From the Archives: Part 93 of The Self and its Sources

Resentment: the disease of the modern age, continued.

From the Archives: Part 92 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf portrays a more advanced stage of the ‘disease’ that Dostoyevsky depicts in the character of the “underground man”. Nietzsche incorrectly saw Christianity as the source of the modern world’s resentments – when in fact the resentments are the source of mimetic entanglements. Christianity censured the taking of revenge. It is this prohibition that Nietzsche rejects. To the extent that people refuse the Christian call to conversion and repentance that can change the human heart and yet still renounce revenge, there will be resentments.

From the Archives: Part 36 of The Self and its Sources

Is this about the ‘novel’ or anthropology? The imitator and the model: Girard's concept of 'internal' vs 'external' mediation. This is exemplified in Shakespeare & Cevantes who were late 16th century contemporaries. Every Shakespeare play deals with, in some way, what Kierkegaard described concerning resentment. Cf. speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida

From the Archives: Part 35 of The Self and its Sources

Sacrality is on the wane…and with it transcendence itself. Fascination is now only with the human order. But as the Hebrew prophets knew so well…we will either worship God or we will create idols. We will have an object of ultimate concern – the only question is, ‘who will it be?’ Kierkegaard announces the beginning of this process in the mid-nineteenth century: Resentment is the constituent principle of the modern age. “Resentment happens when the world moves from the happy love of admiration to the unhappy love of envy”.