A THYMOTIC LEFT? PETER SLOTERDIJK AND THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF RESSENTIMENT

Tuinen discusses Peter Sloterdijk's Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (2006) continues a line of research that begins with the Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), which already abounded with references to psychopolitics. Far from psychologising political powers, psychopolitics deals with the ecology and economy of energies or affects that are articulated only on a collective level. Although he argues that the problem of ressentiment is central to Sloterdijk's general philosophical project, the strategies for its overcoming have shifted to such an extent that, at first sight, there appears an almost unbridgeable gap between his earlier and later works.