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.

Auteur
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.

Contenu

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