Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Those on the periphery of the scene can be said to resent the sacred central object, but they gradually lose their fear of it as the pacific nature of the scene becomes patent, motivating the transition to the sparagmos which supplies alimentary reinforcement to the community. But the resentful tension between appetite and non-fulfillment remains a permanent feature of desire. To desire is, precisely, to defer appetitive possession, and whatever appears as the agent of this deferral may then be said to constitute an object of resentment. It is in this configuration that we can begin to understand resentment’s transcendence by love. The difficulty of defining resentment should make us realize that any characteristically human emotion/relationship cannot be described by starting from its physiological manifestations. Resentment is a cultural phenomenon. Nor is it necessarily experienced as hostility or a desire for “comeuppance.” This is no doubt the way the word is used in normal parlance, and if we begin from the originary relationship with the central object, resentment is, on the one hand, a source of the aggression against this object—as described in Robertson Smith’s famous camel-sacrifice that has served Freud, Girard, and GA as the model for the originary sparagmos.”

— Eric Gans, Sacred Resentment · Saturday, February 29th, 2020 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment