The praise of ressentiment: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump

Dolgert, Stefan

doi:10.1080/07393148.2016.1189030

Cited by 15 publications

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“…It was exemplified with the identity politics that was being articulated on behalf of oppressed groups, influential at the time, spreading from Western universities and beyond. The experience of living in an age of ressentiment was articulated once again in the 2010s (Dolgert 2016;Tomelleri 2017). This time, writers tended to see ressentiment as one main cause for the rise of authoritarian populism, organized around a core of predominantly white working-class males on both sides of the Atlantic (Dolgert 2016;Harper and Schaaf 2018;Oudenampsen 2018;Gidron and Hall 2017).…”

Section: The Build-up Of Tension: Way Of Life and No Way Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Pleasure of Punishment

Hörnqvist¹

2021

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Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: articulating the problematic of desire 1 The disappearance of pleasure? 2 The impossible flight from passion 3 The ambiguous desire for recognition 4 The paradox of tragic pleasure 5 Two paradigms of enjoyment 6 Ressentiment: moral elevation through punishment 7 Obscene enjoyment: between power and prohibition Index This book has a long prehistory and I am grateful to all people who have offered input along the way, starting with David Scott, who, as the editor of the anthology "Why Prison?", encouraged me to think further on the Foucauldian idea of the productivity of power, and thus initially set me on this track. It became a chapter on the pleasure of punishment, specifically focused on the prison and the middle class. When Tom Sutton at Routledge asked me to write a book on the theme a few years ago at a criminology conference, the task first struck me as too daunting. I also needed much more time, more material and a wider scope. My colleagues at the department of criminology at Stockholm university have been a great support; especially thanks to Henrik Tham, Anders Nilsson and Janne Flyghed for useful comments on early drafts. Intelligibility has been the key challenge throughout, and they have reminded me of that. Being granted the RJ Sabbatical 2018, by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (SAB18-0161:1), to write a research synthesis on the pleasure of punishment, entirely relieved me of teaching obligations for a full year, which I spent re-reading works in the philosophical tradition and making notes. The grant also allowed me to spend the autumn of 2019 as a visiting professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the London...

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Section: The Build-up Of Tension: Way Of Life and No Way Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But it was inevitably political. Each mobilization was powered by political demands for justice, and was successful to the extent that it articulated the wish of significant sections of the populations to be recognized and rectified as victims of injustices (Brown 1995;Dolgert 2016;Elgat 2017).…”

Section: The Build-up Of Tension: Way Of Life and No Way Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Pleasure of Punishment

Hörnqvist¹

2021

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“…Then, in the populist worldview the people are virtuous while the elite is corrupt; and finally, legitimate sovereignty is said to derive from the will of the people (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2000). Populism’s grievances are argued to stem from ‘a foundational wounding’ (Dolgert, 2016: 357) experienced by those who feel themselves dispossessed by some severe loss (such as a decline in an assumed prior status of ethnic superiority or, in the United States, ‘Americanness’, however defined) which potentially forms the justification for radical political action. Any such fixation creates the basis for deep, long-term distrust of those who have an apparently unassailable grip on power and it also promotes a willingness to embrace sweeping social change.…”

Section: What Is Populism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some 50 years after the late 1960s, Kazin’s description still reads like a valid account of the current situation, where many Trump voters appear outraged at what they see as their being marginalized by fringe groups, ethnic interlopers and elites, including intellectuals, who show uninterest in addressing what they believe to be their systemic social and economic disadvantages. Dolgert (2016) argued that ‘The dominant trend in American political rhetoric since 1968 has been the successful articulation of a series of Right-tending polemics that carefully nurtured and focused the ressentiment of the primarily white male … segment of the American electorate’ (p. 358). Given the long-term character of this demarcation in US society it may seem surprising that many commentators were wrong-footed, appearing to think that Trump sprang from nowhere as it were.…”

Section: What Is Populism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Trump’s populism, la trahison des clercs and embracing dissent

Sligo

2018

Media International Australia

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This article explores President Trump’s populist politics and its implications for scholars in communication studies, examining how Trump’s supporters need to be better understood within their own context. The thinking of Laclau, Mouffe and others, based particularly on observations of European populism, is employed to shed light on how populist social trends may undermine the legitimacy of rational public discourse and foster public acceptance of authoritarianism. Their perspective also gives insights into means by which scholars can better understand their own responsibility to avoid falling into the trap of invective-swapping seen during the US 2016 presidential campaign. In so doing, the article suggests ways whereby scholars can work towards the protection of a free society and help resolve the crisis of populism in ethical, informed and nuanced ways that help to arrest a drift to authoritarianism.

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“…Given these shortcomings, the displacement of reconciliation in the newly emerging age of resentment may be nothing more than a welcome return to normalcy. At least from this starting point—more tragic, and therefore more honest—we might learn to embrace resentment for the political work it can do (Dolgert ).…”

Section: The Mendacity Of Reconciliationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mendacity of Reconciliation in an Age of Resentment

McIvor¹

2017

American J Econ Sociol

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The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part due to political experiments such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other formal or informal truth or reconciliation processes. Here, I argue that there is a fundamental mendacity to reconciliation, given stubborn asymmetries of social power and disrespect. Reconciliation as an ideal carries an impetus towards resolution that covers over the necessary role that conflict plays in political struggles—including the role that conflict plays within struggles for reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite the mendacity of reconciliation, its meaning still holds political value. Reconciliation implies an orientation towards social repair, which even the strongest critics of reconciliation cannot bring themselves to reject. Some lies are worse than others, and some lies might be noble or necessary. Reconciliation is the latter—a fiction that is less pernicious than its absence. In this light, the task is to locate means of political reconciliation that do not obscure the conflicts and asymmetries of social life but enable social actors to face up to these conflicts and to discover novel ways to repair the damage that they can do.

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The praise of ressentiment: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The Pleasure of Punishment

The Pleasure of Punishment

Trump’s populism, la trahison des clercs and embracing dissent

The Mendacity of Reconciliation in an Age of Resentment

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