Ressentiment

Speaking of writers in the obscene, as if they were gourmet or fine wines, I'm wondering if Roland Barthes might not provide a nice digestivo after a plateful of Nietzsche. .  I might have the Nietzsche with my steak, and Barthes to follow, in a hammock on the porch.  As the necessary sentimental, romantic and subtle corrective to all those vaguely fascistic alpha-male overtones of glorified solitude and angst.  Although the need to carve a distinction betweeen the descriptive and prescriptive applies to Nietzsche if it ap-plies to anyone.  Not too concerned for canonical (mis)statements so much as selective unpickings and digestions, Barthes is one of those rare original readers who manages to be both ruthless and tender at once (never more tender than when ruthless, perhaps).  He is also, in my view, one proof among many (but hardly enough) that the obsessively literary may still avoid the merely pretentious, or an habitual kind of violence in their practices of reading (a certain bodily violence, even).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to swallow Barthes whole.  If his most famous student, Julia Kristeva, is any measure, there may be certain overly-used psychoanalytic categories, or a preponderant reliance on psychoanalytic vocabulary, we would, at some point, be better to do without.  But here's a swish (not swallow) of Barthes for now, if you're so inclined, preceeded by a simple bite of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche:

   The revolt of the slave in morals 2 begins in the very principle of ressentiment 3 becoming creative and giving birth to values—a ressentiment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself"; and this "no" is its creative deed. The volte face of the valuing standpoint—this inevitable gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective—is typical of ressentiment : the slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires objective stimuli to be capable of action at all—its action is fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to the aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and exultant "yes" to its own self;—its negative conception, "low," "vulgar," "bad," is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with its positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is with life and passion), of "we aristocrats, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones."

Now, it appears to me that Barthes agrees with Nietzsche—ressentiment may be inherently reactive but, obviously, it's not a force entirely lacking in virtue either.  On the contrary, it may even be marked by a certain necessity, standing as it does in contrast to the totalitarian "happiness" of "we aristocrats."  (Obviously, I'm neglecting to comment on a lot of things that beg to be unpacked, but it's late and these are hardly polished thoughts.  Maybe the threads can be picked up later.)

Oddly enough, Barthes seems to speak of ressentiment as constitutive, in a sense, of the amorous relation itself!

When two subjects argue according to a set exchange of remarks and with a view to having the "last word," these two subjects are already
married:  for them the scene is an exercise of a right, the practice of a language of which they are co-owners; each one in his turn, says the scene, which means:  never you without me, and reciprocally.  This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called dialogue: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods.  The partners know that the confrontation in which they are engaged, and which will not separate them, is as inconsequential as a perverse form of pleasure (the scene is a way of taking pleasure without the risk of having children).

 

With the first scene, langauge begins its long career as an agitated, useless thing.  It is dialogue (the joust of two actors) which corrupted Tragedy, even before Socrates appeared on the scene. Monologue is thereby pushed back to the very limits of humanity:  in archaic tragedy, in certain forms of schizophrenia, in amorous soliloquy (at least as long as I "keep" my delirium and do not yeild to the desire to draw the other into a set contestation of language).  It is as if the proto-actor, the madman, and the lover refused to posit themselves as hero of speech and to submit to adult language, the social language to which they are prompted by the wicked Eris:  the language of universal neurosis.  (A Lover's Discourse:  Fragments, 204-5)
 

What echoes in me is what I learn with my body:  something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which, meanwhile, had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation:  the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash.  My inward body begins vibrating as though shaken by trumpets answering each other, drowning each other out:  the incitation leaves its trace, the trace widens and everything is (more or less rapidly) ravaged.  In the lover's Image-repertoire, nothing distinguishes the most trivial provocation from an authentically consequent phenomenon; time is jerked forward (catastrophic predictions flood to my mind) and back (I remember certain "precedents" with terror):  starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away:  this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.  (A Lover's Discourse, 200)

Saying "contitutive" may indeed be striding too far (is the Barthes going to my head?) But I'm still struck by how he appears to follow (the spirit of) Nietzsche in seeking to affirm (with such fondness, even!) what might be called "the dark side," without wishing to label and have done with it, or disown it merely. There is something productive of the psychoanalytic in this too, perhaps.

The will to possess must cease—but also the non-will-to-possess must not be seen: no oblation. I do not want to replace the intense throes of passion by "an impoverished life, the will-to-die, the great lassitude."

Barthes does go too far sometimes, I think; his sentimentality doesn't quite find the necessary corrective in the Freudian lingo.  He appears to naturalize a great deal, when all he is doing is perhaps describing.  But I would be remiss if I didn't include the final para of this extended fragment (the one, incidentally, entitled, "Making Scenes," and it ties this rather hopelessly pastiche-ish post back to the theme of dialogue and its discontents, in what I would like to risk reading as a genuinely hopeful breath):

What is a hero?  The one who has the last word.  Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?  To renounce the last word (to refuse to have a scene) derives, then, from an anti-heroic morality:  that of Abraham:  to the end of the sacrifice demanded of him, he does not speak.  Or else, as a more subversive because less theatrical riposte (silence is always sufficient theater), the last word may be replaced by an incongruous pirouette:  this is what the Zen master did who, for his only answer to the solemn question, "What is Buddha?," took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked away:  impeccable dissolution of the last word, mastery of non-mastery.  (A Lover's Discourse, 209)