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cover of episode Zahi Zalloua, "The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Zahi Zalloua, "The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

2025/2/7
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Zahi Zalloua: 我认为理解“受苦者”作为一个历史存在很重要,而不是将其视为永恒的他者。我使用“受苦者”的概念是为了避免在被殖民者和奴隶之间做出选择,它指向奴隶制和殖民主义的后遗症。反殖民主义的左派拒绝将种族与阶级分开。在“受苦者”的行动背后存在着一种原因,他们不是没有目的或愿景的非理性存在。我提出的私人使用怨恨和公共使用怨恨之间的区别,是思考尼采式的康德,或者给予康德一种尼采式的扭曲的结果。对于尼采来说,怨恨助长了奴隶起义,赋予了我们奴隶道德,赋予了我们善与恶的语法。公共使用怨恨总是朝着他人,一种集体意志前进,而不是关于我和我自己的特定群体。如果公共怨恨变得过于适应环境,私人使用将保持其咬合力,它会不断提醒你那种愤怒,那种不守规矩的愤怒。在其充分发展中,在其有效的政治化中,它会远离自我,远离一个人的身份。

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This chapter introduces Zahi Zalloua's book, explaining the meaning of "The Wretched" as those radically excluded by unjust social orders, and how the book connects race, reason, and ressentiment. It challenges the idea of choosing between race and class as primary concerns.
  • The Wretched are those radically excluded by unjust social orders.
  • The book connects race, reason and ressentiment.
  • It challenges the notion of prioritizing race or class.

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The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment) (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause.

A public use of ressentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on ressentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Reframing ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist Left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation.

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).

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