ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper examines the potential of ressentiment and violence as a counter-discourse against racial hatred. To this end, this paper focuses on the reflection of Jean Améry (1912-1978), a victim and survivor of Nazi oppression. After 20 years of silence after his escape from Auschwitz, he agonizes over the impossibility of representing the Holocaust and its ethical issues until he ends his life with suicide. In particular, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, published in 1966, deals with “Ressentiment”. Through ressentiment, the perpetrator gets a chance to properly face the victim in self-denial. The ressentiment, which still dominates the victim’s existential scars, hopes that the perpetrator and the victim will encounter in the current conflict by “reversing” or “sublating” time. This paper continues to analyze Fanon’s violence theory that made Améry aware of colonization, another evils of European-centered racism. Through Fanon’s anti-colonial theories, Améry was able to discover similarities to the way Nazi racism works. In addition, it was noted that their themes to resist racism were not different. By defending and supplementing Fanon’s theory of violence, Améry was able to strengthen his reflection on ressentiment. Even in concentration camps and colonized situations, the cause of the violence is nothing but ethnic differences. From the standpoint of those suppressed and ruled by racial hatred, Améry is asking for “uncomfortable” ethical opportunities of ressentiment and violence, not forgiveness and reconciliation.

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