Neoliberal Variations of Resentment
Abstract
Over the last thirty years, the social sciences have returned to reflecting on the role of the ‘sad passions’ – envy, anger, resentment – in defining the characteristics of the individual and the relational dynamics that characterise global society increasingly. But what is resentment? What phenomena does it describe today? If Nietzsche had defined resentment as the ethos of the weak and excluded, providing a means of explaining even today’s conflicts centred on identity claims, for many analysts resentment is rather the ethos of thode privileged who were ‘dethroned’ by neoliberalism, producing an imbalance in the traditional hierarchy of status which western society was built on. This is the hypothesis made by Wendy Brown when situating the emergence of resentment in the failure of the neoliberal project.
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