Here Lies Bitterness

Healing from Resentment

Cynthia Fleury, Cory Stockwell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509551040, 9781509551033
• eBook ISBN: 9781509551057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Quote
• 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
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