Ressentiment and Post-Democratic Resilience: Affective Infrastructures, Mourning, and the Possibility of Democratic Renewal

Research on democratic resilience has predominantly focused on institutions, constitutional safeguards, and governance mechanisms. While such approaches are indispensable, they often leave the affective infrastructures through which democracy is experienced, contested, and sustained in ordinary citizens’ everyday life under-theorised. To fill this lacuna, the paper introduces the concept of post-democratic resilience that provides a critical analytical lens for articulating this affective dimension. By shifting attention from institutional endurance to affective conditions, post-democratic resilience allows us to examine how emotions, attachments, and expectations shape the limits and possibilities of democratic renewal. The idea of post-democratic resilience is grounded in a normative commitment to democratic resilience. Democratic resilience, following Sofia Näsström’s work on democratic spirit, is understood as the capacity of democracy to sustain its emancipatory ethos—rooted in hope, shared uncertainty, and political equality—under conditions of crisis and conflict. Post-democratic resilience, by contrast, is conceptualised as a secondary, defensive, and transitional formation: it does not aim to preserve post-democracy as a desirable regime, but to prevent democratic erosion from culminating in authoritarian closure. In this sense, post-democratic resilience is hierarchically subordinate to democratic resilience, as it seeks to maintain the minimal affective and symbolic conditions under which democratic renewal remains possible. The paper argues that both forms of resilience depend on affective infrastructures—the patterned circulation of emotions, attachments, and expectations that constitute political identities and communities. While democratic resilience relies on an affective infrastructure of hope and shared responsibility, sociological and ethnographic research on the everyday experiences of citizens in post-democratic societies points to an affective infrastructure dominated by ressentiment. Drawing on Nietzsche and, above all, Scheler, the paper conceptualises ressentiment as a long-term, socially mediated disposition arising from blocked agency and the persistent gap between democratic promises and lived experiences of powerlessness. Unlike resentment, which is directed at identifiable injustices and can fuel democratic contestation, ressentiment operates through a mechanism called transvaluation of values: it preserves democratic rhetoric while hollowing out its emancipatory meaning and redirecting it toward exclusionary and authoritarian ends. Ressentiment thus stabilises post-democracy affectively while undermining democratic resilience. Against this background, the paper advances two complementary arguments. First, it shows why structural and technocratic responses to democratic decline are insufficient when they fail to address the affective infrastructures through which democratic disaffection is produced and sustained. Second, it proposes a therapeutic approach to post-democratic resilience aimed at transforming ressentiment into resentment—that is, redirecting diffuse, value-distorting affects into politically articulable conflicts compatible with democratic struggle. Particular attention is paid to practices of public mourning, which are interpreted as affective infrastructures capable of politicising loss and reestablishing shared vulnerability. By conceptualising post-democratic resilience as a condition of possibility for democratic resilience rather than its alternative, the paper contributes to contemporary debates on democratic threats and renewal. It argues that sustaining democracy in post-democratic contexts requires not only institutional reform but the cultivation of affective infrastructures that keep democratic imaginaries open and prevent their capture by authoritarian ressentiment.