Resentment and the Center in Generative Anthropology
Resentment is, in Generative Anthropology, the foundational irreducible concept — the one category that resists all critical dissolving. As Katz quotes Gans directly in Resentment: "Resentment is the one category that cannot be deconstructed. Nietzsche, who discovered the power of resentment, was destroyed by it all the same. For to discover resentment in another is at the same moment to discover it in oneself. Only resentment can know resentment; yet resentment knows nothing since it distorts the reality of what it observes."1. This is the knot at the heart of the concept: resentment is both the instrument of analysis and the thing that corrupts the analyst. No genealogy, no deconstruction escapes it.
The originary account grounds resentment in the structure of the scene itself. As Katz writes in Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era, representation is "the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture"2. Resentment arises precisely at the site of that deferral: the center that holds violence at bay is also the center that distributes attention, prestige, and being unequally. Those on the periphery of the scene, whose access to the center is mediated and partial, feel this inequality as injustice. As Katz notes in The Tokenization of Resentment, "the most basic form of resentment in a juridical order would be a feeling of injustice, which in turn presupposes a particular conception of justice, which is historically variable"3. GA tends to flatten this historical variability, which is part of why Katz has moved to develop it further.
One of Katz's persistent criticisms of GA proper is its failure to scale the concept of resentment adequately beyond the small originary scene. In The Tokenization of Resentment, he observes that "one impetus for separating center studies from generative anthropology was the inadequate and impressionistic discussions of resentment in the latter," and that "the problem is with scaling up, or resisting the Big Scenic Imaginary, which reduces all social interactions to the model of the small group imagined to be present on the originary scene"3. Center Study thus takes resentment more seriously as a structural and historically specific phenomenon, rather than a psychological residue of mimetic desire.
Katz proposes a specific methodological response to this problem in Accessing the Ostensive within the Declarative: "Seeing resentment as resentment towards the center provides a way of exhibiting the non-resentful quality of your study of resentment, because you turn that study into a study of the center in which your own object of study, regardless of how “justified” or “unjustified” his resentment is, could conceivably join."4. The analyst does not stand outside resentment pointing at it; instead, by redirecting attention to the center and what it demands, the analyst converts their own resentment into "greater clarity regarding central imperatives." This is the meaning of the first Center Study idiom: "donate your resentment to the center."
The passage that most crystallizes the concept's difficulty and necessity comes from Gans, as quoted in Resentment: "no act of deconstruction can separate itself from the construction of the order it resents. No use of language can represent, and defer by representing, its own resentment, yet all of culture is nothing but this attempt."1. Culture is resentment perpetually failing to transcend itself through representation — and GA, at its best, is the attempt to think that paradox without being consumed by it.
Excerpts
"Resentment is the one category that cannot be deconstructed. Nietzsche, who discovered the power of resentment, was destroyed by it all the same. For to discover resentment in another is at the same moment to discover it in oneself. Only resentment can know resentment; yet resentment knows nothing since it distorts the reality of what it observes. Nor can anyone reveal resentment without being contaminated by it; history only gives us models for putting it off, for spreading it thin enough to let some light pass through its opacity."
Resentment · Substack Read →
"'Donate your resentment to the center,' one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. 'Resentment' remains an irreducible concept for center studies—indeed, one impetus for separating center studies from generative anthropology was the inadequate and impressionistic discussions of resentment in the latter."
The Tokenization of Resentment · Substack Read →
"Seeing resentment as resentment towards the center provides a way of exhibiting the non-resentful quality of your study of resentment, because you turn that study into a study of the center in which your own object of study, regardless of how “justified” or “unjustified” his resentment is, could conceivably join. In this way you, the inquirer/accuser can own your own resentment towards the center whose lapses enabled the other’s resentment, while converting your resentment into greater clarity regarding central imperatives."
Accessing the Ostensive within the Declarative · GABlog Read →
"The most basic form of resentment in a juridical order would be a feeling of injustice, which in turn presupposes a particular conception of justice, which is historically variable—GA would never go in this direction."
The Tokenization of Resentment · Substack Read →
"The spread of monotheism, already inscribed in its universalistic origin, could hardly take place other than through resentment towards those who both gave this God to humanity and “selfishly” claimed an exclusive relation to Him."
Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era · GABlog Read →
"no act of deconstruction can separate itself from the construction of the order it resents. No use of language can represent, and defer by representing, its own resentment, yet all of culture is nothing but this attempt."
Resentment · Substack Read →