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?’”
Ten years later, Brown returns to the figure of Socrates in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (2005), where she now speaks approvingly of Socrates’ separation of critique from politics:
Reconceived by Socrates as a philosophical activity both deriving from and producing individual virtue, even critique that involved discerning the nature of political justice was hived off from the political-juridical domain...Thus critique loses its jurisprudential and political status and comes to be constituted as viable only at a certain remove from political life. Paradoxically, Socrates depicts critique both as inherently marginalized and neutered by politics if it refuses this remove, and yet as politically potent if it can ascertain the right degree of remove.Although this discussion is embedded within Brown’s larger criticism of “contemporary characterizations of critique as disinterested, distanced, negating, or academic,” she nevertheless appears to support Socrates’ attempt to locate critique at a “right degree of remove” from politics.
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