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Power now does the work that culture used to do. This is seen in the tendency toward the politicization of nearly everything. Politicization is most visibly manifested in the role ideology has come to play in public life, the well-established predisposition to interpret all of public life through the filter of partisan beliefs, values, ideals, and attachments. As a consequence, we find it difficult to think in ways to address public problems or issues in any way that is not political. Politicization means that the final arbiter within most of social life is the coercive power of the state. Our times amply demonstrate that it is far easier to force one’s will upon others through legal and political means than it is to persuade them or negotiate compromise with them. What adds pathos to this situation is the presence of ressentiment, defined by a combination of anger, envy, hate, rage, and revenge.

Politically conservative Christians are animate by a mythic ideal concerned with the “right-ordering” of society. They want the world in which they live reflect their own likeness. A legacy of a Christian origin is understood as providing a sense of ownership over America and “radical secularists” have taken this away. The effect is harming to America, and people of faith, marginalizing them in public life. Their response has been one of political engagement, often conflating Christian faith and national identity in the political imagination. There are changes occurring among the Religious Right. However, though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ—is identical to the longstanding approach of the Christian Right. This is because the underlying myth that defines their goals and strategy of action has not changed.

Progressives have always been animated by the myth of equality and community and therefore see history as an ongoing struggle to realize these ideals. The key word in the progressive lexicon is justice. The biblical tradition that Christian progressives appeal to is the prophetic tradition in its condemnation of the wealthy for their abuse of the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. However, in its commitment to social change through politics and politically oriented social movements, in its conflation of the public with the political, in its own selective use of Scripture to justify political interests, and in its confusion of theology with national interests and identity, the Christian Left imitates the Christian Right.

Politics has become a “social imaginary” that defines the horizon of understanding and the parameters for action. What is never challenged is the proclivity to think of the Christian faith and its engagements with culture in political terms. For all, the public has been conflated with the political. But the ressentiment that marks the way they operate makes it clear that a crucial part of what motivates politics is a will to dominate. However, for politics to be about more than power, it depends upon a realm that is independent of the political process. The deepest irony is that the Christian faith has the possibility of autonomous institutions and practices that could be a source of ideals and values that could elevate politics to more than a quest for power. Instead, by nurturing its resentments, they become functional Nietzcheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.

This chapter argues for a kind of ‘equal protection’ for retributive justice amongst the kinds of justice. Other forms of justice – distributive, corrective, natural right, promissory – have respected places within our pantheon of plausible theories of legal institutions. The question put is why retributive justice has in modern times been so discriminated against. A variety of explanations are considered; the emotional nature of retributive judgments is ultimately singled out. That emotional nature is given extended treatment, along Nietzschean lines. Despite the conceded force of many of the Nietzschean objections to the emotional basis for retributive judgments, a virtuous emotional base for retributive judgments is argued to lie in feelings of guilt.

Meanwhile, Ryan Litsey suggests a reading of the Joker as a “Nietzschean Superman.” Applying Nietzsche to his reading of the video game Batman: Arkham City, Litsey argues that the “will to power” – a key feature of Nietzsche’s notion of the Superman – “is evident in all things the Joker does.” Suggesting by extension that Batman represents Nietzsche’s “man of ressentiment” – the slave morality to the Joker’s master morality – Litsey offers a careful exploration of the Batman/Joker duality, the applicability of which extends well beyond a single ludic narrative. “Understanding the Joker in this way,” Litsey suggests, “can give us new insight into the appeal and power the Joker has traditionally held for audiences – the attraction of the Superman, latent in all of us, is made manifest in him.”

This chapter argues that a central, but usually overlooked, condition for attaining freedom in Nietzsche's sense is to overcome that most fundamental form of ressentiment: against time. Time is the ‘dimension’ of living that makes us feel most powerless (and so is the greatest stimulus to ressentiment). Unlike that better-known object of ressentiment, the ‘masterly type’, which can be subdued through ‘slave morality’, and especially through a certain valuation of pity, equality, and truthfulness, there is nothing we can do to change the past. So the hardest test of whether we can affirm our own particular life is not merely to recognize the inevitability of the past that has made us what we are, but actively to ‘will’ it. The chapter argues that abandoning a metaphysical worldview does not, therefore, just mean abandoning absolute standards or sources of value, such as God, Reason, or The Good. It also means seeing life as inescapably in time, as structured by time, with no timeless realm to give it meaning. But what is the history in which any contemporary Western self is situated and with which it must reckon if it is to achieve sovereignty? The answer is that our history — the history of Judeo-Christian cultures — is the history of nihilism. A sovereign life must therefore be a coming-to-grips with the challenge of overcoming nihilism — that is, of overcoming Western history as the history of the ascetic ideal, as the history of the ‘will to nothingness’. This claim involves elucidating aspects of the complex relationship between Nietzsche's concepts of selfhood, autonomy and nihilism.

Friedrich Nietzsche believes that self-love is a necessary ingredient for healthy individualism. This chapter explores the connections between his conceptions of egoism, self-love, and vanity in the middle period works. It is argued that the roots of Nietzsche’s later concept of ressentiment appear in these works, for several of the features associated with vanity, such as heteronomy and the absence of self-love, come to be characteristic of ressentiment. The chapter then moves into a discussion of what room there might be for a conception of justice, in an analysis that imputes so much power to egoism.

Nietzsche's moral perspectivism is one of the central and best-known themes of his philosophy. I interpret his genealogical argument in On the Genealogy of Moralsas an ad hominem argument, not so much history as moral psychology. In particular, Nietzsche mentions resentment (ressentiment) as a diagnostic tool in moral criticism. But Nietzsche has mixed intentions here. On the one hand, he adopts what I call a “blaming” perspective.” On the other, he urges us to get “beyond judgment.”

In this chapter, I discuss why resentment (ressentiment) is so important to Nietzsche’s theory and what is wrong with it. I also discuss Nietzsche on love and pity and his several metaphors of strength and weakness, masters and slaves, eagles and lambs, health and illness.

As well as drawing sceptical conclusions, Nietzsche rejects the concept of absolute or metaphysical truth as unintelligible. Nietzsche's views are elucidated by contrasting his arguments with alternative accounts of ‘objective reality’ belonging to the philosophical canon. It ensues that Nietzsche espouses a variety of anti‐metaphysics premised on the mutual determination of reality and interest. He believes that objective reality cannot be conceived without volitional and intentional agency on the part of subjects who experience themselves as acted upon (‘resisted’) by the contents of their representations. Having elaborated and explained the prominence of Nietzsche's denial of metaphysical fact, the discussion turns to the origin and significance of the desire for metaphysical truth. In identifying the embracing of metaphysical truth for its own sake (the ‘will to truth’) with the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche intends to contrast practical engagement with the world with a preference for evaluation divorced from the subject's actual experiences and desires. Belief in objective value and ‘the will to truth’ are subsumed under a general psychological disposition designated ‘the ascetic ideal’, characterized by self‐deception or ressentiment.

Argues that Nietzsche's pronouncements on psychology advert to basic facts about the constitution of inner experience and are thus incompatible with his anti‐essentialism. Nietzsche's analysis of non‐egoistic behaviour, his proto‐Freudian presentation of mental life as driven by processes inaccessible to self‐consciousness, and his analysis of the ascetic ideal, ressentiment, and self‐deception amount to a picture of human agency in which all significant aspects of inner experience are ‘in reality’ desires for the experience of power.

This chapter focuses on Merold Westphal's analysis of the views of Friedrich Nietzsche about faith and theology (through Nietzsche's Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism). It discusses how these views are appropriated, and how Christians and other religious people could learn from them. Other topics that are discussed in the chapter include ressentiment (resentment, hostility), and perversions of pity and love.

This chapter illustrates the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on the tragic philosophy. The play in which the influence of Nietzsche is perhaps strongest is Ibsen's The Master Builder. In this play, Nietzschean oppositions are central to the play's dramatic structure. Auguste Strindberg, in The Father and Miss Julie, subjects traditional tragic form to restructuring and revision by confronting Nietzsche's negative critique, particularly his concept of ‘ressentiment’ and his claim that in the modern world ‘slave morality’ has gained ascendancy over ‘noble’ or ‘master morality’. Strindberg does not suggest any alternative to the tragic condition of being a woman, other than by adopting the strategies of ressentiment in the manner of Laura in The Father.

Here prisoners' perspectives on their institutional treatment as racialized prisoners are explored. The chapter considers equating the pains and deprivations of imprisonment with the pains of racist treatment and religious discrimination, but goes further to illustrate the ways in which younger and older prisoners from diverse ethnic groups experience the new race equality agenda of the Prison Service, in both positive and negative ways. Fatalistic, oppositional, and retreatist adaptive responses to discriminatory treatment by prison officers are described. The chapter also examines resentment of race equality policies amidst white retrenchment, alongside claims of discrimination and racism being used instrumentally and mischievously by minority ethnic and Muslim prisoners, leading to white majority disadvantage.