Articles & Chapters

Tapping <em>ressentiment</em>: pharmakeus and the sublime poisons of white supremacy

April 14, 2025

“The essay enlists autobiography and practices of the self to give voice to the reservoirs of white supremacist poison permeating a worldly body.”

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.

Read “Tapping ressentiment: pharmakeus and the sublime poisons of white supremacy”

History and Technology
An International Journal Volume 40, 2024

Written by

Jessica Ruffin

Jessica Ruffin — an affiliated faculty member based in MIT Literature — is a critical philosopher, media historian, and moving-image enthusiast. Her research and creative work approach ethics as a problem of environmental and historical relation. Ruffin has particular interest in how Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics share poetic and temporal resonance with Black and Indigenous thought.

Her current book project, Becoming Amphibious: the question of ethics in white supremacist worlding, is an auto-philosophical genealogy—weaving German aesthetics, Black studies, paleontology, and media philosophy in search of ethical movements appropriate to contemporary crises. She has published essays in New German Critique, qui parle, and Millennium Film Journal. Ruffin was associate producer for the Aubin Picture’s documentary Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (2014) and was pre-production coordinator for the films Chavela (2017) and Dispatches from Cleveland (2017) before returning to academia in 2015.