Here Lies Bitterness

The greatest threat to modern democracy comes from within and it has a name: resentment.  Stemming from feelings of inferiority in relation to others, resentment is a diffuse and obsessive loathing, coupled with delusions of victimhood, which clouds one’s judgment and perspective, so that an individual’s capacity to act and heal is paralyzed. Without the ability to heal, resentment can give rise to violent impulses, to the rejection of the rule of law, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the urge to use violent means to try to regain control of one’s life.    As individuals and as societies, we face the same challenge: how to diagnose resentment and its dark forces, and how to resist the temptation to allow it to become the motor of our individual and collective histories. This bestselling and highly original account of the psychic forces shaping modern societies will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the crisis of democracy today and what we can do to address it.

Part I Bitterness: What the Man of Resentment Experiences 1. Universal Bitterness                                             2. Individual and Society in the Face of Resentment: Rumbling and Rumination   3. The Definition and the Manifestations of Resentment                          4. The Inertia of Resentment and the Resentment-Fetish                        5. Resentment and Egalitarianism: The End of Discernment                         6. Melancholy in a State of Abundance                               7. What Scheler Could Teach to the Ethics of Care                                8. A Femininity of Resentment?                                            9. The False Self                                                    10. The Membrane                                                     11. The Necessary Confrontation                                     12. The Taste of Bitterness                                               13. Melancholic Literature                                          14. The Crowd of Missed Beings                                            15. The Faculty of Forgetting                                                  16. Expecting Something from the World                                    17. The Tragedy of the Thiasus                                            18. Great Health: Choosing the Open, Choosing the Numinous                      19. Continuing to Be Astonished by the World                             20. Happiness and Resentment                                        21. Defending the Strong Against the Weak                                      22. Pathologies of Resentment                                             23. Humanism or Misanthropy?                                        24. Fighting Resentment through Analysis                                       25. Giving Value Back to Time                                             26. In the Counter-Transference and the Analytic Cure                          27. To the Sources of Resentment, with Montaigne                   Part II Fascism: The Psychological Sources of Collective Resentment                    1. Exile, Fascism, and Resentment: Adorno, 1                             2. Capitalism, Reification, and Resentment: Adorno, 2                        3. Knowledge and Resentment                                         4. Constellatory Writing and Stupor: Adorno, 3                                  5. The Insincerity of Some, the Cleverness of Others                        6. Fascism as Emotional Plague: Wilhelm Reich, 1                             7. The Fascism within Me: Wilhelm Reich, 2                                8. Historians’ Readings, Contemporary Psyches                             9. Life as Creation: The Open is Salvation                                     10. The Hydra Part III The Sea: A World Opened to Man                                            1. Disclosure, According to Fanon                                         2. The Universal at the Risk of the Impersonal                                  3. Caring for the Colonized                                               4. The Decolonization of Being                                            5. Restoring Creativity                                             6. The Therapy of Decolonization                                          7. A Detour By Way of Cioran                                        8. Fanon the Therapist                                                    9. The Recognition of Singularity                                         10. Individual Health and Democracy                                       11. The Violation of Language                                             12. Recourse to Hatred                                              13. The Mundus Inversus: Conspiracy and Resentment                          14. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 1                                   15. What Separation Means                                                 16. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 2: Democracy as an Open System of Values                                                      17. The Man from Underground: Resisting the Abyss  Notes