is as futile as it is pointless to just categorically dismiss them as untenable and outdated. If my essay thus aims to understand some of the remarkable developments of our time, I am even more concerned with understanding how to understand them, with stocking up tools for what Sally Haslanger calls the “social critic’s toolbox.”10 Whether the “toolbox of critical theory” should contain certain concepts depends on whether we can use them to understand, decipher, and enclose the phenomena that we are confronted with. We therefore need to ask what kind of theorizing we need and what kinds of concepts are useful in analyzing and criticizing our times. Yet concepts do not stand alone but rather come in clusters. They inspire narratives and enable explanations. And their respective meaning is more or less explicitly connected with underlying social theories. So, one has to see what one can achieve with certain concepts—but one should also pay attention to the implications and assumptions that are associated with them. By way of stipulation, I would sugest three principles and conceptual virtues that we should be looking for when evalu­ ating our critical tools: 1. Ressentiment and Its Problems What, then, is ressentiment? In a first approximation, ressentiment is a specific kind of envy, a negative, hostile attitude and “ill will” that aims at the disparage­ ment of others and their way of life as well as at a devaluation of what they cher­ ish and represent. Ressentiment is comparable, but not identical, to vengefulness and envy that begrudges others and wishes them harm. As “envious but impotent anger,”12 it is born out of (perceived) powerlessness and remains marked by it.13 While Nietzsche famously introduced the concept, it was the German phenom­ enologist Max Scheler who, in his essay “Ressentiment in the Construction of Morality,”14 written in 1915, employed the concept in order to explain the social phenomena of rising nationalism, protofascism, and the authoritarian hatred of equality that culminated in World War I. What, one might ask, is the question that ressentiment is the answer to? It seems as though the concept of ressentiment gives us another tool to address a question that has often been (and still is) framed differently—namely, in terms of ideology.15 This question has, historically, been at the heart of Critical Theory (with a capital C and a capital T)16 from the very beginning. This question takes the following form: How does it come about that social suffering, indignation, the multiple crises (of capitalism, of neoliberalism, you name it) do not lead to emancipatory movements but instead to reactionary, authoritarian, and fascist tendencies? Since this obviously cannot be explained by the ruthless pursuit of self­interest alone—just think of the CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 504 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 They must help us to understand how social changes have come about and what we can do to (re)direct them in emancipatory ways. What we need are concepts that help us to differentiate emancipatory from non­ or even antiemancipatory social movements and forms of political mobilization. Where does this leave us with respect to the concepts of regression and ressen­ timent? As I said at the beginning, I will defend a twofold thesis: In order to work as a critical tool, ressentiment should be understood as a mode of regression; the use of the framework of regression, on the other hand, can be defended without rely­ ing on a problematic idea of teleological progress or a Eurocentric and imperialist idea of development. The first part of my essay will elaborate on the structure of ressentiment by going deeper into its anatomy and normative grammar. Spelling out how ressen­ timent can help us to understand our times, I will argue that we have only begun to grasp the structural dimension of ressentiment. By asking after the normative dimension of the diagnosis of ressentiment, I arrive at my thesis: ressentiment should be understood as a mode of regression, a notion that in the second part of the essay is defined and defended as an experiential blockage and an inadequate reaction to crises. Three Problems with Ressentiment In order to make the concept suitable for a critical approach, we have to address three problems.17 First, when conceiving of the phenomena in question in terms of ressentiment we should avoid trivializing or belittling those tendencies as mere ressentiment, as if ressentiment could not have solid causes as well as solid—and sometimes violent—consequences. That the authoritarian backlash (to use a shorthand) is fueled by ressentiment and can (only) be explained with reference to ressentiment certainly does not mean that it is less dangerous; nor does it mean that it will dissi­ pate with ease. And if ressentiment is an instance of “social unreason” with a flair of irrationality, it still has its own and powerful logic. Second, there is a danger of unwillingly buying into the logic of self­victimization of the movements in question. If we go back to Nietzsche’s narrative—the slave revolt against the powerful—ressentiment is the weapon of the powerless, of those who are in an inferior position. Unable to attack those in power directly, they take refuge in ressentiment, in an indirect attempt to devalue their values. Now, it is obvious that the contemporary bearers of ressentiment are not exactly groups without power; just think of the absurd self­portrayal of Trump as a victim of the liberal elite. Ressentiment cannot simply be a weapon of the factually powerless but rather has to be seen as a weapon of those defending their (even if sometimes JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 505 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 fact that in the United States even some of those who are most dependent on a func­ tioning health­care system and more generally on a functioning welfare state vote for politicians who are openly trying to destroy both—it appears that what motivates support for these politics is in need of explanation. The reference to ressentiment seems to step in here. The keyword “ressentiment” might also be able to illuminate why authoritarian and right­wing populist movements spend a disproportionate amount of political and emotional energy on discrediting a so­called left­liberal cul­ tural elite or minority politics. And it should explain the weird mix of rebellious and authoritarian attitudes, and the negativity that can be observed in the wicked delight in destruction that we saw on the faces of those storming the US Capitol, as well as the avowed hatred of institutions and denial of solidarities that the global phalanx of COVID­19 deniers performs. As in the assumed effect of ideology (even if some of those using the concept of ressentiment would vigorously refuse to think along the lines of ideology and false consciousness), it seems that whatever it would mean to satisfy the group’s “real interests,” their ressentiment certainly is satisfied—producing distractions from the real crises, real interests, and whatever is needed to address and to pursue them. Indeed, there are privileges at stake, privileges that might be lost and that are hatefully defended. Still, it would be too easy to read all of this as a simple battle for hegemony. 2. The Anatomy of Ressentiment Let us ask then: How, exactly, does ressentiment work? To answer this question, I will take a closer look at the inner structure and operation as well as the normative grammar of ressentiment and spell out some of its characteristic features in order to situate it “more precisely in relation to other social sentiments and reactions”18 and to point to its structural dimensions. Ressentiment as a Mediated Reaction and Second-Order Affect Ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is “fundamentally reaction.”19 Or, as Scheler, whose fine­grained analysis already offers profound insight into the character and operation of ressentiment, describes it, it is an “emotional response reaction.”20 However, this feature alone does not yet distinguish ressentiment from other atti­ tudes. Everything we do and feel is “reactive” in a completely unproblematic and also inevitable sense: we react to our environment, to what we experience, and to what happens to us, with all of these reactions being embedded in evaluative frameworks.21 However, ressentiment is “reaction” in a more specific sense. It is not a direct or immediate reaction to a certain social situation, to a lack that one suf­ fers, but a multiply mediated one. In this way, ressentiment is a reaction to a reaction, a reaction to the experienced rage or indignation itself—and, as we will see later, an affect based on the repression of an affect. This is why I would like to call ressen­ timent a second-order affect—that is, an affect that has an affect as its content.22 Not simply a “raw feeling,” it is in a variety of ways socially constituted. Let us look at these mediating instances in more detail: Ressentiment is relational and comparative; it is socially mediated through the comparison with others. Ressentiment does not simply react to a factual and objective lack of resources, the absence of something that is desired.23 Rather, ressentiment is mediated through the assessment of one’s own situation as compared to that of others, to what others have or represent. It is driven by a (real or perceived) neglect and degradation com­ pared to others. Ressentiment, then, is not about what I have or do not have—but CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 506 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 only relative) privileges. If, nevertheless, ressentiment should be seen as a reaction to (or expression of ) powerlessness and impotence, then we have to carefully spell out the specific kind of powerlessness at stake. Third, we must avoid the tendency to psychologize ressentiment. The diagno­ sis of ressentiment should be extracted from a purely psychological spectrum (that is, a thesis about personality traits) and instead be read as a phenomenon on the level of social structures. It is only after a closer look at the anatomy of ressentiment, then, that we will be able to provide a basis for understanding the advantages and limits of a diagno­ sis of our times in terms of ressentiment. Impotence and Refusal: Second-Order Impotence But this alone does not constitute ressentiment; the normative and comparative character is a necessary but not sufcient condition for the characterization of a reaction as ressentiment. I will now turn to the other “ingredient” of this danger­ ous cocktail. JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 507 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 about what I do not have while others have it. The deprivation in question is not only judged as bad (harmful or unfortunate), but moreover as worse in comparison to others. In short: ressentiment does not react to deprivation but to relative deprivation. (A natural disaster that affects everyone to the same extent, in comparison, is—as such—not likely to generate ressentiment.) At this point, a second feature comes in. Ressentiment not only reacts to a rela­ tive deprivation; it is also a normative reaction to relative deprivation; it evolves out of a sense of entitlement. Others have what I don’t have but at the same time feel enti­ tled to. Thus, ressentiment is mediated through a normative assessment of a wrong, harm, or lack suffered. Ressentiment is an emotion, an affect that is grounded in what is felt and perceived as unfair.24 Those who are driven by ressentiment do not react—in the sense of an original or “primitive” reaction—solely to the actual (objectively determinable) absence of certain desired social gratifications or goods, or to the mere fact that they do not have something they would like to have. It is a reaction to a deprivation that is perceived as an injustice and affront. (And again: the same situation caused by a natural disaster does not triger ressentiment as long as no norms are harmed and no one can be normatively held responsible for it.) The “material” from which ressentiment is formed is correspondingly not immediate suffering or immediate lack but indignation over such. The starting point of ressen­ timent, then, is not a certain state of affairs per se but rather a state of affairs or a lack of resources normatively judged as bad, undeserved, degrading, and unjustified. Another feature of ressentiment then arises: the effect of inversion and the debasement of the desired goods (as Nietzsche has described them with respect to what he called slave morality). As a reaction to the experienced denial and rejec­ tion, ressentiment debases those goods and resources that it initially desires. Unlike envy, ressentiment does not leave the value of the desired goods intact; it works as a devaluation of the object in question, a devaluation of the value one is deprived of. What is being denied to those who have ressentiments is at the same time being devalued by the very same group. This is a moment of inversion and a kind of “sour grape” effect. It is this normative as well as the comparative aspect that transforms the indig­ nation about one’s own situation into a biting feeling of revenge against those (per­ ceived) relatively better off. It is also one of the reasons for the open­endedness of the indignation and the fact that the desire in question can never be satisfied. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear.25 The impotence that trigers ressentiment is thus, again, not direct, but mediated. It is not only impotence regarding the causes that triger deprivation or lack; it is not only the powerlessness regarding the circumstances, or against the groups of peo­ ple responsible for it. Of course, these too are factors. But the powerlessness leading to ressentiment is above all a self­imposed impotence against one’s own feelings and inclinations, an inability to act upon one’s own feelings. Ressentiment is reactively mediated through the impossibility of giving space and articulation to the nega­ tive affects described above—for example, the nascent feelings of revenge. It is, to a certain extent, trigered by a refusal of the feeling of revenge. This is precisely what Scheler means when he characterizes ressentiment as the “self­poisoning of the mind through the repression of affect.”26 To put it simply: the (judgmental, affective) indignation based on lack and (perceived) injustice produces indignation and feelings of revenge. Ressentiment in the proper sense then arises as a response to the fact that one must refuse these feelings of revenge, that one is powerless to express them. This impotence or powerlessness may, to be clear, not be real; it may lack any factual basis. Very often it is only imaginary and at odds with the actual influence CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 508 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 Ressentiment always occurs in combination with a feeling of impotence, a feel­ ing of powerlessness. In other words, ressentiment is not only a reaction to a (nor­ matively perceived of and relative) lack of something or deprivation but a reaction to the inability to do something about it. This perceived powerlessness is the ferment that allows ressentiment to emerge from feelings of indignation, revenge, and envy. But again, as a reaction to powerlessness, it is not the factual hopelessness of the case in question that produces ressentiment. There is more to it. The power­ lessness in question is, again, in some way self­made. Those driven by ressentiment are not just devoid of power; their problem is not only that they don’t succeed in acting out their feelings of revenge or that the task of achieving the desired good would objectively be too big. It is one of Scheler’s important contributions here that he takes this lack of power as something that the individuals in question impose on themselves: Ressentiment as Genuinely Social If we don’t want to, as I warned at the beginning, end up in a depoliticizing psychol­ ogism, then how do we arrive at the structural dimension of ressentiment? Ressentiment, if one follows the hints of the previous analysis, is genuinely social. It relies on a social comparison with others, which is why a withdrawal or unavailability of important goods due to nonsocial causes—for example, due to a natural catastrophe—would produce lack and misery but not ressentiment. Moreover, many of the goods in question are genuinely positional goods, such as honor, fame, or recognition—that is to say, goods that can only arise within social relationships and that are impregnated by social norms. And finally, the feeling of impotence, which provokes ressentiment, is impotence within and with respect to the social order (as opposed to, again, the kind of powerlessness that we might experience in our relationship to natural conditions). But if ressentiment is incon­ ceivable apart from a social setting, then it must be possible to identify dispositions for the emergence of ressentiment in the social structure itself—that is, social con­ ditions that are at least likely to result in the development and spread of ressenti­ ment.28 (This is not to deny that there might be psychological dispositions related to ressentiment as well.) However, any inquiry into the structural conditions and supraindividual foun­ dations required for ressentiment to emerge rests on assumptions that need to be mentioned explicitly. Ressentiment, conceived of as a social affect, is not the result of a general (anthropological) disposition to compare oneself with others.29 It is JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 509 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 of those who portray themselves as powerless. However, it is important to realize that “reality” or the reference to “facts” does not matter here: The powerlessness can develop the same effect, whether it is due to “real” forces whose prohibition I internalize or whether such forces are only imagined as at best secondary. The line between the real and the imaginary is obviously blurred here. Even the powerlessness of ressentiment is, therefore, not merely the impo­ tence sensed when one is faced with an experienced lack of resources itself. It is not impotence with respect to a first­order problem that is not in my power to solve—for example, the fact of being unemployed or having no health insurance. The powerlessness in question concerns the reaction to these facts: the impotence or inability to express one’s own feelings. It is the refusal of that desire, and there­ fore a doubled feeling of impotence, that trigers what we call ressentiment.27 In this sense, to get back to the conceptual framework introduced above, this power­ lessness is a kind of second-order impotence. If ressentiment is a reaction to powerlessness, it is, again, not powerlessness as such that trigers ressentiment. It is not the first­order experience to have lost a battle, to be overpowered, but, in some ways, the inability to even enter the battlefield. Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education. While each has the “right” to compare himself with everyone else, he cannot do so in fact. Quite independently of the characters and experiences of individuals, a potent charge of ressentiment is here accumulated by the very structure of society.31 What is instructive for our purposes here is Scheler’s insistence on the structural causes of ressentiment as “accumulated by the very structure of society”—and, one might add, by a specific tension or even contradiction that is constitutive for this society. I will not comment on Scheler’s own nationalism here (just as I have not engaged with Nietzsche’s chauvinism). But, taking one’s cue from the way Scheler conceives of the interface between social structure and psychological mecha­ nisms, one might very well feel inspired to follow up on his description of a certain CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 510 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 induced by a historically specific and determinate social order and thus is related to tensions that emerge in a specific social constellation. It is neither the foundation of every conceivable social order nor does it overwhelm the societies in question like some evil spirit. It is the consequence of the way these societies are structured and constituted. At this point, I can give only a tentative indication and some short remarks on how to conceptualize the interplay between the social order and the disposi­ tion toward ressentiment. I will start, again, from the instructive analyses of Max Scheler. Scheler, in his attempt to extend Nietzsche’s concept to a sociological analy­ sis, identifies two social structural factors that render the emergence of ressentiment more probable. The first relates to the hierarchical division of society. According to Scheler, what can be called (then) classical European capitalist bourgeois society is marked by a discrepancy between the expectation of status and the fulfillment of this expectation. It is this discrepancy that fosters the likelihood that ressentiment will emerge. A particular kind of social vindictiveness can arise only in a social structure in which a certain expectation arising from “the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power” exists.30 In West­ ern bourgeois capitalist societies, this plays out as a discrepancy between an assumed (formal) equality and a real tangible (social, economic, or cultural) inequality. Thus, ressentiment does not arise in hierarchically structured, stable social relations in which a general acceptance of one’s status prevails—as is the case, for example, in openly hierarchical feudal societies. And perhaps no ressentiment would arise in a truly egalitarian society, one could add. Referring to the European bourgeois society as it emerged in the nineteenth century, Scheler sums up: 3. Thinking about Our Times in Terms of Ressentiment Let us now take a closer look at how these insights into the anatomy and the nor­ mative grammar of ressentiment can help us understand some of the features of populist right­wing authoritarians,34 as we find them in countries as different from JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 511 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 discrepancy between a normative self­understanding and actual living conditions. Cer­ tainly, the alleged discrepancy has taken on a new form and new dimensions within contemporary neoliberalism and financialized capitalism: the ressentiment­trigering tension that confronts us today is a specific neoliberal form of precarity along with the ideological imperative imposed on the individual to independently (and creatively) solve her own problems, the assumption of responsibility32 that the spirit of neoliberal capitalism has been obsessed with. Even if I, in fact, cannot change my precarious social situation or my bad or precarious work situation, I’m still seen as (and see myself as) responsible for it. Above all, this can explain how feelings of envy and revenge can be repressively blocked in such a way that they seek an escape hatch in ressentiment. Under the dictates of the neoliberal imperative of responsibility, direct feelings of revenge against those who possess the coveted goods are ruled out, not just because of the real and menacing superiority of these groups; they must be prohibited because they amount to an admission of one’s own weakness and inability. I myself am to blame for my situation; thus I must refuse myself these reactions. It is the tension between self­blame and the need to have a culprit that trigers the unpleasant rift of ressenti­ ment. A “self­poisoning of the mind” indeed, induced by imposing responsibility for “our own lot or condition” where in fact responsibility is structurally rendered impossi­ ble and systematically undermined. Another hint leads us to the specific forms of powerlessness that foment res­ sentiment. While immediate subjugation under a concrete (or even personalized) ruling power provides the “feeling of impotence” with a direction and target, the general and diffuse powerlessness felt in light of structural dynamics of power— typical for the social and economic mechanisms and systematic constraints of (global) capitalism—is difcult to grasp. Thus, ressentiment would be a reaction to a very specific form of experiencing impotence as an anonymous force, the experi­ ence of alienation.33 To be sure, these are only first hints. In order to develop a critical theory of res­ sentiment, we still have to figure out how the transition between social structure and the reactions in question is to be conceptualized and how to conceive of the phenomena in question with respect to the larger social context. If tensions, such as those mentioned by Scheler, are trigering mechanisms for ressentiment, we still have to elaborate on how those tensions are themselves systematically induced. The discrepancy then might turn out not to be a contingent one but to lead to sys­ tematic contradictions constitutive of the societies in question. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 512 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 each other as India, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Brazil, and the United States—to name just a few. (1) First of all, the fact that ressentiment is based on a perceived and relative deprivation and arises against the background of normative expectations and a sense of entitlement may help us to understand the fact that ressentiment­driven mobiliza­ tion cuts across classes and social positions. After all, it is an empirical fact that in most countries that are facing antidemocratic populist movements, ressentiment is located both in well­situated middle­class environments and among those who have actually lost their hopes for a better future. The professor who develops ressenti­ ments against his “woke” students or the CEO who has never been forced to compete with female executives conceive of themselves as “powerless” and deprived, as does the often­evoked “Rust Belt” worker who witnesses how his industrial plant is trans­ formed into a posh coworking area with urban gardening and yoga classes, or the resident of an abandoned rural area who feeds their own grudges against migrants. Awareness of the sense of entitlement that structures the judgment, self­ understanding, and worldview of the bearers of ressentiment provides us with a key here. The “others” (refugees, women, ethnic minorities) do not just get some­ thing. They get something (whether material resources or attention) that they, in the eyes of the bearers of ressentiment, do not deserve. It does not matter whether those with whom one compares oneself are really better off or well off. The yard­ stick used to measure what one deserves is understood not in absolute terms but comparative ones and is based on the discrepancy between what one feels entitled to and what one gets. This explains why the slightest change in public awareness as well as the slightest improvement of life chances for groups and social posi­ tions that have formerly been neglected is perceived as an unfair disadvantage by those with established privileges. Consider the per vasiveness with which hostile feelings are articulated against groups that only recently have gained public rec­ ognition and who have only just begun to achieve fragile successes against their oppressors (as in the #MeToo movement or in Black Lives Matter). Ressentiment, then, can be—and very often is—felt by those who are nei­ ther objectively deprived nor objectively powerless, and it can be directed against those who, objectively speaking, are not in possession of much power themselves and are most certainly not the cause for whatever lack of resources is experi­ enced on the first­order level.35 This is why simply fulfilling the demands of the ressentiment­driven by providing (material or immaterial) resources would not resolve the issue at hand. We may ask the question, then, whether white supremacists have become ressentiment­driven racists as an effect of their relative deprivation, or rather the other way around: Is their sense of deprivation a result of an assumed entitlement that has racist sources in the first place? JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 513 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 As with any social movement, theirs might be based on moral outrage.36 Yet, in their case we are dealing with a ressentiment­driven normative judgment that is based on a sense of entitlement that itself is the result of taken­for­granted privileges (e.g., white privileges, male privileges, class privileges). However, this leads us to the problem of how to distinguish justified outrage from its ressentiment­laced counterpart. More generally, how do we demarcate between social wrongs and the ressentiment­driven perceptions of wrongs? These problems are an invitation to a deeper inquiry into the basis of entitlement. The point here is not to simply deny one kind of entitlement and outrage and afrm the other but to direct the inquiry toward a closer look into the way this feeling of entitlement is gener­ ated. In the case, for example, of the white supremacists, we should look at the social structure and social dynamics that establish and feed inegalitarian dispositions and racist entitlement, on the one hand, while simultaneously destroying solidarity and collective action potentials, on the other.37 This entails neither conceiving of those driven by ressentiment as “racist by nature” nor trivializing or even exculpating them by referring to the deprivations (real or imagined) that they suffer. What it does entail is understanding ressentiment as a social relation. Thus, we cannot simply say that the white supremacists’ racism comes down to either the effects of their relative (perceived) deprivation or their sense of depri­ vation resulting from their feeling of entitlement. Instead, we need to see these as feeding into and off each other. The answer to the question asked above—whether the source of a white­ supremacist ressentiment­driven racism is their relative deprivation or whether their sense of deprivation results from an entitlement stemming from their racism—would then have to reject the question as proposing a wrong dualism. It cannot be one or the other, as one feeds into the other: The sense of entitlement is based on a disposition that is fed by the sense of entitlement and caused by a social structure. (2) The understanding of ressentiment as a second-order affect might, fur­ thermore, help us to understand why the battle against political correctness and so­called cancel culture plays such an irrationally large role in movements as diverse as the German Pegida (and its parliamentary representatives), the French Front National, the US supporters of Trump, and Brazil’s followers of Bolsonaro. All these right­wing populists are obsessed with an alleged “ban on thinking” enforced by a supposed liberal hegemony, which results in, as Wendy Brown puts it, claims for justice being “trivialized and monsterized as ‘political cor­ rectness.’ ”38 The strugle against political correctness and the supposed global domination of a liberal­multicultural hegemonic elite is not some secondary battlefield, as it may appear to us at first sight. (And it is certainly not a rebel­ lious opposition against institutional constraints.)39 Rather, it is the very battle­ CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 514 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 field, the site of conflicts over whose claims for justice are heard (and even whose claims for justice are understood as claims for justice). But why is that so? This is exactly where the second-order character of ressentiment’s powerlessness might shed some light. If ressentiment is generated by (per­ ceived) powerlessness with respect to a state of affairs and a (perceived) ban preventing one from acting on it, in some way the supposed “ban”—that is, the pre­ sumably self­induced imagined prohibition against even expressing one’s anger— seems to overlay and complicate the original feeling of powerlessness. The so­called thought ban imposed by political correctness, then, seems to be an externalization of the internalized prohibition that Scheler and Nietzsche have pointed out. No matter what the origin of the first­order anger and outrage is, this origin is overlaid by what ressentiment perceives as a ban on acting out its indigna­ tion and on those social forces it takes to be responsible for this ban. The supposed “thought ban”—the fact that political correctness prevents people from express­ ing their vindictive and envious feelings toward those whom they believe “don’t deserve” resources, attention, and public recognition—is (and must be) one of the main battlefields since it is the element that turns outrage and the craving for revenge into ressentiment. Political correctness and the cultural liberalization it stands for are thus a primary, not a secondary, problem for its opponents because they mark the place of impotence and the inability to act out indignation. The “ban” on acting out one’s envy and thirst for revenge is conceived of as the cause for the impotence or second­order powerlessness in question. These observations should keep us from prematurely and uncritically buying into the self­understanding and self­victimization of those who interpret themselves as powerless subjects of a global cultural and economic elite. As with their supposed material deprivation, their self­description as powerless against the mainstream cur­ rent of public opinion seems to be detached from their factual situation. It seems that for every advocate of political correctness, or so­called wokeness, there is at least one person who proudly stands up to challenge it, with the well­known taboo­breaking attitude—an interaction we see not just at millions of dinner tables but also as a daily occurrence in the mainstream media and in other powerful social institutions. But for the development of ressentiment, it doesn’t even seem to matter whether the impotence is imagined or real, as even imagined powerlessness trigers ressenti­ ments. And even an imagined ban on thought and speech is enough to create resent­ ment of those who one imagines as powerful enough to enforce such a ban. (3) The grammar, the inner structure, and the operation of ressentiment thus gives us a hint how to understand the frequent displacement of the “enemy” onto freefloating projections and associations as well as the derealization that we frequently observe. Social indignation in its genuine form is directed at the cause of harm. If we are outraged about instances of social injustice, we aim to identify its causes in order to JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 515 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 abolish them (although an attempt to abolish the cause does not mean that the cause was correctly identified). Even the envy­driven thirst for revenge is still directed toward something specific and identifiable. As Scheler pointed out, it can thus come to an end. With ressentiment, however, the feeling of revenge is diverted to increasingly undefined objects, so that there can be no rebuttal, no resolution, not even a vic­ tory. The problem then shifts; it has to find someone who (or something that) is guilty. In this way, it amounts to a general displacement with elements of derealiza­ tion. As Frank Vande Veire points out: “Ressentiment is an undetermined rancor. The man of ressentiment is bitter; he bears a grudge—but against who or what? That is not clear. Against the world, society, mankind? Ressentiment is unfocused. It mainly focuses on an object, but the choice of object is arbitrary; it could be any­ thing.”40 Although I do not agree with Veire that the object “could be anything,” the lack of focus is an important feature of ressentiment. Thus ressentiment becomes potentially unquenchable, unappeasable, eternal, and indeterminate. Envy­driven, I want to harm my rivals, to get what they have achieved, or to destroy what is dear to them. To act out one’s feeling of revenge can resolve the need for revenge.41 No such resolution is available for ressentiment. It becomes increasingly unclear what it would mean for those movements fueled by ressentiment to reach their goals. In a certain sense, it does not even matter whether ressentiment hits “the correct” target (not even to those who hold it). However, this diffuse nature and sometimes unreal character is not an acci­ dental but rather a systematic quality. As “reality” could serve as a constraint, res­ sentiment seems to systematically construct a bubble into which the world can no longer intrude, in which no “sanity check” is possible. Consider, for example, the fact that in Germany the ultra­ethnonationalist and decisively anti­immigrant and antirefugee party called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, or Alternative for Germany) achieves some of their highest results in areas that have rarely been confronted with immigrants or refugees at all. The same holds for some parts of the United States: the fear of “population exchange” (a popular topos in the global white supremacist scene) seems to be especially prevalent when it doesn’t have a counterpart in reality. The more illusionary the alleged “danger,” the more persis­ tent the ressentiment.42 What’s “real” at the end of the day is the ressentiment itself. If “reality” is what strikes back and meets our beliefs, hopes, and fantasies with some kind of resistance (to make a long and complex story short and to offer a deflationary and relatively open definition of reality that could be accepted from a variety of theoretical backgrounds), then a defining feature of ressentiment seems to be the denial of reality and an avoidance of confrontation with reality. Moreover, it seems to be a feature of ressentiment that it not only avoids or denies specific features of reality but goes further and engages in an “irrealization” of reality as such, blurring the very distinction between the real and the unreal itself. The open, CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 516 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 cynical contempt for categories such as reality, truth, and politics as well as the open disdain for “facts” within authoritarian populism is, in this sense, program­ matic. It is striking how well a remark from Adorno’s Minima Moralia (written in 1944, published in 1951) speaks to this situation: “Among today’s adept practition­ ers, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know.”43 This is the setting in which, as Brown observes, the most disgraceful viola­ tions of fundamental values are not met with “shock” but with “a knowing gri­ mace.”44 And it shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that ressentiment comes with a soft spot for the most absurd kinds of theories and an elective afnity to conspir­ acy theories, a farewell to common sense by those who love to depict themselves as “down­to­earth.”45 (4) It has been said that ressentiment­driven movements are eager to identify scapegoats in order to blame someone for what’s bothering them. Having obtained a grasp of the basic layout of ressentiment’s anatomy, we are in a position to make sense of those sometimes striking misjudgments. The need to designate scape­ goats itself is based on the very fact that ressentiment has a normative structure, that it works with the (perceived) discrepancy between merit and refusal. As a nor­ mative feeling, it must be based on the attribution of responsibility. Where no one is or can be made responsible—remember the case of purely natural disasters or purely contingent bad luck—ressentiment will find no foundation. In Nietzsche’s words: “Someone or other must be responsible for my feeling ill.”46 To single out a scapegoat, then, means to take someone or something as a representation of and substitute for another, to pronounce someone guilty who is innocent and thereby to misrepresent a certain state of affairs. Ressentiment is frequently characterized by delusions about the causal mechanisms that are at work,47 causal mechanisms that are responsible for one’s own suffering, misrecog­ nition, or sense of displacement. And again, the right­wing obsession with gender issues is telling here. It is more than obvious that equal rights for LGBTQ+ people do not harm anybody (certainly not economically) since this is neither a question of divisible goods nor another kind of zero­sum game; it is also obvious that no jobs are coming back to the American Rust Belt or to the German coal industry if queer couples cannot adopt children or transgender persons are not allowed to join the army. Moreover, the (at least relatively) greater attention paid to so­called identity issues and questions of diversity does not stand in a causal relation to the neglect of other (social) problems, as some people constantly would like to make us believe.48 To construct a direct competition here is blatantly absurd. So why does this propaganda work? The simple psychology of blaming someone who is easier to attack than those with real power is effective here, for sure, but it is only one part of the answer. It is accompanied by the more general need to control the The Social Function of Ressentiment The anatomy of ressentiment provides us with insights into its mechanisms but also gives us a clue about its social function. Ressentiment might be systemati­ cally unfocused, projectively displaced in its orientation, and not aiming at any direct resolution or even at the enforcement of the rational self­interest among those who hold it. But, as I’ve said, in spelling out the apparent aimlessness and apparent irrationality of ressentiments, one should not assume that they don’t have solid social causes or an inner logic as well as solid consequences. If reality is obstructed and twisted here, this doesn’t mean that there is nothing at stake. Ressentiment is cer tainly socially effective, with effects that fulfill cer tain “real” social functions. If ressentiment against the liberal­feminist­queer­multicultural mafia does not restore jobs in the Rust Belt but rather brings Trump to power and thus leads to the loss of affordable health insurance for millions of people, inquiring into the grammar of ressentiment has led us to uncover its “functions of a second order.” It is not the lack of (first­order) resources that ressentiment will provide a solution for but the second­order “suffering” from the inability to express one’s outrage and to address one’s sense of displacement and powerlessness. Although it might seem increasingly unclear what benefits are to be gained from liv ing out one’s ressentiment, one should not jump to such a conclusion. Instead, one needs to be aware of ressentiment as a crucial element in a more general ideological defense mechanism. When the limits of order begin to break down (as, for example, in the dissolution of gender identities and the respec­ tive forms of life as well as national borders threatened by immigration), the precarious work and life situation as well as the more generalized experience of impotence and precarious social orientation brings forth the desire to be “master in one’s own house” (Build a wall! Take back control!) again, however delusional this desire might be. Authoritarian ressentiment, then, is urgently JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 517 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 diffuse sense of being ruled by alien forces through attributing guilt and responsi­ bility. Singling out a scapegoat frequently means personalizing, where the assump­ tion of personal responsibility in fact is out of place. “Scapegoating,” then, is not only a misconception of the specific target; it is a misconception of the kind of social mechanisms that are in place. The decisive point though is that identifying scapegoats in the case of ressentiment does not simply consist in a shift from the real culprit to the scapegoat; to attribute personal responsibility at all is already a simplifying maneuver. A paradoxical structure: the more concrete it appears, the more illusionary it becomes. (By the way: the tendency to personalize is already one of the characteristics that Adorno and his coauthors attributed to the “author­ itarian personality.”49) CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 518 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 directed against those who are blamed for hav ing violated and dissolved “the sanctity of the home” and the established and naturalized self­understandings of the social order, as Sabine Hark and Paula Villa argue.50 So, if a scapegoat in some sense “could be anyone,” it is still not contingent which group is sought out and blamed.51 Even if a number of functional equivalents are available, they are still serv ing a function and thus are not random. Now, if the diffuse character and plasticity of ressentiment allow one to pro­ ject this experience onto groups that, for some reason or another, are well suited to adopting the role of those who have taken power “from us” or have turned “our homeland” into a strange place, ressentiment restores an illusionary feeling of being at home. The mechanism here seems to be: if we have a culprit, someone who is responsible for our loss, our transcendental and not­so­transcendental “home­ lessness”, then, by implication, the possibility of a “home,” of being at home in a nation, for example, must still exist. Ressentiment thus has a defensive but also stabilizing function, however much it may be based on misguided projections, and however illusory the ideals at stake have become. Contrary to those interpretations that argue that right­wing populists are somehow “heading in the wrong direction but for the right kind of reasons,”52 both the direction and the reasons then become questionable. If, on the one hand, when it comes to these reasons, according to a well­known story, we find social depriva­ tion, the story of ressentiment has turned out to be more complicated. The author­ itarian direction, on the other hand, seems to be a more­than­contingent out­ come and a more­than­contingent solution to the problem. Ressentiment points to a problem that first and foremost is already framed in an inadequate way by those who harbor ressentiments. In other words, it is a wrong answer to a prob­ lem that is already framed in an inadequate way, a problem that is already wrongly perceived—which is why the strategy, defended by some (some of them: former) leftists, to only redirect the answer (in order to arrive at an emancipatory solution) is misleading.53 But now, as much as the concept can illuminate certain dimensions of our con­ temporary situation, does it actually explain them?54 In order to develop a critical theory of ressentiment—an analysis and critique of our ressentiment­driven age— we must deepen and pursue the normative as well as explanatory questions that are at stake here. On an explanatory level we should ask: How does ressentiment come about, and what are its causes and functions within the larger context of a given society and a given historical situation? How is it affected by social structures, and how does it, in turn, lend stability to them? Is ressentiment an outcome of inner tensions or even contradictions built into our social structures? And finally: Is it a symptom of the breakdown of society—or rather one of the means to fortify the structures of social domination and the dysfunctional functionality of an ongoing 4. Ressentiment as Regressive Problem-Solving and the Cementing of Powerlessness What, then, is wrong with ressentiment? Does the reference to ressentiment pro­ vide us with tools for (normatively) differentiating between emancipatory and nonemancipatory social movements, as I asked at the beginning? That is, is the ref­ erence to the ressentiment­driven character of a social movement helpful for iden­ tifying it as problematic? And in what sense would that be so? It has been argued that ressentiment­driven social reactions are the exact opposite of emancipatory social movements.55 Indeed, ressentiment is authoritar­ ianism in the guise of antiauthoritarianism, the decline of the political in the guise of politicization,56 moral indifference and cruelty in the guise of moral indignation, conspiracy with existing structures of domination in the guise of antielitism, and escape from freedom claiming the status of a fight for freedom. But, apart from the repulsive normative content that we find here, is there something wrong with ressentiment as such? Is there a way to criticize ressenti­ ment as ressentiment? Not its specific content but the way it is constituted as res­ sentiment? Is it only the content that is transported via ressentiment or something about the mode of reaction in itself that is normatively problematic? Perhaps my question needs further elaboration. All social movements, it has been argued, are driven by outrage and indignation. We can examine them and can distinguish emancipatory from nonemancipatory movements in terms of the legitimacy of their content and demands. Or else we distinguish them on the basis of how these positions are formed and how the mobilization of the corresponding movement proceeds.57 We can, in other words, judge ressentiment on the basis of what it stands for, or we can inquire into (and judge) how it proceeds. Ressentiment would then be not only unjustified in terms of its normative content but flawed as a mode of reaction. It is, as I will sugest, not just wrong but regressive. It is the regressive aspect of those movements that renders them wrong or inad­ equate, and it is the translation of “wrong”—a strictly normative assessment— into “inadequate”—an assessment that in addition to its wrongness refers to JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 519 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 crisis? This leads to the need for a social theory in which ressentiment as a social phenomenon and problem would be embedded. However, to turn ressentiment into a useful concept for a critical theory, we also need to inquire into the normative standards that underlie our judgment of res­ sentiment and ressentiment­driven social movements. As much as accusing some­ one of ressentiment already carries pejorative and contemptuous undertones, it is less obvious than one would think what the normative evaluation refers to—or what kind of normative judgment it is. This is where “regression” comes in. As I will argue, the reference to regression will provide us with an answer to both questions, the social theoretical as well as the normative. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 520 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 irrationality—that bears some weight here. So, if ressentiment is “fundamen­ tally reactive,” what does it react to, and in what respect is it an inadequate and, as such, regressive kind of reaction? And what does this imply for the concept of regression? Let me sort out some aspects that point to the inner limitations and contradic­ tions of movements driven by ressentiment: Ressentiment, as the “cultivation of powerlessness,”58 stabilizes the existing social order in a paradoxical way (at the same time undermining and stabilizing it).59 Ressentiment does not aim at changing the world; the framework from which it emerges does not, in the end, delegitimize and transform the social order but rein­ forces it. If ressentiment is a reaction to a (felt) loss of power, it will only enhance powerlessness. This is because ressentiment redirects and diverts attention.60 Blam­ ing the scapegoat means missing the real, effective cause. If ressentiment is characterized by a delusion about the causal mechanisms at work, a delusion about the mechanisms that are made responsible for one’s own suffering, misrecognition, or sense of displacement, it seems to be stuck in a reactive attitude that in turn enhances rather than diminishes the loss of control that ressentiment­fueled movements claim to resist. The mechanisms of ressentiment are inadequate or inappropriate reactions then since they cement instead of challenge the power structures in place. What is wrong with ressentiment is thus the fact that it conceals and undermines rather than enables collective (emancipatory) action. But inappropriate reactions to what? If ressentiment is based on a Kausaltäuschung, a misconception or delusion about causes, what then are the effective causes? If ressentiment is a distortion of reality, what is real? And if it misrepresents the interests of those it seeks to mobilize, what are (their) real interests?61 As I noted earlier, I sugest working with a concept of reality as that which confronts us. This confrontation can, I sugest, be spelled out in a pragmatist spirit as the emergence of, and confrontation with, problems.62 If ressentiment is a denial and blockage of reality, it is a denial and blockage of problems that arise, problems and crises that we individually and collectively are confronted with in the societies in question. This is what I sugest we conceive of as regression. So, what ressentiment, understood as a mode of regression, denies, misrepresents, and/or distorts is not “reality” as such; it is the problems and crises that it reacts to, although in a distorted way. What’s wrong with ressentiment, then, is that (under­ lying its inability to enable collective emancipatory action) it is an inadequate and misleading reaction to a crisis. Moreover, it not only fails to solve the problems in question; it even fails to specify and articulate them in an appropriate manner. Res­ sentiment thus falls into the category of a second­order pathology. The emergence of ressentiment is not just an effect of a crisis, it is a crisis of crisis resolution.63 5. Ressentiment as a Mode of Regression In short then, my thesis is the following: reactions that are characterized by ressentiment are inadequate because they are regressive ways to confront (or in fact: avoid) problems and crises.66 This, of course, needs further spelling out. My answer as to what I mean by an inadequate response to problems and crises is, again, very roughly, this: ressentiment is a regressive blockage of experience, an example of the deaccumulation of experience, or a deficient reaction to crisis. The answer to the question “What JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 521 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 Let me clarify one methodological point here, before I go on: I am per­ fectly aware that the existence and emergence of “problems” or crises is not a brute fact. Whether or not we are confronted with a problem is itself a matter of interpretation—and of perspective. The question of whether a problem has been solved, or whether it has even been addressed on an adequate level, will be a matter of dispute as well.64 What will count as a solution to a problem or as crisis resolu­ tion from one perspective—build the wall, turn the European borders into a death zone for those who seek refuge—is a denial of reality from another perspective. But if problems and solutions depend on interpretation, how can we judge res­ sentiment as a deficient mode of problem­solving? My answer, briefly put, is that problems are both objective and subjective. They are simultaneously given and made. The fact that problems must first be understood as problems does not mean that they are “only constructed.” Problems “call out” as ways in which the practical sphere is confronted with obstacles without already having acquired the particular form that characterizes a “problem.” With this, we can resolve what looks like a paradoxical description of problems. A problem is given insofar as a situation provides indica­ tions of a crisis. It is made insofar as the identification of something as a problem “makes” something out of inchoate material. In other words, a problem cannot be constructed “out of nothing.” It must be based on something “independent of us” that makes itself known through a disturbance. For this reason, problems cannot be simply talked away or ignored. Whether a problem is accurately interpreted and its ostensible solution successful can be seen by whether the “pressure” created by the problem lets up. And even when that is a question of interpretation as well, the determination of the “real content of a problem” works through a process of adjust­ ment and readjustment of problem and problem description.65 For those who seek—or deny—ultimate foundations and a stable normative reference point for a critical theory, this will look like a mere shift of the argument and a vicious circle. I would, however, like to put it this way: we will not achieve something more stable than this—and it is exactly the realm opened up by this shift in which the kind of arguments are taking place that I take to be informative from a normative as well as from an analytical and descriptive point of view. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 522 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 is the problem with ressentiment?” is this: it is problematic insofar as it is both an expression of a socially induced blockage of experience and, in turn, a cause of such blockages and the accompanying blockages of action. Ressentiment, like ide­ ology, is a mechanism that prevents the causes of ressentiment (the indignation­ causing injustice and powerlessness) from being addressed. It thus leads to a struc­ tural inability to act and to a systematic destruction of what Frankfurt School mem­ ber Franz Neumann has already understood as sozialer Erfahrungsfähigkeit, the loss of the ability to make social experiences.67 Getting back to one of my earlier examples, the abolition of political correct­ ness would not bring back workplaces in the Rust Belts of our world. The truth is, there is actually nothing that will bring them back, no matter how well the liberal left behaves. Ressentiment is a “mode of regression” because (and insofar as) it is an effect of denial and helps to avoid the “reality check” that would come with the insight into the character of the transformation that we undergo (and the contra­ dictions and multiple crises we live through under capitalism). This is what explains the regressive character of ressentiment on an even deeper level: it is regressive since it is related to a widespread tendency not to confront these challenges, a ten­ dency that is not restricted to the so­called left­behinds.68 The situation of the Rust Belt (which I am adopting as representative for a broader tendency) is an effect of deep social transformations such as the transformation of old­school industrial capitalism (or, let’s say, Fordism) into digital­cognitive and financialized capitalism and the accompanying transformation of a whole form of life, including the deval­ uation (and delegitimatization) of skills and habits achieved. Ressentiment, in this case, is a factor in blocking the truth that the Rust Belt cannot simply be brought back. It blocks the truth (and prevents reality from hit­ ting) since it is successfully making up a scapegoat for the suffering and losses, the unwelcomed and unprepared­for changes in a whole way of life. And it binds and redirects emotional energies and capacities to act (on one’s anger). Ressenti­ ment (as mode of regression) leads to a situation in which we hold on to forms of life struck by crises without recognizing these crises and the immanent reasons that led to them. If “regression,” put briefly, is a deficient mode of reaction to prob­ lems and crises, a mode of reaction based on denial, those tendencies are regres­ sive because they block the appropriate confrontation with a social dynamic that in fact cannot be avoided but only shaped (gestaltet) in an emancipatory manner. Movements fueled by ressentiment then are symptoms of a crisis. They are not simply morally wrong and outrageous (which they certainly are); they cannot be reduced to some kind of unexpected and contingent falling back from “progres­ sive” achievements.69 I agree with Wendy Brown that we should not buy into the (liberal) narrative that “Western civilization, otherwise on the path of progress, is in a bout of regression.”70 However, contrary to her thesis that the concepts and theories involved are either “blinding”71 or of no help, I hold that it is only through a reconstruction of those concepts that we can preserve the diagnostic and critical potentials of Critical Theory, escape moralism, and bring social analysis back into the diagnosis of our times.72 JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 523 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 6. Regression as a Crisis in Confronting Crises But what exactly is regression? At first sight, it makes a lot of sense to grasp our world situation in terms of regression. If social progress in some parts of the world has been marked by the extension of human and civil rights to previously excluded social groups (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQI+ people) and by the (legal) cod­ ification and facilitation of forms of life that were previously marginalized by a dominant “Leitkultur” (“leading culture”), as it is called in Germany,73 then there is a clear danger of regressing when the increasingly destructive hatred of those social transformations becomes widespread and reaches the so­called political center. If the expansion of the welfare state (forced throughout Europe during its post­ war development) counts as social progress, then the dismantling of the welfare state must be a case of regression. And, on an even greater time scale, if it has been regarded as a historical progress within certain parts of the world that governmen­ tal power is not exercised arbitrarily and directly but mediated by constitutionally secured authorities and generally accepted constitutional and democratic proce­ dures, then it is not a stretch to interpret the governing style of Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others as a relapse from historical achievements. (As I am revising this essay, Putin’s war on Ukraine seems to be the most dramatic and monstrous exam­ ple of a tendency to regress.) But it is not that simple—especially if the term “regression” should mean something more than the fact that we are confronted with a number of highly unpleasant contemporary phenomena and trends that are bad, disastrous, and even dangerous. If taken seriously, the concept of regression comes with a whole host of implications, with strong presuppositions that not everyone who uses the concept might be willing to defend. What, then, is regression? Regression is not a linear relapse behind an achieved state; rather, regressions are, as I will argue, complex processes of unlearning. They undercut enrichment and experiential pro­ cesses and render them impossible. Without offering a complete theory of regres­ sion (or its relation to its sister concept, progress),74 I shall briefly point to its essen­ tial features. (1) Regression is not a simple step backward in the sense of a simple return to a previous state. Whereas a conservative or nostalgic attachment to old practices or institutions might be harmless and whereas restoring past practices as a result of insights into the unwished­for side effects of new ones can be the result of a learn­ ing process, regression is based on a denial with compensatory functions. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 524 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 A remark by Adorno provides a clue to this mechanism: “The arbitrary con­ servation of the obsolete compromises what it wants to conserve, and with a bad conscience it obdurately opposes whatever is new.”75 (2) Regression is not the falling back behind a certain state of affairs but the falling back behind a historically achieved condition or mode of experience. It is not forgetting what we had already known but an unlearning, a kind of undoing of an accumulative experiential process that affects the possibilities for further experience, for learning. If one goes “back,” the situation will not be the same as before. There is no chronologically prior state that one can go back to without con­ sequences. Strictly speaking, the former condition doesn’t even exist anymore. The regressive wish to restore a previous state is thus in vain: regression is an “unlearn­ ing” that is not simply a forgetting, not even a motivated forgetting. Rather, as unlearning, it is consequential—and as such it is false and a deficient mode of con­ fronting crises. To understand the difference, Adorno, in the context of his critique of fetishism in music and a regression in listening, describes the childish tenden­ cies of regressed listeners: “Their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly repressed. Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the naging possibility. The regres­ sion is really from this existent possibility.”76 (3) Regression is not just the breakdown of a previously achieved state of affairs. It is a self­made problem that reveals an already deficient dynamic. Not every form of setback in (social or moral) achievements, even if they are regretta­ ble or terrible, follows the pattern of social regression. Indeed, moments of relapse, the waning or deteriorating of improvements, can happen anytime; they are even more likely than unlikely. Social advances often face obstacles. Yet, whether they are blocked or simply left unenforced, these dif­ culties do not mean the end of the road. What Trump has abolished, Biden could— in principle—enforce again. If the new law on rent control in Berlin has failed for the time being, a new attempt to enforce it is not ruled out in principle. Many of the historically known phases of restoration have been replaced by renewed reform processes. If, in those cases, a new practice or institution fails to gain acceptance or a reform is reversed, it is because it faces external obstacles. Resistance of all kinds is, then, greater than expected; practical implementation encounters problems that make progress impossible for the time being; there are opponents of a reform or innovation who gain the upper hand. Regressions are different: regressive set­ backs are based on internal, self­generated, and systematic blockages of a devel­ opment. They are complexly interwoven with sociostructural moments that cause, make probable, or (more cautiously) at least sugest the corresponding regression. If it is possible to move forward again after mere setbacks because the program of JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 525 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 change itself is not affected by them, regressive processes are different, as they are the result of an internal dynamic and profound obstacles. If, for example, one inter­ prets the erosion of the European welfare state model as a symptom of a regressive modernity (as the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey does), then one means that this modernity has refused further reflexive developments, has not been able to learn from unintended side effects, has not been able to balance antagonisms, and has not reflected on its own limitations (for example, in its nation­based restriction and gender­based exclusions). Likewise, the political tendency toward authoritar­ ianism, which is evident in many nation­states around the world, from Turkey to Hungary to Brazil, would be a regression precisely if it could be shown that this development does not affect democracy from the outside but must be explained in terms of its internal deficits, as a reaction to a self­induced crisis and to structurally existing deficits. My proposal is now to understand regression as a specific kind of blockage of experience. Regression is, then, a processual and temporal concept, aimed at identify­ ing deficits or dislocations in crisis­prone, problem­solving processes. Regressive unlearning consists in not being able to tackle newly emerging problems within a history of attempts at problem­solving. There are thus crises, attempts at problem­solving, and crises of problem­ solving. But there are also fundamental epistemological crises in which there is not only the difculty of finding a solution (which is why the crisis persists or the problem remains unresolved) but also a crisis with the existing ways, possi­ bilities, and resources of problem­solving. These problem­solving crises, when systematically and structurally established, lead to regressions. Regressions therefore refer to blocked processes of experience within which it is impossible to address problems in the appropriate manner and at the level at which they occurred. Regression is a crisis in confronting and coping with crises (eine Krise der Krisenbewältigung). If a successful learning process always includes a moment of “learning how to learn,” it can be said of regressive processes that they involve unlearning how to learn. In contrast to the temporary setback, the reaction to a regressive process must therefore not merely consist of a spirited encore un effort. It must reflect and work through the reasons for the regressive development. Regres­ sion afflicts the very practice and possibility of moving for ward again, and it takes more than resuming the pre vious project to overcome regression. It would thus be misleading to try to combat regression by returning to the status quo, when the status quo itself contains the seeds of regression, when the reasons for regression are inherent in it. Without assuming that one can draw immediate inferences leading from the individual psyche to social entities, the concept of regression used in psychoanalysis Regression as a Critical Concept So, what were they aiming at, what are the implications of using “regression” as an analytical as well as critical tool, and what does this tell us about the three demands for useful critical concepts that I stipulated at the beginning? I want to highlight a couple of points here. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 526 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 and the dynamics that Freud identified in psychic activity are informative in specify­ ing the structure of regression.77 If regression means the return of a patient to earlier, childlike, “and thus more primitive modes of experience and processing,” then, of course, the prior state the patient regresses to is not the original mode of childhood experience. It doesn’t turn the patient into a child but into someone who reappropri­ ates childlike reactions and modes of behavior. But why is this even a problem? Obvi­ ously, there is nothing wrong with being a child. It is the developmental direction that is problematic here, the process and the distortion of an assumed process (and progress) toward maturity. There is, in other words, nothing wrong with the sub­ stance, the behavior itself. It is the effect and the function that the behavior in ques­ tion has that renders it problematic. This kind of relapse is problematic because (and inasmuch as) it is an inadequate reaction to a given situation, a denial of reality (as I earlier noted of ressentiment). Regression in psychoanalytic terms occurs because of an inability to access other (more appropriate?) modes of conflict resolution. Regres­ sion is trigered by unresolved crises or problems (and sometimes by confrontation with traumatic experiences), while its opposite, the more highly structured, “grown­ up” mode of functioning, signals the progressive resolution of conflict at the level of their emergence and the biographically (developmental, personality­based) achieved mode of conflict resolution. To continue on this track with respect to social formations and structures, the early history of Critical Theory is instructive. As is well known, it was partly the confrontation with European fascism that led the authors of the early Frankfurt School to move from a more classical (and more orthodox) Marxist critique of cap­ italism to what has become their characteristic feature: a comprehensive critique of instrumental reason and reification and a relentless self­critique of modernity. Now, even if neither Adorno nor Horkheimer are prone to an all­too­easygoing his­ torical optimism, neither in empirical terms (how could they be?) nor in terms of their philosophical approach, “regression” had an important if not unambiguous place in their philosophical vocabulary. To them, fascism was a regressive phenome­ non. In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer regarded the development of German society toward National Socialism, if one wants to shorten it into a slogan, as the regres­ sion of a whole society. They argued that this regressive reaction had its roots in unsolved conflicts and crises that extended from the Enlightenment all the way to what they conceived of as European capitalist modernity.78 JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 527 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 (1) The first point is a methodological one. It affects the kind of concept that is in play here and the way it works as a critical concept. In analyzing fascism as “regression,” Horkheimer and Adorno not only criticized the absolute evil and cru­ elty of fascist practices and institutions (although, of course, they also believe this to be true). They were saying something more and different: they criticized fascism as a false, deficient, and disastrous development due to social­structural causes that produced social­structural atrocities. What is important for my point is that regression is not a freestanding normative evaluation, the application of a norma­ tive criterion, which, like a yardstick, is imposed on social reality. At the same time, it is, without doubt, a normative concept. The concept of regression aims at simultaneously analyzing the social conditions under evaluation and developing a critical standpoint out of this analysis. Fascism is analyzed in and with this evaluation—and criticized in and with this analysis. Regression is thus more informative than a merely normative concept; it has, I claim, a “surplus value” against freestanding normative judgments. It meets the condition that I set out at the beginning—namely, that concepts within critical the­ ory should be normative but not merely moralizing. (This, admittedly, is inspired by a long­standing left­Hegelian tradition in critical theory that does not go with­ out saying but cannot be defended here as such.) (2) The second point hints at the demand for a structural analysis I stipu­ lated above. Regression is a crisis diagnosis. Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize that fascism is not some relapse into premodern, “barbaric,” or uncivilized condi­ tions, as some of their contemporaries sugest. On the contrary, they take Benja­ min’s dictum that the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical”79 as the starting point of their reflections. Benjamin distanced himself from the liberal progressive view that could only understand the emergence of fascism as an intrusion of barbarism into an otherwise civilized world. Fascism was possible today and only today. (And this was not only because it carried out the mass extermination of human beings on an industrial scale and organized it with the most modern logistic means.) The relapse into “barbarism,”80 understood as regression, is not a step back to premod­ ern conditions. To the contrary: it is specifically modern. “As a rebellion against civ­ ilization, fascism is not simply the reoccurrence of the archaic but its reproduction in and by civilization itself.”81 “Modern barbarism” does not transport a specific type of social organization into another era, and barbarism is also not an anthropological constant that bursts out like a force of nature under given historical formations. It is a new phenome­ non that historically developed on its own, one in which certain historical experi­ ences are “preserved” and reflected—a reaction to unresolved problems, to unre­ solved contradictions and crises, but in a regressive way. 7. The Problem with Regression I have attempted to indicate the benefits of the concept of regression as a tool for critical theory. However, the concept of regression shares an essential problem with that of progress (of which it is the flip side). Doesn’t talk of regression presup­ pose a problematic logic of development—and can it really free itself from a notion of “maturity” that runs the risk of falling back into a teleological framework and implies paternalism and ethnocentric imperialism? Admittedly the use of the concept of regression implies the idea of a self­ enriching process of historical experience, an accumulative process, and its coun­ terpart: the probability and danger of deaccumulation. But this is not the same as defending progress as a linear path to a preestablished goal—and vice versa, seeing regression as falling off this path. The tropes of accumulation and deaccumula­ tion sugest that social experiences can react to each other, or follow one another, either in a productive way or in a manner that is not productive or self­enriching but destructive. If regression, then, is not a linear decline, this is because we are dealing with conditions that are as they are because they emerged out of each other, reacting to the specific deficits of the former situation (Hegelians would call this a “determinate negation”). As for the accusations of Eurocentrism and imperialism, it is important to distinguish between the synchronic and the diachronic levels. Regression (as a reconstructed and deflated notion of progress) is path­dependent. German society regresses into National Socialism, European society into fascism, and European modernity into barbarism. This is primarily a radical self­criticism of European modernity, not a disqualification of the non­Western world. Without giving up on every version of a “developmental plot,” this allows for a multiplicity of paths whose entanglement has to be analyzed in a next step. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 528 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 What the term regression evaluates, then, is the course of a specific historical development—the course of a crisis­prone dynamic of transformation. Fascism, analyzed as a regressive tendency, is the result of a deficient development that fol­ lows a certain logic, albeit neither deterministically nor one­dimensionally. To understand fascism as a kind of regression thus means that it is an inade­ quate, regressive mechanism of crisis management. Whether we describe this cri­ sis as a crisis of modernity, a crisis of capitalism, or a crisis of reason does not mat­ ter to me at this point. What matters is that behind this a firm idea of crisis and its dynamics emerges, as well as a clear notion of how such a crisis emerges and how it would be possible to handle it nonregressively. “Socialism or barbarism”—that was Rosa Luxemburg’s resolute and, unfortunately, not entirely outdated description of this alternative. RAHEL JAEGGI is professor of social and political philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the director of the Center for Humanities and Social Change in Berlin. She has taught as a visiting professor at Yale University, Fudan University in Shanghai, and the New School for Social Research in New York and was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Selected publications include Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (coauthored with Nancy Fraser, 2018), Critique of Forms of Life (2018), and Alienation (2014). Acknowledgments The very first version of this paper was presented at the conference “The End(s) of Democracy,” held in São Paulo in November 2017, organized by Vladimir Safatle, Natalia Brizuela, and Judith Butler. For a variety of reasons, I have repeatedly had to delay the revision of the paper for pub­ lication. Since November 2017, of course, the political situation has changed in some respects. I do fear, though, that the problems of regression and ressentiment will outlive the Trump era and will only worsen under pandemic conditions. With respect to the concept of ressentiment (less so with respect to that of regression), quite a lot more has been said in the meantime. I have done my best to integrate those thoughts in my paper. Thanks to everyone who has commented on the paper during the long period when it was pending, especially to Isette Schuhmacher, Lukas Kübler, Carina Nagel, Gelareh Shapar, James Ingram, Robin Celikates, Didier Fassin, Nancy Fraser, Louis Leary, Livia von Samson, and Marvin Ester. I am also very thankful to the two anonymous referees for Critical Times who have forced me to substantially revise the previ­ ous version, even if our disagreements remain. Notes 1. Butler and Hark, “Die Verleumdung”; translation mine. 2. Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” 70. 3. Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” 69. 4. Vogl, Kapital und Ressentiment. 5. These developments have taken on quite different forms in different places in the globalized world, and they might not have one single cause and one definite logic, but they show surprising similarities and some common patterns. JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 529 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 If I, in order to differentiate emancipatory from non­ or even antiemancipa­ tory social movements, sugest that we should translate this distinction into one between regressive and nonregressive social movements, I am thus not buying into a vindicatory narrative of Western civilization as progress.82 The requirement for a philosophical account of regression (and progress) is to get past the teleological mode. This is what my problem­oriented approach is supposed to achieve. If a tele­ ological mode of thinking presupposes a definite goal, the pragmatist deflation turns regression into what Étienne Balibar allows us to understand as a mobile, context­bound category of resistance.83 If now ressentiment is one of various modes of regression, our resistance to it has to be anchored in an analysis of the crises that are thus regressively avoided. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 530 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 14. 15. The concept of emancipation itself will be met with reservation by some critical theorists— but I cannot address all the variables in question at the same time. Geiselberger, Great Regression. In their recent book Die demokratische Regression, Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn framed their contribution to the debate in terms of regression as well. Sluga, Politics. Haslanger, “What Is a Social Practice?,” 232. Haslanger, Resisting Reality. van Tuinen, Polemics of Ressentiment, 5. It is interesting in this context that Nietzsche takes over the concept of ressentiment from Eugen Dühring’s Der Wert des Lebens (The Value of Life)—however, as Frank Nullmeier and Henning Ottmann note, with a changed significance (Nullmeier, Politische Theorie des Sozialstaat, 42; Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche). If, for Dühring, ressentiment is a reaction to experiences of social injury and thus a “motor of moral development”—that is, roughly, the motive of moral indignation—Nietzsche turns this motive around by identifying the “revenge” at the core of morality. Scheler, Ressentiment. While Richard Rorty (among many others) famously denounced the concept as politically useless, the debate on ideology has gained momentum again within critical theory—in some way transcending the boundaries between classical Marxist approaches and other methodologies, such as, for example, analytic and postanalytic philosophy. This work is focused partly on the need to understand the persistence of racist and sexist dispositions. See, for instance, the work of Tommie Shelby, Sally Haslanger, Jason Stanley, Titus Stahl, and Robin Celikates. For an earlier defense of ideology along the lines of immanent critique, see Jaegi, “Rethinking Ideology.” By writing Critical Theory with a capital C and a capital T—thus as a proper name—I mean to refer to Critical Theory as a tradition of social critique as it has evolved in the context of the Frankfurt School, with its founding moment at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931; its founding fathers (unfortunately only fathers) Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, among others; and its intellectual origins in a mix of Marx, Freud, and Max Weber. “We” in the context of my essay means: we who want to use the concept of ressentiment within the context of a critical theory determined to stand up against the described tendencies and to bring about emancipatory social change. Wallace, Normativity and the Will, 217. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 37. Scheler writes: In the natural meaning of the French word I detect two elements. First of all, ressenti­ ment is the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reac­ tion against someone else. The continual reliving of the emotion sinks it more deeply into the center of the personality, but concomitantly removes it from the person’s zone of action and expression. It is not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it “responded”—it is a re­experiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling. Secondly, the word implies that the quality of this emo­ tion is negative, that is, that it contains a movement of hostility. (Ressentiment, 2) This is the difference between resentment (as in Strawson’s famous essay) and ressentiment. JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 531 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 22. Following Harry Frankfurt, I consider wishes and desires of a “second order” when they have other desires or wishes as their content. The classical example is my desire not to long for a cigarette, that is: my second­order desire to render my first­order desire ineffective. See, famously, Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” 23. See R. Jay Wallace’s excellent “Ressentiment, Value, and Self­Vindication,” where he writes: If everyone was equally subject to a condition in which he is denied coveted goods—as for instance in a natural emergency, such as a devastating famine or earthquake—the result might be a tendency to feelings of rage, frustration, and depression in the popu­ lace at large, but not the kind of focused hatred characteristic of ressentiment. For the latter emotions to emerge, there need to be some people who are singled out from the rest in not being deprived of the coveted goods, and who are publicly known not to be deprived. The ur­context of ressentiment is one in which some people have things that you very much desire, but that you lack and feel yourself unable ever to obtain. . . . Res­ sentiment is fundamentally occasioned by invidious comparisons of this kind. (Normativity and the Will, 218) 24. See Jensen, Zornpolitik, 40. 25. Scheler, Ressentiment, 6; emphasis added. 26. Scheler wrote: Ressentiment is a self­poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and conse­ quences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. Thirst for revenge is the most important source of ressentiment. As we have seen, the very term “ressentiment” indi­ cates that we have to do with reactions which presuppose the previous apprehension of another person’s state of mind. (Ressentiment, 4) A primary source, mainly a desire for revenge, is here repressed. In a similar vein Nietzsche describes the psychological mechanism of ressentiment as “Einverseelung” (Genealogy of Morals, 292) of the tension produced by the original conflict since the natural way out (“der natürlichere Ausweg”; Genealogy of Morals, 332) is blocked. 27. “When it is repressed, vindictiveness leads to ressentiment, a process which is intensified when the imagination of vengeance, too, is repressed—and finally the very emotion of revenge itself ” (Scheler, Ressentiment, 7). 28. I deliberately avoid the more demanding attribution of responsibility at this point since the character and strength of the connection are exactly what is at stake when I ask for the explanatory force of the concept. 29. As Jay Wallace seems to sugest: Envy grows into ressentiment when ordinary rectification of this kind is (believed to be) impossible, because one is systematically prevented by one’s nature or one’s cir­ cumstances from acquiring the things that one so covetously desires. . . . The process through which ordinary envy turns into the kind of personal animus involved in ressentiment cannot plausibly be traced to any further emotion or complex of ideas. It seems to me a primitive mechanism, one that can perhaps be understood to reflect our deeply social nature, our nearly obsessive concern for our relative standing within local and less local communities. (Normativity and the Will, 219) 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 532 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 35. Ressentiment is rather, to use Fred Neuhouser’s term, a “pathology of self­love” and a patho­ logical kind of comparison that leads to and is a reaction to social pathologies. Ressenti­ ment would then be a constant possibility and danger but not a universal condition. For the pathology of self­love in Rousseau, see Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love. Scheler, Ressentiment, 7; emphasis added. Scheler, Ressentiment, 7–8; emphasis added. See Vogelmann, Spell of Responsibility. For the concept of alienation as powerlessness, see Jaegi, Alienation. For political alienation see Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics.” I don’t mean to be comprehensive here; nor do I think that the reference to ressentiment explains everything that can and should be said about those movements. This also helps us to understand how ressentiments can be directed at the elites and at those in an even less fortunate situation than oneself at the same time (in a striking analogy to anti­Semitism), as it includes both the perceived wrong in comparison to an oppressed group and the ban on action imposed by said group in cahoots with the elites. See, for this claim, a long tradition in social history, starting with Barrington Moore. Joseph Vogl’s brilliant book Kapital und Ressentiment, for example, conceives of capitalist societies as “structured according to ressentiment” (“ressentimental strukturiert”) and analyzes how the compulsory need to compare and evaluate serves as a rich resource for the functioning of capitalist competitive societies (164). Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 7. It should be added here that the focus on those issues is also always driven by legitimation, plausibilization, and “talking points” of more or less strategically acting media institutions (such as Fox News in the United States). See, for example, Stanley, How Propaganda Works, 60. Veire, “Envy,” 89. Scheler, Ressentiment. This is not to deny that there might be real conflicts of interest between different groups; but those, then, are not rightfully subsumed under the heading of ressentiment. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 30. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 162. Hannah Arendt already had observed a similar tendency at work in German fascism and its prehistory. See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 127. Scheler refers to this as a “causal delusion” (Kausaltäuschung) (Ressentiment, 9). If, as Arlie Russell Hochschild observes, people think of minorities as “cutting in line” (Strangers, 137), one cannot but emphasize that there is no such line—or, better, that those are different lines. See Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality; Gordon, “Authoritarian Personality Revisited.” See Hark and Villa, Anti-Genderismus. It would be worthwhile to have another look at the “Elements of Antisemitism” (in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment), where the problem of how these “targets” are at the same time contingent and not contingent is developed in a most interesting way. Dowling, van Dyk, and Graefe, “Rückkehr des Hauptwiderspruchs?,” 419; translation mine. JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 533 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 53. In Germany, this strategy is most prominently defended by Sarah Wagenknecht and her “Aufstehen” movement, but we find the same tendency in France and in the United States. 54. The lack of an explanatory strategy of course already concerns the individual level: while research projects like the Frankfurt School’s “Studies on the Authoritarian Personality” have grounded their findings in a psychoanalytical framework—and thus, whether one shares it or not, have been able to claim results on an explanatory level—this framework or a functional equivalent for it is either missing in most of the contemporary studies of ressentiment or introduced ad hoc (as when Wendy Brown refers to Marcuse in her In the Ruins of Neoliberalism). 55. Joseph Vogl, in a book symposium on Kapital und Ressentiment, Colloquium for Social Philosophy in Berlin, Humboldt University, January 13, 2022. 56. On this point, see Celikates, “De­, Hyper­, or Pseudo­Politicization?” 57. Celikates, “De­, Hyper­, or Pseudo­Politicization?” 58. Vogl, Kapital und Ressentiment, 161; my translation; emphasis added. 59. The sociologist Robert Merton has illustrated the difference between rebellion and ressentiment in terms of the sour grapes effect. While rebellion comes up with new values (“sweetness in grapes is no longer desirable”), ressentiment remains stuck in the old framework (“those grapes are not sweet but sour”) (Social Theory, 210). 60. The “cunning of ressentimental reason,” to use Joseph Vogl’s words, “diverts our attention from the immanent purposes of the economic system, from the effectiveness of its mechanisms, infrastructures and functions” (Kapital und Ressentiment, 168; translation mine). 61. Some contemporary theorists will be offended by the assumption of “reality,” “real causes,” or “real interests.” They might insist that there is no such thing or argue that there is no way to get to this level of “truth” or “the real.” In my view, the quasi­Platonic framework in which those alternatives are framed is already misleading. The familiar Nietzschean move of altogether denying that there is a reality behind appearances is only the flip side of this framework. But since I do not want to (and cannot) revive this long and extensive debate at this point, let me just sketch the alternative I am working with here. 62. As I argue elsewhere, this is supposed to open up a middle ground between epistemic constructivism and realism. See Jaegi, Critique of Forms of Life, chap. 4. 63. In social philosophy, those social pathologies that define an inability to even thematize pathologies of a first order are called second­order pathologies. In my book Critique of Forms of Life, I call those crises “second­order crises” that are unable to thematize crises of a first order. A drought or a hurricane hitting a neighborhood (as long as it is a natural crisis) is a first­order crisis. The institutional inability to react to the crisis (based on structural inequalities or lack of resources or lack of knowledge where this lack is structural) is a second­order crisis. 64. For a detailed elaboration of this thesis and the very idea of a problem, see Jaegi, Critique of Forms of Life, chap. 4. 65. This conception of “problems” is obviously inspired by John Dewey’s ideas as developed in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. 66. This is not a straightforward normative problem in the narrow sense. Letting ourselves be guided by ressentiment is not a violation of prescriptive norms. That a certain reaction is more adequate to confront problems or to face reality is poorly framed as a moral duty (maybe a duty to oneself, if one wants to stretch the concept). Rather, I want to sugest that it is a distortion of ethical life. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 534 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 67. Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics.” 68. The same holds for the professor who develops ressentiment against his “woke” students and feels insulted by gender­just ways of speaking and writing: it is a result of a historical change that has already happened and whose dynamic has many more causes and dimensions than the (from his view) enervating demands of his students. 69. Let me note that this way of investigating ressentiment as a mode of regression is a systematic alternative to what can be called the “hegemony interpretation.” If the ressentiment we experience in contemporary movements is a way to defend privileges, it might be pointless to inquire from a hegemony theory–informed perspective. From this perspective, one might suspect the following: some people are violently defending their privileges, and the task of a critical theory is to fight back (against this backlash, such as it is). From my perspective, it is not as easy as this. We need to fight back, that much is clear, but we also need to frame the problem in a larger context and evaluate it in terms of a biger picture of what goes wrong, in terms of, as I sugest, adequate and inadequate reactions. 70. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 10. 71. As Wendy Brown puts it, “blinding assumptions about perduring western values and institutions, especially progress and Enlightenment and liberal democracy” (In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 2). 72. For a reconstruction of progress (as it is the counterpart of regression) see Jaegi, Fortschritt und Regression but also Jaegi, “‘Resistance to the Perpetual Danger of Relapse.’” 73. See, in the German context, Hark and Neckel, “Kulturelle Ressourcen,” 28n75; Nachtwey, Die Abstiegsgesellschaft. 74. See my forthcoming book: Jaegi, Fortschritt und Regression, chap. 6. 75. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 10. 76. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music,” 41. The translation used “forcibly retarded” to express Adorno’s “zwanghaft Zurückgestauten.” However, both the language and contemporary sentiment are better served by translating this as “forcibly repressed.” My thanks to Ramsey McGlazer for catching this untimely wording. 77. Yes, this evidently is a developmental plot, but it is a plot worth having a look at before dismissing it as such. Its structure does not resemble the bogeyman that, in some discourses, is made out of “developmentalism” as such. Please note that at this point I’m neither defending nor discussing psychoanalysis. I only go into the psychoanalytic background of the concept for heuristic reasons. For an interesting take on development from a psychoanalytic perspective informed by Hans Loewald, see Whitebook, “Towards a Theory of Needs.” 78. Again, as with psychoanalysis, I am not discussing the actual historical and empirical claims here. I am interested in spelling out the structure of their argument—that is, the implications of their use of the terminology of regression. 79. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” thesis 8. 80. The aim of Dialectic of Enlightenment was to understand “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiv). 81. Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 137; emphasis added. 82. See Celikates, “Slow Learners?” Not only is it certainly not progress as an empirical fact that I am defending here, it is also not progress as an ideal, to evoke Amy Allen’s distinction, that I am interested in. It is progress and regression as a criterion, a normative­analytical tool, that I sugest to hold on to. See Allen, End of Progress. 83. Balibar, “Democracy after Its Decline.” JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 535 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel­Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. In collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and Wil­ liam Morrow. London: Verso Books, 2019. Adorno, Theodor W. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 132–57. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso Books, 2005. Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 29–60. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of New Music. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot­Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Allen, Amy. The End of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin, 2017. Balibar, Étienne. “Democracy after Its Decline: Some Hypotheses.” Keynote Lecture, “Rewiring Democracy: Beyond ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’” La Maison francaise, New York University, November 8–9, 2019. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken, 2007. Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty­First Century ‘Democracies.’” Critical Times 1, no. 1 (2018): 60–79. Butler, Judith, and Sabine Hark. “Die Verleumdung.” Die Zeit, August 3, 2017. https://www.zeit.de /2017/32/gender­studies­feminismus­emma­beissreflex. Celikates, Robin. “De­, Hyper­, or Pseudo­Politicization? Undoing and Remaking the Demos in the Age of Right­Wing Populism.” In Power, Neoliberalism, and the Reinvention of Politics: The Critical Theory of Wendy Brown, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta , 141–57. Univer­ sity Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. Celikates, Robin. “Slow Learners? On Moral Progress, Social Strugle, and Whig History.” Unpub­ lished manuscript, 2020. First published in German as “Moralischer Fortschritt, soziale Kämpfe und Emanzipationsblockaden: Elemente einer Kritischen Theorie der Politik,” in Kritische Theorie der Politik, edited by Ulf Bohmann and Paul Sörensen, 397–425. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1939. Dowling, Emma, Silke van Dyk, and Stefanie Graefe. “Rückkehr des Hauptwiderspruchs? Anmerkungen zur aktuellen Debatte um den Erfolg der Neuen Rechte und das Versagen der ‘Identitätspolitik.’” PROKLA, no. 188(2017): 411–20. Dühring, Eugen. Der Wert des Lebens: Eine philosophische Betrachtung. 1865; repr., Elibron Classics, 2006. Frankfurt, Harry. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” In The Importance of What We Care About, 11–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Geiselberger, Heinrich, ed. The Great Regression. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Gordon, Peter E. “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump.” In Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, by Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky, 45–84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. CRITICAL TIMES 5:3 | DECEM BER 2022 | 536 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 Hark, Sabine, and Sighard Neckel. “Kulturelle Ressourcen: Sabine Hark und Sighard Neckel im Gespräch über Ressentiments und Rachegefühle.” Texte zur Kunst, no. 106(2017). https:// www.textezurkunst.de/106/kulturelle­ressourcen/. Hark, Sabine, and Paule Villa, eds. Anti-Genderismus: Sexualität und Geschlecht als Schauplätze aktueller politischer Auseinandersetzungen. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015. Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2012. Haslanger, Sally. “What Is a Social Practice?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, no. 82 (2018): 231–47. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press, 2016. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by E. F. N. Jeph­ cott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Jaegi, Rahel. Alienation. Translated by Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith. Edited by Fred­ erick Neuhouser. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Jaegi, Rahel. Critique of Forms of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Jaegi, Rahel. Fortschritt und Regression. Berlin: Suhrkamp, forthcoming. Jaegi, Rahel. “‘Resistance to the Perpetual Danger of Relapse’: Moral Progress and Social Change.” In From Alienation to Forms of Life: The Critical Theory of Rahel Jaeggi, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendiata, 15–40. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018. Jaegi, Rahel. “Rethinking Ideology.” In New Waves in Political Theory, edited by Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn, 63–86. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Jensen, Uffa. Zornpolitik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press, 1968. Nachtwey, Oliver. Die Abstiegsgesellschaft: Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016. Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Neumann, Franz. “Anxiety and Politics.” In The Democratic and The Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, edited by Herbert Marcuse, 270–300. New York: Free Press, 1964. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Nullmeier, Frank. Politische Theorie des Sozialstaats. Frankfurt: Campus, 2000. Ottmann, Henning. Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999. Schäfer, Armin, and Michael Zürn. Die demokratische Regression. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021. Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Louis A. Coser. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998. Sluga, Hans. Politics and the Search for the Common Good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. van Tuinen, Sjoerd, ed. The Polemics of Ressentiment: Variations on Nietzsche. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Veire, Frank Vande. “Envy: Sin of Sins, Painful Birth of Desire: Towards a Metapsychology of Ressentiment.” In van Tuinen, The Polemics of Ressentiment, 89–106. Vogelmann, Frieder. The Spell of Responsibility: Labor, Criminality, Philosophy. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Vogl, Joseph. Kapital und Ressentiment. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2021. Wallace, R. Jay. Normativity and the Will: Selected Papers on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Whitebook, Joel. “Towards a Theory of Needs: Preliminary Remarks.” Paper presented at the Colloquium for Social Philosophy in Berlin, Humboldt University and Freie Universität, February 10, 2022. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/5/3/501/1813604/501jaeggi.pdf by guest on 31 May 2023 JAEGGI | MODES OF REGRESSION | 537