The Globalisation of Resentment: Failure, Denial, and Violence in World Politics

Abstract

Through the lenses of contemporary terrorism, this article charts the rise of global resentment against the background of the multiplication and denial of failure. The article examines resentment and ressentiment as emotional responses to different kinds of failure: failure of justice and failure of recognition, respectively. It then investigates their place in the affective and moral economy of the global age, teasing out the key distinctions between the two emotions and assessing the strengths of the claim concerning an ever expanding diffusion of ressentiment in late modern times. Through inroads into classical and contemporary political theory, the article seeks to rescue resentment from the relative hegemony of ressentiment. The article closes with a reading of the Paris terror attacks of 7 January 2015 and 13 November 2015, that seeks to disentangle the different forms of resentment mobilised in these acts. By raising the issue of the moral value of resentment, the article ultimately seeks to address the question of how to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-hegemonic, and self-affirming political practices.