Title: When Ressentiment Itself Becomes Creative

Speaker: Mike McGovern (University of Michigan)

Date: Monday, 19 April 2025

Time: 4:00-6:00pm

Mode: In-person

Venue: Room 114, Humanities Building, New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

This paper explores some unexpected entryways into flourishing in African societies and those of the African diaspora: through the portal of resentment. It asks the question, posed in the book I am writing, of whether “ugly feelings” can turn beautiful. The above quote, taken from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, is part of his acerbic theorization of the development of the Christian ethos of self-sacrifice and the conceit that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” In a supremely resentful analysis, he traces the source of this ethos to the resentments of the priestly class against the virtu of the warriors and kings.

While Nietzsche characterizes this work of ressentiment as being backward-looking and self-defeating, he does acknowledge that the resentful have the capacity for creativity. This paper takes several African-American aesthetic and political movements from the 1960s to the present as examples of ways in which ressentiment can be a powerful springboard for a positive political program.