Tapping ressentiment: pharmakeus and the sublime poisons of white supremacy

Abstract

This auto-philosophical essay takes up Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment; the archival record of Mark and Phillis; and Derrida’s engagement with pharmakon as a means of working through the question of what is to be done with the poisons of white supremacy, which persist in present worldly environments as well as our bodies and histories. Engaging aesthetics, Black thought, and phenomenology of race, the work aims for an embodied therapeutic movement that might open the way for ethical receptivity within the white supremacist world. Eschewing a universalizing tone while recognizing the ahistoricities of white supremacist cultural techniques, the essay enlists autobiography and practices of the self to give voice to the reservoirs of white supremacist poison permeating a worldly body.