Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 21:13:07 +0000
From: R.J.R.Cook-AT-reading.ac.uk (Roger Cook)
Subject: The Dialectics of Resentment



>7.  The duality of the Bourdieu industry is reflected on this very list.
>The duplicity of reinforcing select coteries in the process of employing
>Bourdieu's methods is right here.  I first spotted it in the debate over
>that manipulative and dishonest hustler Andy Warhol.  I've held my tongue
>since an asshole or two on this list slandered me as a homophobe, as if
>Warhol's sexual proclivities constituted a tacit basis upon which to condemn
>him, or even worse, to excuse his crimes.  But don't think I have forgotten
>being lied about and slandered; I'm on to all of the little gimmicks and
>tricks of academic liberalism.  There ain't nothing radical about the sort
>of people who populate the academic industries surrounding critical theory,


Is there not the possibility of this being a case of what Bourdieu calls
'the dialectic of resentment' in *The Rules of Art*

'The desperate hope of being another turns easily into the despair of
failing at it, and ambition by proxy ends in *moral indignation*...Here one
arrives at the principle of the *dialectic of resentment* which condemns in
the other the possession one desires oneself..The unhappy passion for
inaccessible possessions and the extorted admiration that goes along with
it are fated to end in hatred of the other, the only way to escaping hatred
of oneself when envy attaches itself to properties - notably corporal or
*incorporated*, such manners - that one cannot appropriate without
nevertheless being able to abolish all desire for appropriation (thus it is
that the indignant condemnation of the 'brilliant', frequent among pedants,
as Flaubert would have said, is more often than not merely the inverted
form of an envy which has nothing to oppose to the dominant value other
than an antivalue, the 'serious', defined by the *privation* of the
condemned value.' p.17


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