Contemporary tendencies in political culture such as nationalism, populism, fundamentalism, and large-scale conspiracy theories have led to a resurgence of the concept of ressentiment, together with its half-identical twin ‘resentment,’ in the idiom of armchair political analysis. Drawing upon a wide variety of authors, approaches and ideological contexts, van Tuinen's book offers a detailed critique of the distinct, but always polemical senses in which the concept of ressentiment is used today.
- Date
- Wednesday 20 Sep 2023, 15:45 - 21:30
- Type
- Symposium
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- C2-01
- Space
- Theil Building
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
Along the way, it develops a new method of discourse analysis aimed at identifying the ideological performances of a concept, that is, a political epistemology in which the concept is interpreted and evaluated in terms of its varying practical implications.
Prior to An Afternoon with Desire + Capital, Sjoerd van Tuinen's book launch will be held. Leveraging diverse authors, approaches, and ideologies, the book thoroughly examines the contentious interpretations of ressentiment in modern discourse. Esteemed national and international authors will join us to illuminate the book's themes with their insights and expertise.
Inspired by political epistemology, affect theory, postcolonialism and feminism, this book entails new readings of Sartre, Klein, Fanon, Améry, as well as substantial critiques of the more established theories of resentment and ressentiment from Adam Smith and Joseph Butler to Strawson, Scheler, Girard, and Žižek. These readings are sustained by a return to Nietzsche, not in the sense of a return to the author, but in an effort to inherit a certain taste or intuition. As the author argues, this taste is a matter of discerning between the empirical truth of the concept and its plausibility. Based on this distinction, it is necessary to 'redramatize' the concept of ressentiment in mapping, delimiting, and assessing four irreducible ways in which it acquires meaning: the ways of the priest, the (Nietzschean) philosopher, the witness, and the diplomat.
In producing a dialectical sequence between all four types of enunciation, this book demonstrates how all subsequent reinterpretations of ressentiment are already virtually implied in senso negativo in the drama set up in Nietzsche’s late polemical books such as On the Genealogy of Morality and Anti-Christ. In this way, it achieves a surprising coherence in a wide variety of academic, literary and public discourses that currently know only mutually exclusive standpoints.
Programme
16:00 Sjoerd van Tuinen (EUR) - Presentation of the book
16:20 Samo Tomsic (HFBK Hamburg) - Ressentiment: New Appearances
17:00 Sigrid Wallaert (Ghent University) - Ressentiment and testimony: Some comments from feminist epistemology
18:00 Dinner (at the Paviljoen on campus)
19:30 Katia Hay (UvA) - TBA
20:10 Katharina Bauer (EUR) - TBA
20:50 Paul Cobben (UvA/UT) - How to Think Ressentiment Non-Metaphysically
21:30 End
Bio
Sjoerd van Tuinen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is editor of many books including Deleuze and the Passions (Punctum Books, 2016), The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews (Zero Books, 2019), and a series of theory books with V2_Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam). Recent monograph: The Philosophy of Mannerism: From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Samo Tomšič obtained his Phd from the University of Ljubljana, and works on political philosophy, structuralism and poststructuralism, critical theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Capitalist Unconscious (2013) and The Labor of Enjoyment (2019). He has worked at the Jan van Eyck Academy Maastricht, was a fellow at the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University Berlin, and currently teaches there at the Department of Cultural History and Theory.
Katia Hay is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. After her PhD on 'Schelling and the Tragic' she has worked on Nietzsche, humor, laughter at the University of Lisbon.
Paul Cobben is emeritus professor philosophy at Tilburg University and University of Amsterdam. He has worked on Hegel and Marx especially throughout his career, and is the series editor of Critical Studies in German Idealism at Brill. His works include Postdialectische Zedelijkheid (1996, Postdialectic Ethical Life), The Paradigm of Recognition (2012), Value in Capitalist Society (2015) and the new Marx Bevrijd (2022, Marx Liberated).
Sigrid Wallaert is a philosophy researcher at Ghent University, where she works on a PhD project called 'Fury: A Philosophical Analysis of the Productive Value of Feminist Rage'. Forthcoming: Kwaad spreken: wie gelooft de boze vrouw? (Letterwerk 2023)
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