Abstract
The purpose of this essay
is to diffract ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to
see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that
impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual
dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different
experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through
the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To this
end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed
by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with
Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy.
I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s
concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness
through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that
exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first
experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts
Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will
argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and
culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the
sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment.
The second experiment is to
diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal
Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that
text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in
conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I
am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism.
Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology,
this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment-becoming-Amerindian
perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we
will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this
experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by
offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and
an Amerindian perspective can reveal.
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