More specifically, Brown argues that what we find at work here is a process of Nietzschean ressentiment, or a morality based on a codification of imaginary revenge which substitutes for direct resistance to an oppressive power:

Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it [a politics of ressentiment] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social subordination. It fixes the identities of injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their action as against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning.

Rather than being overcome, therefore, the injuries which these subordinated groups are protesting instead may come to define those groups themselves (which is part of the reason, for instance, why many women attempt to distance themselves from the narrow political goals and normative identities implicit in many feminist movements).

However, Brown’s reliance on a theory of ressentiment to make this critique introduces a potential paradox, insofar as any theory of ressentiment, as Fredric Jameson reminds us in Political Unconscious, is necessarily recursive:

What is most striking about the theory of ressentiment is its unavoidably autoreferential structure. . . . [The] theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment.

That is to say, insofar as ressentiment describes a morality grounded on imaginary revenge against a superior force, a theory of ressentiment can be seen as precisely an example of such theoretical morality, wherein the “superior force” is none other than an earlier ressentiment-based morality which has subsequently become hegemonic and oppressive (like Christianity, for instance).

Although Brown’s argument is too specific and nuanced to lend itself to a simple inversion (e.g., to allow us to posit that Brown’s theory is itself a form of ressentiment against the oppressive power of identity politics...), this inherent invertability of Nietzsche’s model does, nevertheless, underscore an important tension within Brown’s writing.

This tension can be most clearly observed if we consider the figure of Socrates, whom Nietzsche identifies, in Twilight of the Idols, as perhaps the quintessential dialectician of ressentiment: “Does he, as one oppressed, enjoy his own ferocity in the knife-thrusts of his syllogisms? Does he avenge himself on the noble people whom he fascinates?”

In States of Injury (1995), Brown notes that “Socrates becomes Nietzsche’s prime example of (plebeian) ressentiment — “One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means...Is dialectic only a form of revenge for Socrates?” Here, Brown is specifically pointing to Socrates’ attempt to assert a space for his theorizing outside the boundaries of conventional power — a quality which she argues is intrinsic to Nietzschean ressentiment:

In Nietzsche’s telling , the supreme strategy of morality based on ressentiment – the source of its triumph over two thousand years — is denial that it has an involvement with power, that it contains a will to power or seeks to (pre)dominate...

Instead of following Socrates’ model, Brown argues that feminists (and other progressive groups) must reject this myth of morality’s independence from power, and asks rhetorically, “What would be required for us to live and work politically without such myths, without claiming that our knowledge is uncorrupted by a will to power, without insisting that our truths are less partial and more moral than ‘theirs?’”