Beethoven Sonata Turd

I’m intrigued by the way that what’s called affirmation acts as a way of stifling niggling doubts and worries – acts to help one avoid critical thinking in general.

I’m also intrigued by the way that “affirmation” becomes something nearly completely free of content… One can take an attitude of “affirmation” and become willing to affirm everything and anything… from a Beethoven sonata to a hunk of floating turd.

I’m trying to understand how affirmation might be possible in conjunction with something else which I will refer to as selection.

Selection involves denial of some choices and possibilities – to affirm selection would be to affirm (some) denial. To affirm to deny – this is slippery ground, and as I have spent a lifetime slipping around on slippery ground, I really must admit that I pause and reflect and indulge the coward in me rather than rushing on in to slip around in this “to see what happens.”

But this problem of selection and affirmation is the problem of culture itself. Culture has affirmative character, as Marcuse pointed out (Later, I want to draw from Marcuse’s essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture” – our investigation demands that we do so, I think,) but it also requires something of a critical distance, some selective power which is negative, as Adorno pointed out ( not to make it appear that if there is a disagreement between Marcuse and Adorno, it is a simple matter of the simple dilemma I am examining – affirmation versus selection.)

I am trying to understand the way Nietzsche’s concept of the will-to-power is a means to address the dual character of culture… A way of addressing the form-content duality which has haunted western philosophy from the beginning. Will-to-power isn’t a meditation on the possibility of an actualization of the brutality inherent in human nature – but a way of confronting and opening out the crucifying binarism(s) which dictates thought prior to thought.

(This opening out of thought involves power and the expression of power – but not as a power of domination.)

After Auschwitz Affirmation is Barbaric

We are attempting a prolonged meditation on what we are doing when we think in terms of a “desiring of one’s own repression.”

I come to a point in this meditation where I must reflect on what I am doing when I exercise “self-hatred.”

In order to understand what “desiring one’s own repression” means, I must try to understand what it means when I can’t stand myself, and whether it could ever be possible to affirm “self-hatred.”

To affirm self-hatred: in other words, whether there is anywhere in the universe an ability to respond actively to this… or whether self-hatred is some kind of zero degree of being… an ultimate impasse.

Self-hatred seems to be expressed as impasse – It can’t act in the form of self-hatred, even, as it rapidly devolves into hatred of self-hatred…which rapidly devolves into hatred of hatred of self-hatred, and so on.

In self-hatred I could wound or maim myself… I could kill myself. Somehow, suicide is not my vision of what constitutes “affirmation” or “responding actively” but if we are going to radically question “affirmation” perhaps we need to keep open the possibility that it is.

This does look very much as if we're reaching a point where we'd want to seriously entertain some notion of raving insanity being the highest moment of sanity: the schizophrenic as the hero of desire?

Lambs of Desiring-Repression

The disagreement with Orla over whether the question of “desiring one’s own repression” is an interesting or useful one to pursue has led me to reconsider the circumstances under which we took up the question in the first place.

It seems to me that what Carl and I really want to get at in asking this question is the POWER to convince someone else that they, “desire their own repression.”

It’s a useless and well-nigh pathetic thing to say to someone, or some group, “Your problem is that you desire your own repression.” That statement is met with denial, disbelief, and contempt at the intellectual presumption of the utterer that they know what someone else desires, that what is desired is harmful, that what is desired is repression, and so on and so forth. It’s also useless to sit back and take these reactions of denial as further evidence that what’s being witnessed is the classic response of the repressed – unwillingness or inability to bring the repressed contents into conscious awareness.

In pressing on how to speak responsibly of " desiring one's own repression" we want to cut through this -- but without cutting... We want to be able to speak objectively about someone else's subjectivity and have them accept our objectivity...but without the taint of authority discoloring our objectivity or their acceptance of our objectivity.

At one point in time, the psychoanalyst had power and prestige and some confidence in the "objective" curative or therapeutic value of the psychoanalytic method which corresponded with some faith in the same by the general public. Then, the maneuver of telling people what they “secretly, really” wanted had found some acceptance, but the decision of what consisted of real desire and what consisted of illusory desire by a “professional” always had an authoritarian and reactionary edge to it… Its acceptance by the patient also seemed to depend at least in part to succumbing to authority. ( Or internalizing it.) I don’t care a hoot for the disclaimers and provisos issued by “professionals” that their patients are merely being helped or aided in the discovery of their own “real” desire rather than having these “real” desires foisted on them by the "professional."

I have my terrible, painful and ongoing problems with authority – is it because authority is a fucked up mess and it’d be stupid not to have terrible, painful and ongoing problems with it such as it is, or is it because I have a poorly-resolved Oedipus complex? Or a little of both? Whichever way it is, who says? I think that we all agree that whoever it is who says does not say from a position of neutrality, and as far as I can tell, a wealthy bourgeois psychoanalyst, no matter how “liberal,” is going to see “real” desire as the desire which ultimately fortifies the status quo, and will dictate desire accordingly.

Of course, such an analyst will register my resistance to therapy as a desiring of my own repression – it will appear that I want to perpetuate and cling to what I have already admitted is a terrible, painful and ongoing state of affairs. And I don’t want to have my explanations and denials that my resistance is in response to other considerations treated as a further symptom of repression.

I don’t want to be treated this way, and I don’t want to treat others that way.

I do, however, continue to take seriously some notion of repression, and some notion of desiring repression as a fundamental mechanism of the perpetuation of human suffering. Therefore, I seek a “responsible” way to work with the concept of “desiring one’s own repression.”

What that “responsible” way comes down to, though, is wanting a form of power which will not exert itself as power… It will “convince.” Convince, but how? What will distinguish the power I seek from the power of the analyst which I claim to reject?

JUST DO IT – As long as “IT” isn’t reflective...

Excuse me for veering away from the tender lamb I had in my sights: to understand what ressentiment is, how ressentiment is understood as an inability to respond actively, and whether or not it is possible to distinguish between responses which are active and responses which are otherwise.

I take this passage of Nietzsche’s as one of his most active responses to the question about active responses:

“That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

I wonder : is this an active response to what an active response is, or evidence that Nietzsche has an inability to respond actively?

Say that I take away this unappealing imagery of the eagle and lamb and simply think in terms of desire… I replace the eagle of this story with desire, and the lamb with what I will call the object of desire. Better, though, would be to do this: I replace both eagle and lamb with one kind of thing ( but it’s not a thing, it’s an act, a deed,) – Lightning Bolt Desire—which is the doer of desire, the deed of desire, and the object of desire all rolled into one…

The story is now about acting immediately, without hesitation or reservation…It’s about seizing the day, getting what you want without “thinking” about it, without “wondering” if getting what you want is right or wrong. It’s about having a desire which is so natural that it is unthinkable that it be questioned. It is acted upon without reflection.

You want something, you go after it. You “JUST DO IT,” as the Nike advertising campaign recommended. You are your desire –

Is that what it means to have the ability to respond actively?

To “JUST DO IT”?

What Do You Turn On When You Turn On?

While speaking of plans for a repetition-difference of the Enlightenment, we have been using a string of metaphorical terms: rebirth, reactivation, renewal, inspiration, and others. In my opinion, when we’ve spoken of affirmation, negation, positive, negative, and even of creation, we’ve also been using a metaphorical frame of reference – so far, very little of what we’ve had to say can be taken outside of such a frame of reference.

These metaphors borrow from the physical and biological realm – sometimes even from the bodily. What fascinates me is that we work along with these metaphors without reflecting on the problematic and questionable nature of the correspondence of metaphors to our subject matter, thought and thinking itself.

The metaphors we’re using are bright, happy ones – they give me a bright and happy feeling. It is very easy for me to mistake this bright happy feeling they give me with the beginnings of a bright and happy philosophy. But I believe that to entertain this notion is to be utterly misled…. To be misled by my own happy feelings into the belief that something is being accomplished, that movement is commencing.

We want a reactivation of a philosophical ethos… Using metaphors, we fool ourselves into believing that we are calling up, summoning as it were, such a reactivation.

This becomes a trap.

Using the word " reactivation" has little if anything at all to do with actual reactivation.

What’s funny, I think, is that clarification of the metaphors suggests itself as a way out – and that’s precisely wrong. The way out has to do with replacing this metaphorical thought with processes which are mechanical, concrete, and material – pragmatic. However, at this time – for me—“mechanical,” “concrete” and even “material” are no more than other metaphors – metaphors no more mechanical, concrete or material than the earlier ones they seek to improve upon. ( And I would like to add to this comment that really these latter metaphors are worse than the ones they improve upon because they occlude a poetic beauty and impulse of life which the earlier metaphors mysteriously retain…)

I talked a little earlier about desire and creativity as ideology. Their ideological function is tied to their expression in terms of metaphor. (But I have to admit -- by the same token, so are the alternatives, at least so far.) Desire will not animate language, (even contemporary poetic language,) if desire is restricted to metaphorical expression. Metaphorical creativity is a sham unworthy of the name of creativity.

* Morris Graves, Hibernation.

War is war. War is peace. War is strategically defined.

We seek for our times a reactivation of a philosophical ethos similar to the reactivation observed during the eighteenth century European Enlightenment. This seemed a simple and straightforward enough thing to be seeking – until we started thinking about it. Then, not a single part of it seems simple or straightforward – especially as we are attempting to restrict ourselves to learning how we might act, and respond actively to our time, to what is different in our time. ( The deed is everything! But what exactly is the deed?) We seek action(s). We do not seek a “brilliant” exegesis or explanation or interpretation of events past or present – we don’t seek a beautiful life or destiny or behaviors which will be satisfactorily harmonious with what’s around us. We might very well be seeking actions which will produce an ugly, blatting clash. But it’s got to be right somehow, and that’s what’s weird, and difficult to explain and get at, on many levels.

If we seek to reactivate a philosophical ethos, it is because the philosophical ethos we have inherited has become passive, deflated, and deadening. I think that this is the case is clear enough, but not so clear that it makes knowing how to perform a reactivation any easier. I think that part of the problem is that the source of the deadness and passivity is somehow intimately linked with the very success of the model of reactivation we’ve taken it upon ourselves to study – that of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment. It’s proven to be worthless for our cause to attempt to sort out what elements were responsible for success in that prior movement, and then analyze how these elements dialectically became responsible for failure in our time. For example, what do we learn when we state that purely formal freedoms were revolutionary in the eighteenth century but are counter-revolutionary in our own? It doesn’t mean that we gain anything by removing purely formal freedoms from the books, I don’t think.

I want to look at Mr. Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of the meaning of the purely formal, which I think is exemplified in the following philosophical parable he tells,

“That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

So here it is: as always in the writings of Nietzsche, I find much to admire and much to detest. It’s not even uncommon for me to experience admiration and detestation in the same sentence, paragraph, or group of paragraphs, and that’s true with the above.

First of all, I have always felt great uneasiness with Nietzsche’s image of the lambs and the birds of prey. Here’s why:

1. Nietzsche seems to be presenting a naturalism underlying human social relations. He is suggesting the naturalness of strife, competition, aggression, among human beings, which he appears to be explaining on the natural observation that some people are strong and others weak. He suggests that it is by nature that the strong prey upon the weak, and also that it is to oppose nature itself to try to prevent this predation of the weak by the strong. Nietzsche attempts to make us believe that it is “against” nature, is to wish for the unnatural, to want the “strong” to make their livelihood some way other than by attacking the weak, or possibly even to question this method of livelihood (predation.)

2. Nietzsche’s story presents the essence of human reality as an opposition of strength to weakness. If there are some people who could be exemplified as birds of prey ( bird of prey as essence,) and others who could be exemplified as tender lambs ( tender lamb as essence,) then there are some people who are essentially strong and others who are essentially weak. Nietzsche believes that there are essentially strong individuals who stand out against an essentially weak mass of people. He believes in the exceptional individual who stands separate from the groups of amassed mediocrity and who is in danger of being engulfed by them and their mediocrity. On Nietzsche’s way of looking at these things, I don’t see how he would account for the curious combinations of strengths and weaknesses found in humans and societies, the complementarities and complex interplays of these strengths and weaknesses, or the existences of strengths and weaknesses as the result, not of essences, but of relationships between people as combinations of strength and weakness.

3. Nietzsche’s presentation involves rhetorical ploys in the form of analogy which give an illusion of necessity where in fact there is none. The bird of prey MUST have prey; a human being need not. We do not need to be carnivores, even. In Nietzsche’s parable, he works with birds and lambs, but what he’s referring to are in both cases human beings, (otherwise, his words are without sense,) and this sleight of hand of Nietzsche’s is incredibly cunning. Even if humans did require prey to survive, humans do not have as a necessity for survival, the need of other humans for their prey. One bird of prey might attack another bird of prey, but I don’t think it is generally true that a bird of prey will prey very often on members of its own species. An eagle might eat its goslings if their prospect of survival was low, but not as a demonstration of its own strength and power! It’s a response to adverse conditions. A human attacking other humans is not demonstrating strength and power. Such a human may perhaps be said to be responding to adverse conditions of one sort or another, but that’s about the best that can be said for such a human.

4. I have often responded to Nietzsche’s words about the birds of prey and the lambs as if they asked me to “identify with” the birds of prey… to try to identify with what’s strong, (vital?, creative? intelligent? athletic?) within me…. To act (affirm?) on that… And to over-ride(Dismiss? Deny? Repress?) as a consideration of action those parts which are reflective, compassionate, considerate, and concerned. Additionally, in this parable Nietzsche seems to suggest to me that I need to think twice about opposing what’s strong and successful in the world and in politics, and to be proposing that if I do oppose, I be certain that in my actions I am not joining those who hamstring the “strong” (with regulations, laws, taxation, etc.) out of hatred of their very strength – out of jealousy and resentment of their very strength and success. I would read the parable of the birds of prey and the lambs almost as suggesting that the brutal part of me is strong, while the compassionate part of me is weak, and that I do well therefore to suppress the compassionate part of me; I also read it as if it suggests that laissez-faire capitalism is best, or maybe libertarianism. I do think that if I took Nietzsche’s meaning just from this one passage, unmodified by anything else he’s written, that anti-compassion and laissez-faire capitalism would be a just reading of his positions.

In these four items I may be attacking a straw man. (In which case, I apologize, but this was something I had to get off my chest.) Later, I want to try to engage whether Nietzsche succeeds in deflating the formal notions which were his real target in the passage I quoted.

Desiring-Repression Prevents Rebirth, Renewal

I want to address this statement by Orla,

“It is true that we want a (Deleuzian?) "repetition with difference" or a philosophical re-activation of The Enlightenment, but I don't agree with your point that "we suspect in some way not terribly clear, that a key to this is to be found in understanding “ desiring of one’s own repression". The "new" Enlightenment must (in my humble opinion) come from a rebirth of secularism and a renewed Nietzschean critique of religious suppression.”

I stress that in addressing this statement I am not seeking to force a confrontation (with Orla or anyone else,) nor am I attempting to find or make a resolution ( with Orla or anyone else.) I believe that we have been able, at least so far, to work well following a "both/and" kind of logic.

In describing our discussion in my last post, I mentioned that we wanted a philosophical re-activation of the Enlightenment, but I didn’t remember to add that we have, so far, thought of the Enlightenment primarily in terms of an emphasis on autonomy and individuality – in terms of its actualization of (and I want to say democratization of,) “sapere aude.” We’ve also focused our criticism of the Enlightenment onto those areas where autonomy, individuality, and powers of thinking were hypocritical, fell short of its self-determined mark, and ended up blocking autonomy and individuality.

When we say we want a repetition of the Enlightenment, what it really means, I think, is that we want specifically to renew or reopen or create, or more fully criticize, practices of autonomy, individuality, and powers of thinking.

This intention then leads us ( or should lead us,) to ask this big question, expressed in one little word: how?

How are we to renew or reopen or recreate or more fully criticize autonomy and individuality and the powers (or limits of powers,) of thinking? How? How does one go about that? How, except as weird empty slogans, probably already signifying intellectual and imaginative impotence, are these words (renew,reopen, create, criticize) made to work and function ( as renewal,reopening,creating, etc.)? How does one “renew” an idea? How did it get “old” in the first place? How did it get closed? And why? I don’t think we know these things. We do not want to merely state to ourselves that we want this or that philosophical “effect,” (for example affirmation or renewal,) and then attribute that effect to what we like or inspires us or to trends we would wish to see encouraged and promoted in the contemporary political realm. I hope we can stop doing that.

If we wish to renew or reopen or reactivate philosophical enquiry, it must be we think that philosophical enquiry has grown old, closed, and deactivated. Deactivated – it must be that we think that philosophical enquiry no longer is able to respond actively. It must be, by the definition of ressentiment, (the inability to respond actively,) we hypothesize that a philosophical ethos became ressentimental.

Knowing how and why the philosophical ethos became ressentimental would be key to understanding how to reactivate a philosophical ethos.

Especially against the background of the medieval churchly practices of Europe, what gets called “secularization” could better be called a rescue or resuscitation of the ability to respond actively. Similarly, I believe the Nietzschean critique of religious suppression is best understood in terms of the conquest of reactive forces over active ones – how that happens, and the prospects, ever so rare and remote, for a future “becoming active.” So, while I agree with Orla when he says that the “new Enlightenment comes from a rebirth of secularism and a renewed Nietzschean critique of religious suppression,” I don’t see how the important questions of HOW WE GET REBIRTH OR RENEWAL are answered unless we walk along this path that the interrogation of “desiring one’s own repression” presents to us.

Ressentiment versus Assertion-Desire

I don’t want to leave matters as I have just left them, and therefore am going to take the risk of making some hasty remarks regarding the relationship of reason to desire.

I’m making use of Nietzsche – I think that’s unavoidable. However, I’m not attempting an exegesis of Nietzsche – to be honest, I doubt I am up to that…That I can cut it there. It’s just that a lot of this Nietzsche stuff sticks in my craw… I want to get it out of there… I want to cough it up and spit it out, or swallow it and then digest it. One way or the other.

Here is a brief recap of our trajectory: 1) we want a “repetition with difference” of, ( or to put it another way, a philosophical re-activation of,) the Enlightenment;2) we suspect in some way not terribly clear, that a key to this philosophical re-activation of the Enlightenment is to be found in understanding “ desiring of one’s own repression"; 3) we note that Kant’s comment that “ Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” relates to “desiring one’s own repression; 4) I insist that “ desiring one’s own repression” emerges against the background of Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, which is a remarkably fertile and subtly influential concept ( even if this isn’t very widely recognized); 5) a philosophical re-activation of the Enlightenment may be facilitated by re-activating an examination of the concept of ressentiment.

I want to note that I think that in terms of addressing the kinds of problems we want to address, which seem to involve what has been called here the “epistemology of desiring one’s own repression,” we do better by completely eliminating all references to the unconscious, and to unconscious processes, and try to think through these matters using the concept of ressentiment instead. As far as I am concerned, (please recognize that I am humble although overreaching in such statements,) the later Freudian concepts are interpretations of the Nietzschean ones, and in their medicalization and reification of the Nietzschean ones, there is an event of power/knowledge I would for my own purposes prefer to skirt…Because the power moment in that event recoups (or appears to recoup) exactly the moment of liberation I am pursuing.

I am very interested in this quote,

“The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.” – Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, section 10.

I said I am interested in it, not that I like it. I don’t like it.

It’s really nothing more than a series of assertions. I recognize that these assertions are backed by various beautiful and stirring descriptions of history and culture and a real impressive grab bag of erudition drawing up all sorts of “illustrations” and “examples.” But I don’t necessarily buy into any of it. I’m not even sure that I am going to buy into the existence of a “slave revolt in morality.” However, this isn’t my point today. I want to remark on the significance of its use of assertion… Of what an assertion is.

An assertion is an intrusion of authority into a text.

I suppose that such an assertion of authority is impossible to avoid. However, an Enlightenment thinker such as Immanuel Kant would attempt to support any insertion of authority into his texts in such a way that he could show that the authority intruding into the text was the authority of “reason.” This would be done by using a variety of practices, such as giving reasons for the assertion, by showing that there was no “partial” interest being served by the intrusion of the authority, etc.

An assertion is an expression of desire in a text.

An Enlightenment thinker such as Immanuel Kant attempts to efface any such expression of desire in his texts. Arguments in texts are literal effacements of desire. An Enlightenment thinker such as Kant utilizes argument and reason to efface desire, not to “uncover” or discover the truth.

In the last four paragraphs, I am trying to make explicit what I think Nietzsche is saying in his manner of saying it rather than give my own views on assertion, desire, and reason. I think that when Nietzsche says, “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No,” his target isn’t the thinking of some impoverished and maltreated human chattel, but someone like Immanuel Kant. I think that Nietzsche would say that in disguising or effacing what is in reality desire, (someone’s desire,) Kant says a loud NO to himself and to life -- Kant refuses triumphant affirmation of himself…. And thus contributes to “ triumphant calamity” instead.

Ressentiment and the Ambiguity of “Responding Actively”

In my last comment, I asked these questions,

“What is ressentiment? To what material conditions is ressentiment a response? By whom and for whom is ressentiment a response?”

Today and over the following weeks, I want to continue to try to answer these questions.

Please bear with me – the purpose of this excursion is not to wander away from our interrogation of what the Enlightenment is, nor to discontinue the pursuit of using “ desiring one’s own repression” accurately and responsibly. I believe that the concept of ressentiment directly bears on these, and we’ve got to come to it sooner or later—let’s do it now.

In the last comment, I gave this answer to what ressentiment is,

“Ressentiment is born of the inability to respond actively. Ressentiment legitimates and justifies this inability. Ressentiment posits that it is possible to NOT ACT…that it is possible to respond WITHOUT ACTING.”

This answer is Nietzsche’s, based on this,

“The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.” – Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, section 10.

Nietzsche does not deny that ressentiment is creative, or that it gives birth to values—he goes so far as to emphasize ressentiment’s creativity and powers of valuation. He does, however, claim that this creativity is based on a false reaction which is not active—is not that of deeds; that the creativity of ressentiment is a compensatory mechanism; and exists within the realm of the imaginary. Ressentiment’s creative deed is, Nietzshe says, a kind of nay-saying, a NO.

Nietzsche also uses the following elements to describe and delineate how ressentiment is not a properly active response : it says NO to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself.” It needs a hostile external world, (which implies, I think, that ressentiment will then “create” such a hostile external world for itself.) It needs external stimuli – its action is fundamentally reaction.

This all seems quite clear…. But is it really? Is it clear or is it clearly mere Nietzschean bluster and hysterically-flustered rhetoric?

How do we decide who is saying NO to what’s “outside”, what is “different”, what is “not itself” and who is saying YES? How do we know what is “outside”, what is “ different”, what is “not itself”? Is it even clear who is saying NO and who is saying YES? Is it really obvious what a triumphant affirmation of ‘itself’ is, or who among us in the history of humankind has exhibited this triumphant affirmation of ‘itself’? Is it clear whose revenge is merely imaginary? Is it clear what a deed is and is not? Is it clear who has been denied the capacity to respond actively, who it is who has this capacity and uses it, or even what this so-called capacity consists in? Or who it is who says, one way or the other?

The meaning of “ desiring one’s own repression” is not clarified, at least not now, by linking it to the meaning of “ressentiment” unless we give Nietzsche a personal and unphilosophical authority to dictate—to assert and insinuate—meaning, which I know that I refuse to give him.

Desiring-Repression and Ressentiment

I am going to say a few, very preliminary, words about the way that referring to “desiring one’s own repression” appears to rely on Nietzche’s ideas, and how an entire articulation of desire exists upon an armature of thinking which, as far as I know, finds its original formulation in Nietzsche’s “ On the Genealogy of Morals,” (GOM).

I feel that I have a duty to bring this material into the conversation, even though I feel that I am probably the least fit of us to do so. First of all, it would seem that for anyone interested in not only the use of the phrase “desiring one’s own repression,” but in social psychology in general, GOM suggests itself as an important source… It’s almost odd that we haven’t looked at it yet here at the Enlightenment Underground. Secondly, I am personally haunted by these ideas of Nietzsche, and I have been drawing on them – I just haven’t been very honest about it, to this point. I want to start being honest and explicit about it from now on, and this is the starting of that.

I make a direct link between “desiring one’s own repression” and ressentiment. ( By the way, I tip my hat to Orla on this – he has been explicit in making this link in his posts before now…) but I could also make the same link, I believe, by speaking of “desiring one’s own repression” and bad conscience, mauvais foi, false consciousness, or any of a variety of epistemologically and emotionally-twisted formulations which serve as a kind of secularized “theodicy” for explaining, for certain types of modern thinkers, the perpetuation of human malevolence. Even though I will be speaking only of ressentiment, what I say applies to these others. I think that if we are thorough-going enough in attacking ressentiment , all the other hydra-heads will be severed at the same time along with it. This can be a motivation for us, perhaps. (Then again, don’t hydra-heads multiply when severed?)

Before I make any severing swings, I want to prepare a few necks and a few chopping blocks. In GOM, in my way of reading him, Nietzsche makes a few very critical and very questionable moves. I suggest we look at these.

Very astonishingly – so astonishingly that it is hard to comprehend or appreciate – Nietzsche attempts to explain not only Christianity, but also the State – out of the spirit of ressentiment. AND...Not only Christianity and the State come out of the spirit of ressentiment, but also—get this—the “subject” is explained as an epiphenomenon of ressentiment. Our youthful, fun-loving and Dionysian Nietzsche explained the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, but the brooding, Teutonic, and insipiently-mad older Nietzsche will explain the birth of Christianity, the State, and the “subject” out of the spirit of ressentiment. That’s what’s become of Freddie’s line of flight by the time of GOM. He's no less ambitious and paints with strokes no less bold, but Nietzsche's palette has changed. I want to consider that this says something about Nietzschean " affirmation."

What is ressentiment? To what material conditions is ressentiment a response? By whom and for whom is ressentiment a response?

Nietzsche says: Ressentiment is born of the inability to respond actively. Ressentiment legitimates and justifies this inability. Ressentiment posits that it is possible to NOT ACT…that it is possible to respond WITHOUT ACTING. If ressentiment is actual, Kant's and most other 18th Century Enlightenment ideas about autonomy are devastated, because most of what Kant and these other thinkers believe to be freedom and agency is really something more like a system for protecting the pretences born out of being UNABLE TO RESPOND ACTIVELY.

It is quite plausible to me that my entire mental life – the ceaseless chatter of dialogue and courtroom and bedroom and ballroom and imagery of stadium, stage, movie, and dramatic landscape scenes which populate the inner sanctum of my mind—come from my inability to respond actively. If I had the capacity for an actual confrontation with my real-life antagonists, would I continue to mentally yell and bicker with the "enemy" who lives inside my head? If I could make love, and make it satisfactorily, would I require this compulsive and therefore burdensome sexual fantasy life, quite portable and quite uninterruptible? I really do have the distinct impression that all of this junk flitting and flowing through the screens in my soul are a substitute for living, which I have somehow, in a fool’s and devil’s bargain, accepted.

It's a mental life free to amuse itself in its own lack of freedom or agency. It's not a model of autonomy at all, even if I do from time to time find it possible to draw off some "theme" of freedom or autonomy from my fantastic mental froth.

These are preliminary words on a very lengthy subject…serving, I hope, the very modest intention to initiate a little more conscious attention to this neglected ( by us) background to the question of what the heck we are trying to say when we speak of “ desiring our own repression.” I will have more to say later.