The Irenics of Ressentiment: From Good Sense to Common Sense

How does the full weight of two centuries of discourse on ressentiment bear on those it pretends to be about, Nietzsche’s ‘men of ressentiment’, and what are the interests of those who wield it today? In this chapter, I will put the consistency and coherence in our use of the concept of ressentiment to the test. If the moderns have always used the concept of ressentiment in a polemical fashion, as a critique of a more common sense based on a more exclusive good sense, my aim is to explore its relevance and irrelevance from an irenic point of view. Following the lead of Isabelle Stengers, whose project of a ‘cosmopolitics’ is the most profound contemporary legacy of a philosophical diplomatism stemming from Leibniz, I will develop a new conceptual framework for thinking with ressentiment, with special focus on the Leibnizian version of voluntary servitude, the problem of damnation. It is not so much the truth of ressentiment that is in need of revision, but rather the purpose it serves. Its critical truth, I argue, should never be an excuse for neglecting the more speculative care for its potential overcoming. Ultimately, the question is, How to situate our diagnosis of ressentiment in the collective fabrication of a common sense in which ressentiment no longer prevails?...