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

2. 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

3. 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