On Love, Resentment and the Early Chronicles

In the panel at the recent GASC conference on a Substack essay I wrote on “resentment,” I began by asking “what is the other of resentment” before realizing that an answer was built into the title of Gans’s regular “column,” the Chronicles of Love & Resentment. I was a little bit astonished to realize that I had forgotten that “love” could be seen as the other of resentment, and responded, in those opening remarks, by suggesting that “love,” certainly as compared to “resentment,” is a very underdeveloped concept in GA. I still think this is the case, but I just experienced another, equivalent, moment of astonishment—I have been asked to go through Gans’s Chronicles, in the context of a pedagogical project concerning GA, and select those that should be considered essential for pedagogical purposes, and I have discovered in the very first few Chronicles, not only vivid and even florid descriptions of love, but the claim that love, in fact, precedes and makes possible resentment (and that, furthermore, this is a distinguishing feature of GA as opposed to Girard’s mimetic theory). So, from the very first Chronicle:

Perhaps the most useful way to describe the difference between GA and Girard’s system is that the latter begins with resentment whereas GA begins with love. Human violence is as violent as it is only because the first human act is the deferral of violence. Resentment preoccupies us more than love because it poses problems to be solved, but our problems repose on a basis of human solidarity. This is not an expression of optimism, but a reminder of our ontology. One (more) thing the Oedipus myth is about is human survival through love, minimally defined as the deferral of violence. Oedipus is the infant that his father could not kill, that his mother could not abandon to his death; loved as a child by his adopted parents, he leaves the scene, accompanied by his loving daughter Antigone, to die a holy man at Colonus. It is not to make little of life’s tragedies to affirm that they are part of la comédie humaine.

Of all our personal experiences, that of love is the most profound–in the vocabulary of GA, the most originary. So much so that it cannot fully be articulated, no more than the believer can fully articulate his faith. The foundation of language cannot be directly expressed in language. Resentment, on the other hand, rests on a foundation of love; the resenter is a child who breaks his toys knowing his parents are there to pick up the pieces. And thus it can be articulated with great sharpness. Its danger lies precisely in this ease of communication.

And Chronicle #2 gives (derived from a Girardian attempt to reconcile the two positions) a very good reason for this: resentment derives from mimesis, and mimesis is driven by love. (But would this make love pre-human?) Then, in Chronicle #3, we have the very interesting claim that “love is to the ostensive as resentment is to the declarative. Love defines a new significance, whereas resentment is parasitic on an old one.” I will keep an eye on this going through the Chronicles, but I don’t think we see this kind of argument after the first dozen or so. Indeed, we already see the concession that resentment “preoccupies us more,” which is to say it’s more “interesting,” and it has certainly come to preoccupy Gans himself more. Necessarily so? If love is ostensive, it’s hard to talk about it. Meanwhile, we also see in these early Chronicles a kind of “constitutive” understanding of resentment, one that is certainly familiar as a recurrent account of resentment, but increasingly over the years tied to those occupying certain moral and political positions:

Alone, I am the man of resentment. All worldly presence does me injustice, not because it is unaware of its own existence, as Sartre’s Roquentin would like us to believe, but because of its scandalous indifference to mine. Even when my fellow man does not esteem himself over me, he betrays me by admiring another above myself. The least object I encounter in my path, a scrap of newsprint not consecrated to me, an advertisement in another’s image, a street-sign bearing a name not my own; the entire world and everything within it is a complicit witness to my unjust exclusion from the center of significance.

“Alone,” in this context, as we will see in a moment, can be taken to mean “without love”—alone, then, resentment is perpetual, a kind of continuous undertone or atmosphere to our daily lives, as we are always encountering centers of attention indifferent to us. We could almost say that resentment is consciousness itself. But this only works through the contrast with love:

What is there then for me to love? To love what refuses to acknowledge my infinite power to love would be the ultimate abjection, the relinquishment of my claim of centrality.

But now we are two and in love; all things in the world become beneficiaries of our happiness. Not only those who smile on us, but those who fail to smile–we pity them: they have never been in love! By centering my little world on another, I am fulfilled by proximity to its center; I forget the world’s indifference in my beloved’s eyes.

Is not love’s springtime the moment when the libido conspires to perpetuate the species? But our love is not the expression of an impersonal life-force. It is, like all truly human things, a transcendence of appetite mediated by the center of human significance. My beloved and I are not so consumed by desire that we forget the universe; on the contrary, our love opens us to the universe. What resentment saw as obstacles to our being have become extensions of it. Lovers are humble; their love, so much greater than either of them alone, reveals to them the source of their own meaning in the community of meaning that surrounds them.

For the man of resentment, the center of the universe–the place of God–is the only place. No degree of worldly eminence is enough; although, to be fair, there are probably many degrees between God’s eminence and his own that he has not experienced. The man of resentment suffers from his finitude, not because he knows his life is finite, but because he feels his significance is finite. He, at least, knows what is meant by immortality; it is what would purge him of his resentment.

But then to fall in love is to become immortal. The lover discovers that, freed from resentment, he has lost his fear of death; his present is full of eternity. Yet love is not idolatry of an image invulnerable to death, but tenderness for a vulnerability that mirrors his own.

These early Chronicles are very short, and I’m quoting almost all of this one. We can see in this lyrical description of love that the terms of resentment of the one who is alone are systematically reversed: rather than everything in the world conspiring to exclude you, you and your beloved can benevolently include the entire world in your love. Love, it seems—although this is not explicitly said—makes each a sufficient center unto the other, hence guaranteeing one’s own centrality, which is to say significance, and even immortality.

This dialectic between resentment and love is very compelling, but I think we can begin to see why it wasn’t sustained. For one thing, the love being described here is very much love in the modern sense of “being in love”—this is made even clear in Chronicle #13, on Heloisie and Abelard, analyzed as the first modern love affair, in which the private world of the lovers protects them from the resentments dominant in the larger public world. This is not the emulative love of the center that would follow from the identification of mimesis with love—love and resentment are already being cut down to the size of the modern marketplace. We can see this is the description of what I referred to above as “constitutive resentment,” insofar as that constant and continually renewed resentment driven by noticing new centers of attention indifferent to oneself is unthinkable within a ritual order where, in practicing the prescribed rituals, one is not only devoted to a center beyond oneself but is a center of attention of the divine beings (including, at an early enough stage I would imagine, one’s ancestors) in a way as continual as the bereftness of the modern figure of resentment. So, there’s a slippage here between a kind of “stripped down” resentment resulting from the elimination of intermediate orders articulating individuals with the center and an “originary” resentment presumably applicable to all instances of resentment.

The effect is to make the stripped down form of resentment and the reductively romantic form of love a dialectic that is irreversible—and, interestingly in another one of these early Chronicles (#7), Gans identifies irreversibility with sacrifice. The love associated with emulation that might transcend the resentment of the model is not considered. Even Gans’s lyrical description of being in love seems to me difficult to distinguish from a momentary infatuation, which can certainly give one the feeling of being in love the with world, benevolently inclined to all of its creatures. The protection of the other in her vulnerability, a vulnerability that, paradoxically must be preserved so as to guarantee love’s significance, is also insisted on in #6, and this is a much more sustainable model of love, one that can remain unaltered even in the face of alterations. This kind of love, at least, transitions into the building of an institution, the family. But there’s no transition to a “public” form of love, and since private love affairs can hardly provide for a sufficient haven against the heartless world of public resentment, we can see why this dialectic never made it past these early Chronicles. On the terms of these early Chronicles, and Gans’s political thinking more generally, any kind of public love would have to seem “fascistic,” and therefore indistinguishable from resentment. There has been no replacement for the publicly expressed love of one’s monarch in the modern world, which is predicated upon abolishing any such sentiment. It’s hard to imagine Gans conceiving of, much less endorsing, such an asymmetrical love (which of course includes reciprocal expressions of love from the monarch toward his subjects). But we can imagine something analogous if we push Gans’s description of love to one of love as the deferral of our own resentful desire to possess the other unto his or her extinction (as they become a mere appendage or reflection of ourself), i.e., the preservation of the otherness of the other in the face of our own desire to render her unrecognizable. This understanding of love can apply to public as well as private, asymmetric as well as to symmetric, varieties. Only, though, given the triangular rather binary nature of desire (which Richard van Oort reminds us of in an early guest Chronicle [#14]), if there is some other Other to which both parties can refer. Then we might think of a love for the center in a dialectical relation to our resentment of “usurpations” of the center (which are, indeed, as constant as the objects of resentment in Gans’s model of constitutive resentment). If our only reaction to any occupancy of the center is unremitting resentment—well, that way lies madness, does it not? Madness from which no private love can even extricate itself, much less save us.