Concept · Imperative Mode

Resentment and Victimary Thinking

The structural consequence of centeredness — and its pathological universalization

Resentment is the unavoidable product of the originary scene. Every participant desired the central object. The sign that deferred appropriation also deferred satisfaction. The equality-on-scene — everyone facing the same center on the same terms — is not a compensation for the frustration of desire; it is a transformation of it. Desire becomes the desire to occupy the center rather than to take the object. That desire, structurally frustrated for most participants most of the time, is resentment.

Resentment is not a character defect. It is an originary structural feature of any scene with a center. To have resentment is to have a center; to have a center is to have participants who desire it and cannot reach it. The question is not how to eliminate resentment — that would require eliminating the center, which would eliminate the scene, which would eliminate human social life — but how to channel it productively.

Productive and destructive resentment. Resentment is destructive when it is directed at the occupied center with the aim of eliminating it — when the resentful participant seeks not to occupy the center but to destroy it. It is productive when it generates the disciplines and practices that make the resentful participant more capable of occupying the center — when resentment becomes motivation for the hard work of self-improvement. Philosophy and drama, Katz argues, are historically the primary modes of productive resentment: they convert the frustrated desire for the center into the discipline of approaching it intellectually and aesthetically.

Victimary thinking. The victimary is resentment universalized and institutionalized. Victimary thinking takes the individual's frustration at not reaching the center and transforms it into a structural account of social organization: the world is divided into oppressors (those who occupy the center illegitimately) and victims (those who have been excluded from it). Every inequality becomes evidence of oppression; every privilege becomes a violation of rights; every hierarchy becomes an injustice. The victimary political grammar — which Katz traces to the twin icons of World War II, Auschwitz and Hiroshima — has become the dominant moral language of modernity.

Anti-centerism. The deepest pathology generated by the victimary is anti-centerism — the principled opposition to centers as such, the claim that any occupied center is ipso facto illegitimate. Anti-centerism does not abolish centers; it produces center-occupants who are devoted to opposing the center they occupy. This is the characteristic pathology of contemporary liberal institutions: they cannot affirm their own authority, cannot defend their own centrality, and therefore cannot perform the deferral function that is the only justification for their existence.

The implied center in victimary discourse. Every act of victimary resentment implies a center that it appeals to — a standard of justice, a vision of how things should be distributed, an authority that could redress the grievance. The victimary cannot abolish the center; it can only transfer allegiance from the occupied center to a projected ideal center. Center Study's task is to make that implied center visible and to ask whether it is adequate to the obligations it is being asked to discharge.