Chapter 8 Nietzsche’s Agon with Ressentiment: Towards a Therapeutic Reading of Critical Transvaluation (Nietzsche and Freud)

Abstract

In Nietzsche’s life-project of critical transvaluation (Umwertung), the prevailing values of European (Christian-Platonic) culture – whether religious, metaphysical or moral – are contested in the name of life as the highest value. It is his critical diagnosis of modernity that motivates his call for a transvaluation of all values, giving it direction and urgency, and from the period of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft and Zarathustra onwards, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is often expressed as a problematic of revenge and ressentiment, uncovered by his genealogical critique of modern values and their sources.1 In this chapter, I examine the practical implications of Nietzschean transvaluation through the lense of therapy and redemption.What practical consequences does Nietzsche draw from his diagnosis of ressentiment as our malady and the source of our malaise? Does he have a cure to offer, a way to heal the wound of ressentiment? Does he offer us a way out, a redemption from ressentiment? These questions raise in an acute form two of the fundamental problems afflicting Nietzsche’s critical thought. The first is an energetic problem: if, as Nietzsche argues, 2,000 years of re-