Cristian VargasDr. Judith NormanPHIL 342623 November 2015Race, Ressentiment, and Rednecks: Nietzsche and LynchingThe question facing critical race scholars today is whether or not Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 decadencethese 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 Nietzsches 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 laws 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 sufferingNietzsche 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 slaves social location, the being of ressentiment instead fulfills the fantasy of revenge in the form of ideas and attitudes towards the worldspecifically 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 slaves transgression is inconsequential and trivial relative to the masters own power. By contrast, the slave forgives reactively as a matter of impotencealmost 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 Nietzsches 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--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 intensitythe wound must be allowed to fester and growsuch 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 moralitydoes this not then make the priest a type of hybrid whose very existence upsets the master/slave dichotomy (Pittman 36)? The priests 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 Pittmans 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 readers 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 Pittmans argument concerns the role of punishment within lynch lawafter 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 Nietzsches 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 ones relationship to their ancestral lands. It becomes obvious how, given this social imaginary, the black ex-slave would always already be a criminalas 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 Deleuzes 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 ownersby 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 Gods 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 Pittmans 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 waysusually, the slave revolt exerts the force of ressentiment on the source of the victims suffering, the master. In the ascetic ideal, ressentiment turns inward against the being of ressentiment, but what distinguishes lynching is that ressentiment isnt 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 slaves 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 powerlessnessin 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 ressentimentthey dont 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 wouldnt 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 CitedHolub, Robert. Nietzsches 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 Len. 2014. Print.