Deleuze, ‘From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience’ summary

Chapter 4 of ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’

In Deleuze’s Nietzsche, reactive forces are acted by active forces (specifically the active force of forgetting) when they begin to concern conscious excitation, whereas reactive forces remain reactive when they concern only unconscious traces (the opposite of excitation). The man of ressentiment changes this relation, making reactions to traces perceptible, by rearranging the relation of reactive forces such that the active forces can no longer use their energy, can no longer act through them. Active forces decay without ever being directly attacked, and reactive forces triumph in general by struggle with each other. The loss of forgetting (aka the growth of a good memory) therefore characterises the man of ressentiment. Topologically, traces and memory invade consciousness. Such a man is unable to escape the influence of the traces, so every experience is offensive, and he blames the objects for this; thus revenge. This revenge is never simply a desire for revenge, since the topological change guarantees the victory of ressentiment; it is a real state of forces, and the slave revolt always succeeds. The slave is incapable of admiration (where he seems to admire he really diminishes himself, disguising the hatred he has for the object even from himself), he is constantly passive (meaning that which is non-acted, rather than inactive, where the former is reaction become ressentiment, the latter is reaction in general; he seeks, as a disinterested third party, to profit from the acts of others), and he is moral (meaning he blames and distributes responsibilities). But there is a second means through which ressentiment can win out. The morality of the slave is opposite the ethics of the master. The master says “I am good, therefore you are bad”; the negative is introduced only in the conclusion, as a matter of indifference, for the premises must be positive and affirmative. The slave says “You are evil, therefore I am good”; the negative becomes part of the argument, the slave defines himself only in relation to a non-self, and the positive is delayed (one can sense the dialectic). In more detail: the action is separated from its force (which is the splitting of force in two); the force is referred to a subject (which does not really exist), which is capable of acting or not acting; the decision to not act is praised and the decision to act is condemned. In this way, the active force is found blameworthy for acting (which is all it could ever do), and the reactive force is found praiseworthy for not acting (which it could never have done). Thus the slave morality reverses reality at every point. Ressentiment comes to the fore when reactive forces take the place of active ones (displacement), or when they present a fiction which separates the active forces from what they can do (reversal by projection). This projected fiction is the noumenal world, the world of God or heaven, etc. It presents action as evil. This projective fiction had to be done by someone, one who works with the reactive forces and makes sure they triumph, but for his own ends, namely a nihilistic will to power. The first such person is, for Nietzsche, the Jewish priest (though not in a racial sense); he introduces the dialectic, the negative premises, and all the themes later taken up by the Christians. Nietzsche takes up the subject of Judaism (a recurrent theme of the Hegelians) in his own way, which must be considered; he asks under what conditions and in what ways the Jewish priest is constituted through the whole of history. Bad conscience results from the victory of reactive forces; the active forces are separated from what they can do, and so they turn inward and produce pain. The bad conscience is the one in which the active forces become reactive and multiply pain through introjection. The result is that pain is produced by the self, which is twisted into ‘you feel pain because you have sinned’; thus bad conscience produces guilt. For the active interpretation, pain means that someone else is enjoying life, and becomes an instigator to live more (pain has an external meaning). For the reactive interpretation, pain means that the self has done something wrong, it is an argument against life (pain has an internal meaning). This internalisation of pain (different from the multiplication of pain caused by internalisation of forces) occurs when the Christian priest arises; he changes the direction of ressentiment such that it stops blaming the object and starts blaming the self. In doing so, ressentiment reaches its maximum contagion and produces guilt — this is the significance of sin, and the purpose for which the Christian priest must arise. The priest always acts through a fiction, so which fiction is it, in this case? Initially, culture is the exercise of habits on reactive forces to make them acted, so that the man becomes active; key in this process is the ability to make promises, which requires memory not that the promise was made in the past, but that one is obligated to fulfil the act promised in the future (this is where the debtor and creditor come from). This requires punishment, often violent, which could never cause guilt; it is only a way of making man responsible for his reactive forces. This is only a step on the path to the sovereign individual, who is not responsible for his reactive forces: responsibility is subordination, responsible in the eyes of the law, whereas the individual isn’t subordinated at all, and so cannot be responsible. Culture destroys itself. There is, however, a moment in between those two, wherein reaction triumphs. It perverts all the processes of culture, using them not to destroy itself but to reinforce itself. It uses hierarchy and training to prevent the people it produces from overcoming it. This is the ‘historical’ period, where reactive forces form communities and institutions, and take over from culture. “Universal history” means the triumph of reactive forces. This historical period begins when reactive forces use their own function (as being trained to be acted) to give the impression that other reactive forces are in fact active; that is the fiction of the priest, and in more concrete terms it refers to the formation of reactive institutions. Under these circumstances, debt is no longer caused by active forces (it is no longer active), and the reactive forces are held responsible not by active forces but by other reactive forces (“everything takes place between reactive forces”); debt becomes owed to a divinity, state, or church, and becomes inherently unpayable and infinite. Christian redemption is not a final payment through suffering, after which one is free, it’s an infinite debt whereby suffering does nothing, and the only way to be redeemed is for God to sacrifice himself on the cross and thereby make us all infinitely indebted to him. Responsibility-debt, a self-destructive tool of culture, is replaced by responsibility-guilt, which propagates itself endlessly and refuses to die. In summary: reactive forces appropriate culture and give some amongst themselves the appearance of active forces; debt becomes reactive and infinite, causing guilt (and creating the bad conscience); at the same time, the priest invents ways to cope with the internalised pain and guilt (which he invented), making it propagate further under the guise of healing; bad conscience perverts and usurps culture, projecting debt. Though there are more or less active, more or less reactive religions, religion in general has an affinity with ressentiment and the bad conscience, and it’s only when religion is subjugated to active forces that it becomes active. The ascetic ideal expresses the relations between ressentiment and bad conscience, the ways they work in the real world, and the will that makes reaction triumph. The ascetic ideal relates reactive forces to nihilism (they are never the same thing, but are always mutually dependent), a relation which relies on the myth of a world-beyond. This is never simply psychological, because the will to power is never simply psychological.

All quotes are from pages 104-138 of Deleuze G (2013) Nietzsche and Philosophy (Tomlinson H trans), Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London, UK.