Disruptive Emotions
Grace Hunt, New School for Social Research
Introduction
In his vehement defense of resentment against politically sanctioned forgiveness, JewishAustrian essayist and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry offered in 1966 what would
become a standard worry within political theory regarding reconciliatory politics.
Namely, that reconciliation is a tactic of "enforced commonality" which must necessarily
omit survivors' particular understandings of injustice and subsequent claims of selfdetermination (Schaap, 2008; Motha, 2007).
Amery believed that the pressure placed on survivors of the Holocaust to forgive
was immoral even when in the service of reconciliation. Amery instead believed that only
a kind of moral phenomenology of resentment could adequately respond to the
transgressions of the Third Reich, because the transgressions were properly moral in
nature. When Amery was tortured and later told to forgive, his dignity was denied twice.
I want to suggest that we understand his resentment not as a stubborn refusal to reconcile.
It is, I hope to show, a principled mistrust of commonality and a disruption of the
temptation to forgive. What interests me in particular, is whether Amery’s resentments
can be politically emancipatory without thereby being rendered fully politically
intelligible.
As a way to reveal how Améry’s right to resentment is not wholly reconcilable
with politics but remains necessary nonetheless, I develop five arguments. First, I briefly
suggest that we understand Amery’s resentment not in general, but as a mode of moral
self-defense. Second, despite the recent efforts of political theorists such as Thomas
Brudholm to subsume Améry's resentment within the goals of reconciliation, I argue that
his resentment remains "irreconcilable". Third, I demonstrate how this irreconcilability is
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a result of Amery’s critique of the progressive time that he believes governs the ideal of
reconciliation. Fourth I suggest that reconciliation need not entail an ideological
commitment to state-sanctioned forgiveness, despite Amery’s suspicion that it does.
Finally, I suggest that Amery’s resentment should be understood as a principled mistrust
of and disruption to enforced commonality, even if Amery himself does not offer a
positive account of what politically mobilized resentment would amount to.
1 - Resentment as a Moral Self-Defense
I take it that Amery’s worry is legitimate: he thinks that representing political
reconciliation as the willingness of survivors to forgive places undo pressure on victims
of violence to overcome, repress, or otherwise deny affects that are necessarily part of the
recovery process. The pressure to forgive, in other words, feels immoral.
Amery’s charge of immorality is in large part due to his awareness of the fact that
in the swift change to democracy from despotic rule, many unspeakable wrongs were left
unpunished. Hannah Arendt noted herself in Responsibility and Judgment that for a long
time Germans refused to prosecute known murderers (56). It is in response to this denial
of justice under the guise of forgiveness that led Amery by the late 1950s to become part
of a disapproving minority with hard feelings a minority who “stubbornly held against
Germany its twelve years under Hitler" (67). What I want to call attention to here is the
intimate link between suffering or victimization and resentment in Améry's work. We
must not understand his essay as a defense of resentment in general, but as a moral selfdefense in particular. Améry's resentments, developed over time, resist forgiving and
interrupt forgetting in order to acknowledge and thereby protect the moral particularity of
the victim. [Amery understood morality according to a scale of exposure to reality. So
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whereas in everyday life we can distract ourselves from reality with memories, pleasures,
and hopes, when tortured, the intensity of localized pain exposes a person to unmediated
reality. The sadistic exposure to reality as unmediated pain is what gives Amery the
privileged right to judge, resent, and to withhold forgiveness and understanding]. Because
Amery experienced his body as the site of self-betrayal at the hands of soldiers following
orders, he experiences the public’s willingness to forget as the privilege of the nonvictim. All of this is to say that Amery resents according to a moral principle of selfrespect. This is also the basic thesis of my dissertation, namely, that resentment as a
reaction to indignity is a demand for respect.
2 - Reconcilable Resentments
Despite Améry’s professed disdain for political evaluations resentment's value—what
matters to him is the subjective state of the victim revealed through introspection—
political theorists interested in widening the scope of acceptable responses to atrocity
have nonetheless turned to Améry's work. This section will briefly rehearse the recent
praise for Améry’s defense of resentment within reconciliatory politics by turning to
Thomas Brudholm’s 2008 book, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to
Forgive. I am curious about whether the political appropriation of Améry’s resentment
entails “reconcilable resentment”, and whether this reconcilability brings about a
normalization of suffering that would be at odds with Améry’s understanding of the
moral particularity of having suffered injustice.
In response to the boosterism of forgiveness within transitional justice literature,
Brudholm's work aims to reorient our thinking towards the negative emotional
“remainders” of mass conflict, particularly resentment. Brudholm’s work, as I read it,
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tries to square resentment within reconciliation, and turns to Améry as a case in point.
Brudholm ultimately argues that neglecting the moral significance of survivors' negative
affects post-atrocity is unfair and deeply offensive (4). Accordingly, Brudholm is critical
of those who assume in advance the priority and virtue of forgiveness.1 Brudholm
addresses resentment in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South
Africa in the 1990s and argues that forgiveness only gains legitimacy within transitional
justice when it can be considered an option alongside other options. Brudholm ascertains
that "the TRC should have been obliged to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger and
demands of retributive justice (44). In other words, reconciliation, as a political policy,
must be arrived at democratically on pain of becoming ideological. And here Brudholm
was reacting, and I think rightly, to Desmond Tutu’s infusion of the Christian language of
forgiveness into the political project of reconciliation. It was Tutu who said things like it
was more human to forgive. So in this respect I’m very sympathetic to Brudholm’s
efforts.
But given the definitive commitments of transitional justice, that is, given that it is
already primarily invested in and aimed at reconciliation, can merely including negative
affects as a way to legitimize and democratize the reconciliatory project do justice to the
suffering expressed by Améry’s resentments? Are Améry's resentments best understood
as compatible with reconciliatory collective goals?
The implication that Brudholm fails to see is that as a field of study focused on
institutions, laws, and policies, reconciliatory politics itself precludes a subjective attitude
towards victims and perpetrators. Reconciliatory politics, in other words, cannot
acknowledge the subjective demands of resentment because its efficacy as that which can
1
See Brudholm's criticism of Desmond Tutu in Chapter 5 of Resentment's Virtue.
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bring about the lawful treatment of injustice relies on its ability to judge impartially.
Within the arena of transitional justice, Brudholm brings legitimacy to Améry’s defense
of resentment as a kind of conscientious objection to the political view that forgiveness is
the only legitimate response to moral atrocity. The question remains whether a politics of
resentment is possible without sublimating or merely tolerating negative affects alongside
the goal of forgiveness. The problem with reconciliation guided by an ideal of
interpersonal forgiveness is that it forsakes the needs and demands of the victim; needs
and demands that Brudholm would agree are morally and politically necessary for justice.
But what I think Brudholm misses is the fact that while there are face-to-face encounters
with testimony, but ultimately it is the state that authorizes the reconciliation. And it is
this authority that Améry’s resentment fundamentally disrupts.
I therefore remain skeptical of this move to read Améry's work within the context
of current transitional justice debates, and I am not alone. Magdalena Zolkos, for
instance, argues that Brudholm's reading of resentment is itself teleological insofar as he
believes, Zolkos says, that "the goal of the encounter of victim and perpetrator is to
validate and/or 'objectify' the knowledge that derives from the subjective experience of
victimhood" (Zolkos 2007, 30). Rendering the morally particular desires of resentment
politically intelligible is a prevalent practice within the political culture of reconciliation.
But Améry refuses to explain-away the moral horrors of Auschwitz:
I had no clarity when I was writing this little book, I do not have it today,
and I hope that I never will. Clarification would also amount to a disposal,
settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history. My
book is meant to aid in preventing precisely this. (11) 2
2
Améry unwittingly reveals a psychoanalytic insight in line with Gregg Horowitz, who says
"while knowledge on its own will not emancipate us from the suffering of our proper histories,
nothing else will either." (Horowitz 2009, 28)
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Although Brudholm has the best intentions in attempting to explain the virtue of Améry's
resentments, he unwittingly ends up reifying negative affects as politically legible or even
widely understandable “remainders,” a move that risks disinfecting the affects of their
subversively particularity. Whereas Brudholm is hopeful that Améry's resentments can be
welcomed into the reconciliatory process, Zolkos reads Améry’s resentments as
disrupting “the very discourse of ‘normalization’” that reconciliation tends towards
(2007, 27).
But now, if Amery’s resentments fundamentally disrupt political intelligibility,
how could politically mobilizing the affect result in anything other than resentment’s
appropriation by the political. I will suggest a way out of this dilemma when I discuss
Amery’s conceptualization of reconciliation in sections 4 and 5.
3 - Progressive Time of Political Reconciliation
What exactly is Amery’s critique against political reconciliation? Simply put, Amery
argues that a time sense of forgiveness illegitimately governs moral healing. It is
illegitimate because despite its moral appearance (forgiveness is often praised as the most
ethical response to wrong), political forgiveness actually subscribes to a "natural"
tendency to let time “heal.” Amery says,
Whoever submerges his individuality in society and is able to comprehend
himself only as a function of the social, that is, the insensitive and
indifferent person, really does forgive. He calmly allows what happened to
him to remain what it was. As the popular saying goes, he lets time heal
his wounds. (71)
He argues that the pressure to forgive is compelled by an illegitimate privileging of a
time-sense that understands psychological and moral healing as analogous to the healing
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of physical wounds. In Zolkos’s terms, Améry is deeply troubled by what she calls the
“time-engineering” of reconciliation (Zolkos, 29).
Early in his essay, Améry admits that his resentment is unnatural. He says,
"Absurdly, [my resentment] demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event
be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human condition, the future" (68).
But Améry’s understanding of what is natural and unnatural is counterintuitive and
deserves a closer look. Améry believes that the sense of time that governs the Christian
concept of forgiving is analogous to the physiological process of "wound-healing" (72).
Améry's resentment is a moral injunction against the tendency to consider reconciliation
a matter of healing physical wounds. His resistance to understanding moral injury as
analogous to a physiological injury that can scar over with time is articulated in the
preface to the second publication of At the Mind’s Limits:
I rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places
the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a
revolting way. Nothing has healed, and what perhaps was already on the
point of healing in 1964 is bursting open again as an infected wound. (xi)
So while Améry uses the language of the wound to describe his condition, hid wound
won't heal; it is more akin to a disease or trauma that gets worse with time when it is not
treated. Resisting the natural time-sense of repair is a moral necessity; moral wounds do
not heal on their own and therefore an interjection or intervention must be made. When
Améry says he wishes to "reverse the irreversible," he is expressing a wish and a worry:
the past must be integrated into the present, and yet this goal is made impossible
according to the progressive time sense of reconciliation, since his wounds don't heal.
According to Amery’s account, political reconciliation takes on a teleological character in
combination with the Christian language of forgiveness and the wound-healing analogy.
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Améry is alienated by what he calls “a unanimous peace chorus all around him,
which cheerfully proposes: not backward, let us look forward, to a better, common
future!” (69). For Améry, Christian forgiveness is a complacent response to the past that
liquidates claims of injustice. He understands the very project of the restoration of
harmony as hegemonic and…suppressive of victim’s individuality” (Zolkos 2007, 27).
Améry's resentment expresses contempt against the privileging of forgiveness and
social conformity over and against the moral conscience of victims. He understands
society as that which will not allow suffering to disrupt its political realization of civility.
Amery confirms his suspicion when he says,
The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not
care less about a life that has been damaged. At the very best, it looks
forward, so that such things don’t happen again. But my resentments are
there in order that the crime becomes a moral reality for the criminal, in
order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity. (70)
So long as reconciliation serves to safeguard society against exposure to the abject
suffering of others, it remains ideologically committed to disinfecting social conscience.
Améry's moral time returns to the past as a way to call it forth into the present
while problematizing the social pressure placed on survivors to forgive and thereby
forget. Améry believes that time must be disordered in order to become moral. Time must
move out of the biological sphere into the moral sphere, the latter which engages the past,
present, and future, rather than fixating on the future. Amery’s time is properly moral
time because it acts against natural time. It is in this sense, in contrast to natural woundhealing time, that Amery’s time is both dis-ordered and moral, while political time is
ordered and teleological.
4 – Ideological Reconciliation
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Despite his denouncement of politics as an inadequate response to the properly moral
transgressions of the Third Reich, Améry's writings reveal a deep political critique of the
ideological character of reconciliation. His essay "Resentments" expresses a principled
suspicion of the post-war climate wherein certain affects sediment into politicized
customs and institutions; specifically, forgiveness and its underlying affects guide the
telos and time of reconciliation.
What I'd like to suggest here, however, is that Améry's deep suspicion of political
efforts to cure what is essentially a moral dilemma is the result of his own hasty
conceptualization of politics as both teleological time and enforced commonality. What
Améry does not realize is that not all political conceptualizations of reconciliation serve
hegemonic and homogenizing functions. In fact, political agonists have argued that
dissidence need not be relinquished or sublimated in order to achieve reconciliation.
Stewart Motha reminds us, that reconciliation actually constitutes a double move: it is
both a device by which an enforced commonality can be re-inscribed and [an]
emancipatory demand. Where reconciliation amounts to mere re-inscription of
commonality, the first move, reconciliation is nothing less than domination (Motha 2007,
88). That is Amery’s point, and I think we can praise his critical awareness while still
being weary of his move to view reconciliation as merely a tool for domination.
In his exploration of non-ideological conceptualizations of reconciliation, Schaap
suggests that reconciliation as a concept can be non-controversially defined as "a public
reckoning with a history of political violence and oppression in order to enable people
divided by that past to coexist within one political community and to recognize the
legitimacy of its law" (250). As an ideal, the concept is difficult to oppose; public
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reckoning as a way towards peaceful coexistence is too vague to discount. It is rather
according to its varied realizations or conceptualizations that reconciliation has been
criticized. Schaap argues that the meaning of the concept of reconciliation became overdetermined in the 1990s according to the competing conceptions of reconciliation (250).
Schaap draws upon three conceptions that emerged in public debates in Australia
when the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was founded in the 1990s by the Howard
government. This program of reconciliation was created in response to the fact that there
had been no formal steps to reconciling indigenous peoples with the colonizing ruling
class. I bring up this case only to give context to three conceptualizations that have
emerged from the attempt to reconcile the oppressed and its oppressors. Schaap points
out that the two competing conceptualizations—a practical conception favored by the
government in power at the time that focused on redistribution of socio-economic
resources, and the more symbolic approach based on reparative justice as collective
responsibility—over-shadowed a third option, favored by oppressed persons themselves.
The alternative was based on the democratic ideal of self-determination and "emphasized
the importance of a treaty, indigenous rights, Aboriginal sovereignty and constitutional
recognition" (250). Améry's resistance to reconciliation is based on a worry about
diminishing self-determination (this is implicit in his claim about the moral particularity
of the victim). What his worry lacks is an articulated demand. Schaap helpfully brings to
the table a properly political conceptualization of that self-determination would look like.
I have turned to Schaap to point out that not all reconciliatory efforts are derived from an
ideological or one-sided commitment to enforced commonality, and to provoke the worry
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that Améry employs only the ideological definition of reconciliation, a move that restricts
the emancipatory purchase of his defense of resentment.
Andrew Schaap acknowledges the legitimacy of the concern that reconciliation
might be a conservative device of enforced commonality, but also thinks "it might a
strategic error to concede the ideological capture of the concept of reconciliation entirely
to its conservative appropriators" (249). Améry, for better or for worse, adopted merely
skeptical view of reconciliation as ideology. On the one hand, his mistrust of
reconciliation provoked his valuable—if not systematized—critique of post-war
forgiveness and his defense of resentment. In his refusal to forgive we find a compelling
defense of an emotion whose link to justice has been ignored since Adam Smith. On the
other hand, his unwavering rejection of reconciliation because it negates "the indignant
demands of the ruled in the service of the rulers" (to use Schaap's phrasing) amounts to a
rejection of the very concept that could, if conceived differently, redeem his resentment.
Améry's resentment names the conservative appropriation of the ideal, but struggles to
fully articulate the emancipatory possibilities of reconciliation.
5 - Resentment as Principled Disruption
What do Améry's resentments want? In this section I will try to flesh the moral revolution
Améry has in mind when he defends his resentments against state-sanctioned forgiveness.
Living with resentment is not a private condition for Améry. It is rather, a public event
whereby he expresses his indignation as a way to provoke collective moral
consciousness, what others have called "collective awakening into responsibility”
(Assmann, 131). Améry's resentments are a reminder intended to provoke a revolution in
moral conscience (Brudholm calls them a remainder, but I'd like to think of his
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resentments as actively making a claim, rather than being a kind of unfortunate residue).
Legitimizing Améry's resentments would require the German people to admit their guilt
so that they could join Améry in vulnerability and fallibility. Améry believes that there
exists a social aversion to vulnerability of the kind revealed through resentment. In this
sense, his resentments are not merely a moral self-defense, but also a political demand for
responsible recognition. (And here I've been pushed by my advisor, who says that
Germans have become obsessed with the Holocaust in a way would also be problematic
for Améry. Cathartic obsession with someone else's suffering is not an adequate mode of
recognition.)
Some theorists have rightly pointed out that Améry is not interested in the
political empowerment of victims’ in general. In fact, Amery vehemently denied any kind
of identity politics, again on the grounds that such politics breeds complacency and
sameness. Usurping power from the political, in other words, would entail a negation of
particularity. What he is properly concerned with is the alleviation of the condition of
victimhood (30); a condition that he admits is defined by extreme loneliness. Amery’s
principled refusal for power and collective identification ironically maintains both his
sense of integrity and loneliness. On the one hand, his refusal to identify with a victimposition delineated and endorsed by the state protects his moral particularity. On the other
hand, because Améry's resistance effectively negated any group identification his
resentments further alienated him. Améry's resentments exude a paradoxical resistance
that is upheld “out of a principle of solidarity with victims" and yet resists collective
identity (Sebald 2003, 156). What is so striking about Améry’s resentment is that it
exacerbates its own condition by making one “morally unique,” by feeling and thinking
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against society (Zolkos, 31). State-sanctioned reconciliation forsakes particularity
whereas non-political resentments leave Amery alienated from a community that might
otherwise share the burden of the past.
Despite the fact that Amery’s work leaves unsubstantiated the political power of
resentment, what it does suggest is perhaps more subversive. Amery’s work hints at the
possibility of securing a moral disruption of politics as a condition for ethical politics.
That is, if politics is to ethically respond to atrocity, where ethicality has to do in part
with enabling victims’ self-determination through the process of reconciliation, it must
avoid the forsaking experiential particularity as a condition of political recognition.
Because resentment is tied to self-respect, it is an affect among others that are a
necessary, though not sufficient resource for determining oneself within the
reconciliation process. Resentment turns out to be an untapped resource that registers
injustice and indignity in a way that aroused thinking and action for Amery, though
unfortunately, not recovery. Amery’s suicide 33 years after his release speaks to
irreconcilability of certain harms. Resentment as moral-self-defense, can, I think,
nonetheless be understood as that which strives for self-determination while resisting
closure.
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Works Cited
Améry, Jean. At the Mind's Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980)
Assmann, Aleida. "Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German
Memorial Culture" in New German Critique, (Number 90; Autumn, 2003)
Brudholm, Thomas. Resentment's Virtue (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008)
Motha, Stewart. “Reconciliation as Domination” in Law and the Politics of
Reconciliation, Ed. Scott Veich. (Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007)
Schaap, Andrew. "Reconciliation as Ideology and Politics" in Constellations (Volume 15;
Number 2, 2008)
Sebald, G.W. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell (New York:
Random House, 2003)
Zolkos, Magdalena. “Jean Améry's Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics
and Politics” in European Legacy (Volume 12: Issue 1, 2007)
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