Thomas Brudholm

This article starts with the work of Jean Améry, formerly Hans Maier, a Jewish refugee from Austria during the Second World War and later a member of the French Resistance. Améry published Beyond Guilt and Atonement in 1966 to discuss the legitimacy of resentment, the moral good of the refusal to forgive those who have not themselves come to terms with their crimes. Brudholm connects this to the philosophical ressentiment of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, rejects the idea that the division between legitimate resentment and the illegitimate ressentiment that distorts the self can be whether it is "justified," and argues that the withholding of absolution can be the highly moral act, the one that shows that we care for ourselves and our rights, that a crime against us--forget "humanity," forget "war crimes"--the rage that arises from our wound shows that it cannot be swept under the rug, that it is an enormity. He doesn't say that that's the basis of public morality, but I think he implies it--and it needs saying. The ability to empathize is rooted in the ability to feel pain--we dodge the implications of that, in an era where the discourse of evil is so dominated by the images and themes of trauma and healing, where great men like Desmond Tutu strive to sweep the burning resentment under the rug, and where it's so natural for us to locate peace-at-last in the disembodied emotional hygiene of "reconciliation."

This is a good starting point for thinking not only about the Holocaust, not only about the flaws of reconciliation processes like the one in South Africa, but also about indigenous activism at present, about the genocide and apartheid we pretend weren't like those others. And about the effects of rejecting emotional hygiene on your one and only personal you. Letting ressentiment destroy you because to do otherwise would be to endure the unendurable, to forgive that which must not be forgiven, isn't an easy choice by any means--it's Christlike in a crazy way, the path of the martyr. And yet we've all done it. We've all refused to let it go, because it was our right to rage, and their responsibility to atone. A world without outrage is a world without atonement. Journal of Human Rights.… (plus d'informations)