Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment as the psychological structure for Sartre’s theory of anti-Semitism

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre was among the first to address the ‘strange silence’ on the Jewish question in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In doing so, he influenced an entire generation of thinkers concerning not only anti-Semitism specifically, but all forms of racism generally. Yet what are the antecedents to Sartre’s polemic in Anti-Semite and Jew? In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment forms the structural foundation for Sartre’s penetrating psychological analysis of the anti-Semite. Moreover, it is also my argument that both Nietzsche and Sartre advance similar solutions to the problem of ressentiment, which can only come about by overcoming the situation we are thrown into through a will to power. But this also means understanding oneself and in the end ‘making oneself in the face of all, and against all.’