Ressentiment — A reactive affect of rancor and repressed vengeance that, for Friedrich Nietzsche, grounds the morality of the weak and the “slave revolt in morality.” Nietzsche uses the French word ressentiment (from ressentir, “to feel again”) within his German text, since German lacks an exact equivalent; English usage keeps the French form to distinguish it from ordinary “resentment.” The concept is central to the Genealogy of Morality (1887): in the First Essay (§§7–11, especially §10), the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. Those who cannot react in action compensate through imaginary revenge: they condemn the noble and strong as “evil” and declare “good” what is in fact weakness. In the Second Essay (§11), Nietzsche opposes Eugen Dühring’s claim that justice originates in reactive affect; in the Third (§15), the ascetic priest redirects ressentiment against the sufferer himself, in the form of guilt. Max Scheler took up the concept in Ressentiment (an essay of 1912, expanded in 1915), arguing against Nietzsche that Christian love does not spring from ressentiment, which instead marks modern bourgeois morality; see Max Scheler. Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), reads it as the triumph of reactive forces. Critics object that Nietzsche’s genealogy psychologically generalizes the origin of entire moral systems without sufficient historical evidence. The notion connects with nihilism and the overman; see the article Nietzsche: will to power, eternal recurrence, and the genealogy of morals.
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