Emotions: familiar and yet so misunderstood. Because of positivism, social theory repelled from early on the existence of the split subject, as something "embarrassing" and "absurd." As a consequence, emotions were ostracized. The enlightenment project were premised upon the overcoming of "passions" which were defamed and degraded to such an extent that Reason to be deemed as what is left of human thought after draining them. Romanticism committed the offense on the contrary: the full autonomy of emotions against any symbolic and cultural context. 

Contrary to this warped legacy, the coupling of a non-positivist social analysis with the unromantic psychoanalysis in the book at hand places the study of envy and resentment into a new framework. Thus helps to overcome a symptom of modernity, namely, the displacement of these emotions and the repression of the words naming them; a symptom created by the domination of populist egalitarianism, individualism, the tyranny of intimacy, as well as moral relativism. The book is in line with the broader international “affective turn” which characterizes the entirety of  social sciences and humanities.