The ressentiment concept was devised to discredit political impulses

Evidence

The problem is the “motivation” of this device: how to imagine and to cause readers to accredit a motive for this remorseless pursuit of Jim at the very moment of his triumph? But as we showed in Chapter 4, such a motivation is available everywhere in late nineteenth-century ideology, devised initially as a psychological explanation of the revolt of mobs, but also for the revolutionary vocation ·of disaffected intel­ lectuals, and then more largely applied to the presentation of daily life generally, and tp the discrediting of the political impulse in particular: this is, of course, the concept of ressentiment, of which Conrad is by way of being the epic poet. There is not a single work of his (although here too Nostromo is uniquely privileged and almost an exception) in which the typical, gratuitously malevolent bearer of this diseased passion does not lie in wait for the innocent and unsuspecting. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6470

Categorization

• XREF: Ressentiment as ideological weapon connects to Nietzsche’s genealogy and to Jameson’s own master narrative of ideology as class apology.
• SEED: The ‘discrediting of the political impulse’ via psychological terms (ressentiment, then reactionary modernism) is a rich axe for an essay on how ideology smuggles politics into psychology.