There is just about nothing I enjoy more than learning a new word, especially when it describes something I have been pondering for a long time without knowing there was a word for it.  The effect is a shift in focus, perspective and understanding.   

The occasion was a visit to the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts in Providence, where some of my husband John Back’s work was included in an exhibition titled “Bill Parker: A Matter of Influence.” It was a retrospective tribute to a much loved photographer, painter and educator who inspired numerous artists during his distinguished 40-year teaching career at a variety of institutions, including Pratt, Parsons, the University of Connecticut and the Rhode Island School of Design. 

As I made the rounds of the small galleries, it became clear that, although the work of Parker’s students was tremendously varied and individual, themes emerged, and the artists’ statements described transformative concepts and philosophies, shared by Bill Parker and internalized by his students, exerting a lasting influence on their work and lives.  

It was in one of these statements that I encountered a (for me) new word: ressentiment, a term that brandishes multiple related meanings depending on the era and context. Today, in a discussion of art, ressentiment might refer to an individual artist’s preoccupation and frustration with established forms, theories and fellow artists seen as having recognition, power and authority, and how that anger might be expressed in their work. Conversely, it could also describe the viewer’s (and especially the cultural critic’s) expectation to be outraged, a predisposition to see new forms as an insult to the safe and beautiful past.   

The notion of ressentiment swirled through 19th-century European philosophy. Most notably, Friedrich Nietzsche used the term to describe a progression of thoughts and actions emanating from hostility felt towards an object or person that one identifies as the cause of one’s problems or failures. Roiled by envy, powerlessness and frustration, individuals or groups experiencing ressentiment create for themselves a compensating personal morality or value system, projecting blame and hatred for the object of their resentment, assuaging their wounded egos instead of addressing their flaws and failures objectively and working to improve. 

For social and political purposes, ressentiment can be cultivated in order to manipulate and distort our thinking, sometimes to obscure genuine injustices, other times to shift blame to a scapegoat group. So, through the repetition of extreme and violent language, economic anxiety can be transformed into an atavistic fear of immigrants instead of a desire to address flaws in the political and economic order. Our schools and universities, where only a few years ago we might have taken for granted the value of free intellectual inquiry and exposure to a range of philosophies and cultures—a “larger world”—these principles are turned on their heads and demonized as elitist.  

In recent months, ressentiment has effectively revived the demonization of climate research. Only a year ago, Genevieve Guenther, writing in the New Republic, reported that fossil fuel interests and their allied politicians were retreating from climate denial, tacitly acknowledging the reality of climate change while employing more nuanced though deeply flawed arguments that appropriated terms like resilience and innovation to argue that continued reliance on coal, oil and natural gas is in fact the solution to the climate problem. Since the 2024 election, we have seen a resurgence of words like “hoax,” “cult” and “scam” to justify the elimination of climate research and data collection from the federal budget and the mass firing of climate researchers from federal agencies.  

More happily, another transformative idea also surfaced among many of the artists’ memories of Bill Parker: the phrase Amor Mundi, “love of the world,” drawn from the work of Hannah Arendt. Parker frequently referenced this phrase in his lectures and embraced it in his life. Amor Mundi, in Arendt’s conception, calls for a clear-eyed, unsentimental, truthful engagement with the world, a commitment to the world “as it is.” She urged us to confront the realities of the past and the present with courage and all our critical faculties—to “face and come to terms with what really happened” without illusions. 

In the words of exhibition curator Bob Martin, Bill Parker believed photography was “born as a way of confirming the presence of the world without subjective intervention… the first medium in which the physics of light and the chemistry of earthly elements combine to create an image.” A way to see the world as it really is, beyond the subjective lens of sentimentality or of grievance, and perhaps a first step in the courageous path of engagement Arendt described.