American political discourse in the era of Tea Parties, Donald Trump, and '#BlackLivesMatter' is suffused with Nietzschean ressentiment. Left critical theorist Wendy Brown's 'wounded attachments' characterize civil rights protesters, multiculturalists, anti-tax activists, and Christian conservatives alike: all are grounded in an identity thoroughly constituted by foundational wounding, which then provides a continuing impulse to fixate on perceived wrongs as the basis for political community. Rather than lamenting this, however, I defend ressentiment from the vantage point of a renewed Left in the United States. This paper explores a strategic reclamation of ressentiment 'well-used, ' argues that its employment in past liberation struggles has been crucial to the successes of the Left, and proposes several specific tactics in political rhetoric and mobilization, including: (a) embracing victim/enemy narratives, (b) cultivating anger, and (c) deploying effective lies rather than ineffective truths.You shall hear, then, an encomium, not of Hercules, nor of Solon, but rather my own of myselfthat is, of Folly.-Erasmus, The Praise of Folly 1
Democratic theorists have increasingly turned to Aeschylus' Oresteia as a resource for challenging the shortcomings of liberal theory, but I argue that this particular return to Greek tragedy should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Defenders of Aeschylean justice have underplayed the sacrificial aspects of his solution to the problem of civil strife, mistaking the consent of the Furies for a resolution that escapes the cycle of violence. Drawing on elements of Greek ritual practice, I contend that Aeschylus folds the consent of the Furies into a sacrificial framework which denies the violence it enacts by directing this violence toward nonhumans. As a consequence Aeschylean justice is complicit in continuing the sacrificial economy it seems to subvert, and Aeschylean politics relies on the suffering of nonhumans (and humans) to secure its conception of order.
Homer has long been considered a fountainhead of “western” civilization, though it is only more recently that the epic poems attributed to him, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, have been evaluated as important works of political theory. These epics depict the events surrounding the Trojan War between the Greeks and Trojans, a war caused by the abduction of Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. Homer's importance for political thought can be seen in three primary fields. (1) As the pedagogical source for classical (fifth‐century
bce
) Greece, Homeric texts are considered exemplary of the warrior ethos and as educators of Pericles’ democratic, imperial Athens. (2) Homeric texts are also, and as such, treated as the key antagonists against whom Plato's political philosophy pivots, leading, indeed, to the “quarrel between poetry and philosophy.” (3) Finally, Homer is seen as one of the founding figures in “agonistic” and “tragic” democratic political theory, particularly as this has been articulated by Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Simone Weil.
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