Here Lies Bitterness

Part I

Bitterness: What the Man of Resentment Experiences

1. Universal Bitterness
2. Individual and Society in the Face of Resentment: Rumbling and Rumination

3. The Definition and the Manifestations of Resentment
4. The Inertia of Resentment and the Resentment-Fetish
5. Resentment and Egalitarianism: The End of Discernment
6. Melancholy in a State of Abundance
7. What Scheler Could Teach to the Ethics of Care
8. A Femininity of Resentment?
9. The False Self
10. The Membrane
11. The Necessary Confrontation
12. The Taste of Bitterness
13. Melancholic Literature
14. The Crowd of Missed Beings
15. The Faculty of Forgetting
16. Expecting Something from the World
17. The Tragedy of the Thiasus
18. Great Health: Choosing the Open, Choosing the Numinous
19. Continuing to Be Astonished by the World
20. Happiness and Resentment
21. Defending the Strong Against the Weak
22. Pathologies of Resentment
23. Humanism or Misanthropy?
24. Fighting Resentment through Analysis
25. Giving Value Back to Time
26. In the Counter-Transference and the Analytic Cure
27. To the Sources of Resentment, with Montaigne

Part II

Fascism: The Psychological Sources of Collective Resentment
1. Exile, Fascism, and Resentment: Adorno, 1
2. Capitalism, Reification, and Resentment: Adorno, 2
3. Knowledge and Resentment
4. Constellatory Writing and Stupor: Adorno, 3
5. The Insincerity of Some, the Cleverness of Others
6. Fascism as Emotional Plague: Wilhelm Reich, 1
7. The Fascism within Me: Wilhelm Reich, 2
8. Historians' Readings, Contemporary Psyches
9. Life as Creation: The Open is Salvation
10. The Hydra

Part III

The Sea: A World Opened to Man
1. Disclosure, According to Fanon
2. The Universal at the Risk of the Impersonal
3. Caring for the Colonized
4. The Decolonization of Being
5. Restoring Creativity
6. The Therapy of Decolonization
7. A Detour By Way of Cioran
8. Fanon the Therapist
9. The Recognition of Singularity
10. Individual Health and Democracy
11. The Violation of Language
12. Recourse to Hatred
13. The Mundus Inversus: Conspiracy and Resentment
14. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 1
15. What Separation Means
16. Toward an Enlargement of the Ego, 2: Democracy as an Open System
of Values
17. The Man from Underground: Resisting the Abyss

Notes

"Fleury's theorization of resentment is powerfully informed by philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory, and at the same time forges its own original and compelling account of self-destructive modes of existence. In this beautifully written meditation on resentment, Fleury opens up new ways of thinking about a subject's capacity to become a trapped, incapacitated, and bitter victim of its own ruminations. The implications of this book are profound and manifold."
Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

"In view of the political crises that spare no region of the world today, we can no longer ignore that democracy is mortal and very sick: too often we see the sacred right to vote turned against democratic values. It is essential to understand why, and what is to be done. That is why it is urgent to dive into this book's luminous demonstration that the disease has a name - resentment - and to explore the philosophical and psychoanalytical paths toward healing that its author opens up."
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University

"[P]rovides both academics and clinical therapists with a comprehensive paradigm of resentment as a dysfunctional state of mind."
Emotions and Society

Cynthia Fleury is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who holds the Chair of Humanities and Health at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.