Resentment as political tool: the priestly techniques of instrumentalizing resentment

• Grant number: 24/16313-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Oswaldo Giacoia Junior
• Grantee: Lucas Pires Ramos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The current project seeks the subsidies in the works of Nietzsche and Adorno to understand the reasons through which resentment can be used as a political tool for a religious leader. In order to justify both why resentment constitutes a condition conducive to being employed by a religious leader and through which devices this leader manages to instrumentalize it, one must perform a substantially hermeneutic work, directed not only to each author's theory of resentment, but also to their joint analysis. The complementarity between the authors is evident precisely in light of this double front of analysis, since, although Nietzsche already demonstrates how the resentful people, once their demands for power and pretexts to justify their suffering are met, submit to a certain religious leader, the ascetic priest, it's Adorno who points out the different psychological techniques used by a specific religious leader, Martin Luther Thomas, to dominate his listeners. Although the use of resentment in these cases begins in the religious sphere, its effects expand to the political field, as the subjugated group multiplies and becomes stronger, demanding that other individuals adhere to their own precepts. This project, therefore, based on the analysis of resentment in Nietzsche and Adorno, both within the works of each of these thinkers and their comparative examination, opens up to a current issue, namely: elucidating the socio-political instrumentalization of resentment.