Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“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, is made to feel not resentment but guilt . The centrality of the victim is experienced primarily as undesirable; our feeling of guilt reflects our sense of dependency on the scene of cultural representation that we all share. Guilt is thus the inverse of resentment, which equally reflects this dependency. I resent the person in the center because I cannot help participating in the scene of which he is the center–which means that I cannot, or, in the self-conscious modern mode inaugurated by Hamlet , will not, put an end to his centrality. Similarly, I feel guilty because the centralized victim’s sufferings, even if I have not caused them, generate cultural meanings from which I benefit. I participate in the victim’s sacrifice just as I worship the central divinity, whether I do either overtly or not. What is most interesting about guilt and resentment is that people do not generally admit to either of them. At Stacey’s talk, a few people objected to the term “guilt” and wanted to speak rather of “compassion.””

— Eric Gans, Resentment, Guilt, Compassion, and Injustice · Saturday, June 21st, 1997 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment