Concept
Resentment and Victimary Thinking
The structural consequence of centeredness — and its pathological universalization
“Victimary thinking is, most fundamentally, resentment towards civilization—a resentment only possible for the civilized, or those in close proximity to them.”
From the Archive
“Resentment is the emotion (?) or attitude (?) one has towards whomever denies you your desire.”
“All resentment is directed at someone who has usurped, or prevented us from occupying, “our” center.”
“Individual resentment toward the center is the source of innovation in human affairs.”
“But victimary thinking enacts this resistance and refusal as a resentment of firstness: Nazism’s extremities are just the extension of the striving for pre-eminence among nations, among firms in the economy, among ideological and religious claims, and so on.”
“Indeed, victimary thinking is predicated upon the suspense of honor as a reciprocal principle, demanding honor for the designated victim but guilt and shame for the oppressor.”
“The victimary thinker sees all sufferers, including the environment, as our victims, and implicit in the victimary configuration is that it is within our power to rectify the situation.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.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.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“But then why did it become a victim, which is to say, a communal focus of resentment, in the first place? Love cannot express itself with the concreteness of resentment; but precisely for this reason, its expression is a model of the community-creating function of language. The formula “I love you” offers insights into originary language. More about this…”
“Sacrificial thinking is designed to justify the necessary evil of this discharge of resentment toward the central being that can never fully incarnate the divinity and put an end to conflict rather than merely defer it. Sacrificial thinking is a necessity of ritual society , all the more so in its often repressive hierarchical forms. But in market…”
“In her talk on “witnessing” that concluded the UCLA GA – Religion series last month, Stacey Meeker suggested an interesting paradigm. If we consider the scenic center in its capacity as the center of significance, the relation of the observing periphery to it is one of resentment . But the witness to “trauma,” one of Stacey’s two witnessing categories,…”
“Only victimary status still provides some degree of universal authority, breadth of terrain being counterbalanced by narrowness of focus. And even here, the institutionalization of the various genres of victim studies generates new sets of professional specializations–and a concomitantly less victimary orientation. There is no world without resentment. The…”
“The point of this concept was to serve as an originary model for resentment between those on the periphery: the scandal of my absolute inferiority to the center must precede that of my relative inferiority to my rival, since what I feel as “inferiority” is a relation of significance , in contrast to the pecking-order rivalries of the animal world. Yet it…”
“If centrality—sympathy, attention (not to mention attendant material benefits)—is to be granted to certain forms of suffering, misfortune or subjection-by-others, those who actively claim it may logically “deserve” it as much as those upon whom it has been bestowed without conscious effort on their own parts, those whom we do not perceive as “playing the…”
“I take on the resentments of that power center. This reciprocal relation continues, and is continually restructured as new imperatives from the center realign its centrality and my own. New obligations emerge, to my fellow “centers,” who mediate my relationship to the power center. Insofar as the power center keeps remediating these relationships, I imagine…”
“In revolutions and among the French casseurs or our Antifa activists, this may lead to violence, but one cannot explain the victimary phenomenon merely as the discharge of aggression. Whereas in pre-modern society, resentment was considered sinful, and far more often than today both led to violence and was followed by atonement, in the modern peacetime…”
“Further, I’d not want to deny that expressions of “the victimary” can be pathological; in this sense, it is like any cultural expression. But if your founding texts are Socrates’ Apology , The Book of Job, and The New Testament, what can you do? Defenders of the West against its cultured despisers need to recognise this as much as the despisers themselves…”
“(Has any philosophy or human science tried to get to the bottom of this line of questioning, which reduces any other line if inquiry to near irrelevance—which I say at the risk of arousing resentment, because nothing can be/seem more unfair than having one’s central concerns minimized.) When is resentment energizing and when paralyzing? Our recourse must…”
Key Texts
Reframes resentment not as a pre-social feeling but as an index of the security of central power, distinguishing resentment toward, donated to, and on behalf of the center.
The fullest treatment of resentment as such: always shaped by power, always aimed at a usurped center, and usable as a 'discovery procedure' rather than merely a grievance.
Anatomizes victimary thinking as a resentment of firstness, tracing how it universalizes the figure of the victim across nations, firms, and ideologies.
Shows the victimary configuration in operation—the guilty conscience of the Big Man's successor and the thinker who casts all sufferers as 'our' victims to be rectified.