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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

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

28. Capitalism, Reification, and Resentment: Adorno, 2

29. Knowledge and Resentment

30. Constellatory Writing and Stupor: Adorno, 3

31. The Insincerity of Some, the Cleverness of Others

32. Fascism as Emotional Plague: Wilhelm Reich, 1

33. The Fascism within Me: Wilhelm Reich, 2

34. Historians' Readings, Contemporary Psyches

35. Life as Creation: The Open is Salvation

36. The Hydra

    Part III

    The Sea: A World Opened to Man

    1. Disclosure, According to Fanon

37. The Universal at the Risk of the Impersonal

38. Caring for the Colonized

39. The Decolonization of Being

40. Restoring Creativity

41. The Therapy of Decolonization

42. A Detour By Way of Cioran

43. Fanon the Therapist

44. The Recognition of Singularity

45. Individual Health and Democracy

46. The Violation of Language

47. Recourse to Hatred

48. The Mundus Inversus: Conspiracy and Resentment

49. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 1

50. What Separation Means

51. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 2: Democracy as an Open System
    of Values

52. The Man from Underground: Resisting the Abyss

    Notes