This presentation will attempt to draw some lines between the cultural history of emotions and the political history of psychiatry. Resentment, on the one hand, and monomania, on the other, will serve me here to explore the cultural forms of modern subjectivity, the conditions that made possible both the salience of a particular mental disorder and the intellectual reflection on a highly sophisticated social passion. I will argue that resentment and monomania came about in the same cultural and political space, and that, in a sense that will be explained later, none of them could have developed without the presence of the other my approach does not share the tenants and assumptions of the seminal work of Marc Ferro. Unlike this French historian, who defended that resentment was a key and constant element in the revolutionary processes of any type and of any period, from the Antiquity to Contemporary Societies, I consider resentment a passion of modernity, whose first systematic treatment was provided by Adam Smith in the mid 18th Century, and whose hutching depended on highly embedded social roots.

With regard to the history of monomania, I do share some assumptions with the recent and not so recent readings in the social and cultural history of mental disorders. The works of Jean Goldstein, Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain have confronted some of the connections between mental illness, subjectivity and modernity. More recently, Laure Murat, in the L’homme qui se prennait pour Napoléon has also drawn interesting suggestions regarding the political history of monomania before and after the events of the French Revolution. My approach, however, also differs from theirs in that my reading is primarily concerned with the relation between distorted experiences and inflated passions. I am not so much interested here in the layers of the modern identity, as Goldstein did, or in the romantic bio-politics of the self, as Gauchet and Swain proposed, following Foucault. My intention is shed some light on the historicity of human experiences and, in more in particular, in the salience of moral and political resentment. This historical epistemology of experience, as I would like to call it following the work of Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking or Arnold Davidson, will lead me to suggest, in the case of resentment, few cognitive conditions that made its formulation and inclusion within a theoretical framework possible.