Cristian Vargas

Dr. Judith Norman

PHIL 3426

23 November 2015

Race, Ressentiment, and Rednecks: Nietzsche and Lynching

The question facing critical race scholars today is whether or not Nietzsche’s philosophy

can be useful in regards to issues like white supremacy, colonialism, and black identity, despite

the blatant racism and sexism that manifests itself clearly throughout Nietzsche’s works. The

conventional response from scholars has been an extreme revulsion to his denigration of the

black race (Preston 1997), as well as to his theories of the ‘good European’ and a ‘great politics’,

in which a new type of philosopher would emerge that could overcome the nation-state, create a

superior culture, and dominate the world, which are repudiated as colonial fantasies (Holub

1998). However, black existentialist thought seems to disagree with this conventional wisdom, as

Nietzsche critiqued European culture as a contingent and overdetermined result of slave morality

and decadence—these race scholars contend that his critique of Europe is useful for those who

seek to imagine alternatives to Eurocentrism (Gooding-Williams 2006). Specifically, John

Pittman argues that Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment explains the phenomenon of lynching as a

manifestation of unequal socioeconomic power relations between impoverished, white

Southerners and the wealthy, white aristocracy.

Pittman claims that lynching is a site of convergence for ressentiment, morality, white

supremacist ideologies, and punishment (33-34). In order to trace lynch law’s relationship to

ressentiment, one must first define ressentiment. Ressentiment is a fundamentally reactive force

that seeks to express itself violently upon another who is determined to be the source of suffering

—Nietzsche contends that the slave revolt in morality began whenever ressentiment obtained

creative potential (ostensibly first through Socratic rationalism and later through the ascetic

ideal). Unable to express itself physically in the manner of a true reaction by nature of the

impotence of the slave’s social location, the being of ressentiment instead fulfills the fantasy of

revenge in the form of ideas and attitudes towards the world—specifically against the active,

instinctual, and self-referential noble class. Nietzsche outlines the five constitutive elements of

ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morality as follows: first, that the expression of the impulses of

vengeance must be obstructed and deferred. By contrast, the nobles exact revenge swiftly and

precisely, so although they may also experience ressentiment at time, it does not become toxic in

the way it does for the lower classes. Additionally, Pittman fails to consider the argument that the

master has the option of forgiveness, which indicates strength insofar as the master can afford not

to care because the slave’s transgression is inconsequential and trivial relative to the master’s

own power. By contrast, the slave forgives reactively as a matter of impotence—almost as a

psychological defense mechanism to cope with their own powerlessness. The slaves tell

themselves that retribution will come in another life, and thus deny the apparent world through

the religious axiom “the last shall be the first in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Second, these feelings

of hatred and the desire for revenge must be retained and preserved, in order to find release on

something different yet similar to the original source of suffering. Pittman assumes the audience

already has made the connection between the second criterion and Nietzsche’s theory of memory

and pain. Pain is the primary way to form memories, and the humiliation and impotence felt by

the lower class by virtue of their social location serves to constantly remind them of their own

inferiority vis-à-vis the noble class. By contrast, Nietzsche argues that the noble faculty of

forgetfulness allows the master to actively and spontaneously create new values and explains

why the master never lingers for very long on any particular transgression. Holding grudges

becomes a practice reserved for the slave. Third, these vengeful impulses must be deepened in

intensity—the wound must be allowed to fester and grow—such that these impulses exhibit an

enhanced strength once they are finally discharged. In Genealogy, Nietzsche makes clear the fact

that a force turned inward will intensify upon itself. Fourth, this increase in intensity must

necessarily involve a new degree of cruelty not typically present in active expressions of

revenge. When exacting revenge, the noble never inflict more suffering than the transgression is

worth. By contrast, the intensification of cruelty characteristic of ressentiment manifests itself in

Christianity, a theology born from slave morality, which believes that the powerful will suffer in

Hell for eternity. Finally, ressentiment evolves from merely being a behavioral pattern

characteristic of slaves into an epistemological lens for how they exist in and see the world. The

origin of ressentiment comes from slave morality, which is the unique creation of priests, who

created “evil” both as a distinct category of person and as a moral value. While slave morality

cannot have existed without the priest caste, slaves used to exist without priests and without

slave morality—does this not then make the priest a type of hybrid whose very existence upsets

the master/slave dichotomy (Pittman 36)? The priest’s existence mirrors that of the slave in that

they both lack the physique and strength of the master, but at the same time is different than the

slave because the priest engages in certain ascetic practices such as abstinence and purification

that the slave does not yet participate in, but even still possesses an affinity for value creation

characteristic of the noble caste. The creation of slave morality represents a complete

transfiguration of the slave/master dichotomy by overthrowing the supremacy of the noble class

and by moralizing the reactive animosity felt by the base class (Pittman 36-37). This

fragmentation of the slave/master dichotomy will be important later for Pittman’s argument in

relation to ressentiment.

Just as Nietzsche gives a genealogy of morality, Pittman seeks to produce a genealogy

about lynch law (38-39). The essential element of lynching was to institute a social practice of

punishment that resided outside of state law. Pittman splits the history of lynch law into three

distinct phases: first, from the beginning of the Revolutionary War to right before the Civil War

crisis. Lynching was originally developed as a public style of execution against Royalists who

were enemies of the independence movement. Later, lynching developed into what Pittman dubs

a “frontier justice” used by those settlers moving west given the absence of legal authorities and

institutions in the western United States at the time. The second phase started at the inception of

the Civil War and lasted until the end of Reconstruction. During this time period, lynching

became a microcosm of the broader political struggles between the North and the South rather

than about criminal law. Lynching was used to punish abolitionists who ventured into slave-

owning communities. From there, the final phase spanned from the post-Reconstruction period to

the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s-60s (Pittman 39-40). Lynching became

racialized such that majority white mobs began killing blacks, primarily black men, and thus

began to exhibit the gratuitous cruelty of ressentiment. The actual death of the victim was de-

emphasized in favor of the ritualization of torture and dismemberment. Pittman points out that

the mob aspect of lynching is crucial to the reader’s understanding of his argument, because this

indicates a “herd instinct” characteristic of ressentiment (40)—those who are weak by nature

require the security of overwhelming numbers in order to feel comfortable translating their brutal

impulses into action.

The final piece of Pittman’s argument concerns the role of punishment within lynch law

—after all, it originated as a form of criminal punishment outside of state control. But in order to

understand what it means to be criminal, one must first recall how Nietzsche’s genealogy of

punishment is grounded in the debtor-creditor relationship. Whites in the South had developed a

culture that constructed a debt that descendants owed to their ancestors for granting them life.

Thus, this also created social practices wherein the patriarch of the family would violently

mistreat the male children, and to a lesser extent the female children, as a manifestation of the

creditor extracting his due from the debtor (Pittman 42-43). The most important effect of this

culture was a conception of measured nobility based on one’s relationship to their ancestral

lands. It becomes obvious how, given this social imaginary, the black ex-slave would always

already be a criminal—as a result of natal alienation, blacks had no ancestral lands in the United

States, yet they still benefited from social organization to a certain extent (Pittman 44). The

criminal in this case is the debtor who fails to repay, or even dares to try to lay a hand on the

creditor – in doing so, he forfeits all of the advantages afforded to him by the creditor and truly

learns the value of these advantages. The creditor in this case is the community, who had

previously protected the debtor from the inhospitality and brutality of nature, but now ostracizes

the debtor and invites every hostile force to express itself upon this criminal. Interestingly, this

argument reminds the reader of the social contract theory, in which a collective agrees to

establish and abide by certain rules in exchange for protection from the brutish ‘state of nature’.

This introduces a useful albeit inaccurate heuristic for understanding the creditor-debtor

relationship in this instance, especially given Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche wherein he

argues about the role of contracts as a method of bureaucratic codification. Regardless, Nietzsche

argues that for the nation-state to have been able to bring restraint and fixedness to previously

unrestricted populations, it necessarily required gratuitous violence. Given this argument, one

could postulate that the practice of lynching emerged as a reactive manifestation of Southern

whites’ feeling of vengeance against the violence of state formation, especially after the Civil

War (Pittman 44). However, Pittman interprets Nietzsche to suggest that the very act of

collective punishment of the criminal constitutes and reconstitutes the community precisely

through such an exclusion and serves as a socially acceptable outlet to vent collective impulses

of cruelty on a vulnerable body, which is to say that lynching was a way for the Southern white

community to build solidarity (43-44). The revaluation of the formerly strong and noble Africans

slaves into a socially constructed weakness (in other words, they were made weak through

slavery) depicted that very weakness as a sign of indebtedness to the community of slave owners

—by failing to pay this debt, which is to say by merely being ex-slaves, the emancipated black

was easily constructed as criminal.

Pittman only now establishes the source of ressentiment as the residual effects of

socioeconomic power relations between poor Southern whites and middle- and upper-class

Southern whites (41). Even though rich whites often spectated or condoned the lynching and

occasionally even participated in the lynching, the overwhelming majority of the participants

were poor, disenfranchised whites who were resentful against their own class oppression. If one

recalls the role of the priest in catalyzing the creative potential of slave morality, the facets of

ressentiment become more apparent given fundamentalist Protestant ministers were the primary

organizers and leaders of lynch law. They were inextricably linked with the Ku Klux Klan, either

as prominent leaders within the organization or as close allies of these leaders (41). The greatest

irony here is that a religion originating from the Hebrews, former Egyptian slaves who would

become God’s chosen people, would condone the brutal killing of helpless members of a race

that had itself just been liberated from slavery. But if their primary grievance is class oppression,

why would the poor white Southerner not find solidarity with the black wage worker? The

answer, according to Pittman, may be that ressentiment fragments the master/slave dichotomy

through its own intensifying and dynamic properties, as evidenced by the emergence of the priest

as a hybrid, and replaces it with a stratified hierarchy (45). Although Pittman’s argument lacks

clarity as to where exactly blacks and poor whites are on this hierarchy, the reader can infer that

in order for whites as beings of ressentiment to see blacks as objects of their hatred, they had to

feel as though they were inferior to both blacks and wealthy whites. In these circumstances,

ideologies of white supremacy easily flourished as a way for poor whites to cope with their own

impotence. This fragmentation of the master/slave dichotomy becomes obvious given that

ressentiment does not express itself in typical ways—usually, the slave revolt exerts the force of

ressentiment on the source of the victim’s suffering, the master. In the ascetic ideal, ressentiment

turns inward against the being of ressentiment, but what distinguishes lynching is that

ressentiment isn’t turned inward nor is it discharged against the master. Rather, ressentiment is

directed towards an individual of a different social position than the sufferer, someone who is

also somewhat impotent relative to the master, and therefore can serve as a safe and satisfying

scapegoat for the slave’s expression of revenge (Pittman 46). However, the choice to designate

blacks and black men in particular as objects for the safe expression of ressentiment is not

accidental. Pittman contends that there are two criteria for objects upon whom it is safe to

express the violence of ressentiment: first, the object of the discharge must be recognized to be a

fellow person capable of feeling humiliation and powerlessness—in other words, they must be

capable of ressentiment themselves by being conscious of their own social location (46). This is

why animals or inanimate objects are insufficient as objects of ressentiment—they don’t feel the

inward sting of humiliation. Ironically, this first criterion is incredibly self-deceptive. White

supremacy argues for the natural superiority of whites and the inhumanity of blacks, but

lynching fundamentally acknowledges the humanity of the victim, because otherwise they

wouldn’t be satisfying objects for discharging violent impulses. The so-called supremacy of

whites is the greatest of deceptions, for it is merely a way for the weak to appear to embody a

characteristic, any characteristic, of the strong, noble class because the slave fears the relative

strength of the black body. The second condition requires that the object of the discharge must be

a threatening kind of other, founded not merely on a projection of anxiety but a social reality

(Pittman 47). In this way, moralized fantasies and exaggerated threats about the other are

constructed reactively relative to the original, physical interactions. For example, slave morality

constructed the powerful as “evil” but its moralizations were based in reality: the noble class was

actually more powerful and subjugated the lower castes. The so-called ‘threat’ posed by the

black male that poor whites liked to use was the fear that they would lose their jobs due to the

influx of cheap labor and the myth of the “black rapist” (Pittman 47). Following Reconstruction,

the institutional support necessary for the prosperity of blacks post-emancipation simply was not

there, which then caused a huge influx of low-wage workers against whom poor white

Southerners had to compete. In other words, blacks represented a threat to the job security of

lower class Southern whites. Additionally, black men in particular threatened the narrative of

“white womanhood”, and by extension, to white moral values. The physical basis for this

assumption came from a long history of interracial sexual relations between slaves and their

masters, and from this black men were constructed as figures of defilement and sinfulness who

were antithetical to the purity and virginity of white women (Wood 2014). The valuation of

womanhood and purity intensified the relationship between Southern whites and ressentiment by

more closely aligning with Christian ascetic values regarding abstinence from bodily temptation,

which Nietzsche has repeatedly criticized for being life-denying rather than life-affirming. By

affirming their own sexual deviancy, blacks arguably could be seen as another hybrid class

within the now ruptured master-slave dichotomy because they embrace materiality and the body,

but still lack the power and social status of the master.

In summary, Nietzsche clearly has much to contribute to critical race scholars who seek

to bring new interpretations to the history of racial violence in the United States regardless of his

own racist tendencies. John Pittman forwards a new scholarship that attempts to trace

ressentiment, born from class antagonisms, as the root cause of the lynching of blacks in the

South. Not only does his theory problematize conventional understandings of how white

supremacist ideologies dehumanize black bodies by showing how ressentiment fundamentally

humanizes the object of discharge, but it also demonstrates how self-deceptive and socially

contingent these ideologies are. This offers a new angle for race scholars to approach race

antagonisms and to imagine new methods of active value creation that can combat the reactivity

and decadence that plagues the American social imaginary.

Works Cited

Holub, Robert. “Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germania, Good Europeanism, and

Great Politics.” The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy. ed.

Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop. Ann Arbor: The University of

Michigan Press, 1998. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Carol Diethe. On the Genealogy of

Morality. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

Pittman, John. “Nietzsche, Ressentiment, Lynching.” Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African

American Thought. ed. Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin. SUNY Philosophy and

Race Series. 2006. Print.

Preston, William A. “Nietzsche on Blacks.” Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black

Existential Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Wood, Amy L. “Lynching.” Religion and American Cultures: Tradition, Diversity, and Popular

Expression. ed. Gary Laderman and Luis León. 2014. Print.