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

“Fleury’s theorization of resentment is powerfully informed by philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory, and at the same time forges its own original and compelling account of self-destructive modes of existence. In this beautifully written meditation on resentment, Fleury opens up new ways of thinking about a subject’s capacity to become a trapped, incapacitated, and bitter victim of its own ruminations. The implications of this book are profound and manifold.”
Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

“In view of the political crises that spare no region of the world today, we can no longer ignore that democracy is mortal and very sick: too often we see the sacred right to vote turned against democratic values. It is essential to understand why, and what is to be done. That is why it is urgent to dive into this book’s luminous demonstration that the disease has a name – resentment – and to explore the philosophical and psychoanalytical paths toward healing that its author opens up.”
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University

"an insightful and probing exploration"
Philosophy and Society

Cynthia Fleury is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who holds the Chair of Humanities and Health at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.