Notes on Spite

(With apologies to Susan Sontag)

Many things in the world have not been named openly; and many things, even if they are admitted, have never been described. One is the unsung sensibility – a sentiment and power source, a secret reservoir, unmistakable and timeless, a variant of umbrage but hardly identical with it – known as spite.

To talk about spite is to betray it. Spite operates through concealment and misdirection. Spite succeeds best when its motivations remain hidden from all but its intended target. Spite is forensic. Spite is a creative brief, born of a rejection that when veiled becomes fuel. To name spite, to draw its contours, requires sympathy. It requires ignoring the therapeutic establishment’s hostility toward sustained grievance.

Spite is particular. All great art is particular, rather than universal. The power of spite is its specific audience and its clear metric for success. Artificial intelligence cannot know spite.

Radical specificity of audience and absolute clarity of intention should guide all art, of course. Unlike motivations that require external validation or internal satisfaction, spite generates its own justification through targeted vindication. Spite seeks to devastate through virtuosity. There can be no counter argument.

Spite is neglected, formally. Aesthetic theory has sophisticated frameworks for analyzing beauty, sublimity, and the grotesque. Spite may be the most undertheorized force in creative achievement. Spite is engine and architecture, fuel and destination, providing creative energy, scaffolding framework, and ultimate goal.

Spite cares little about style. Allusion or irony or pastiche are not the point. The work must be genuinely superior, technically unassailable, substantively beyond reproach. This is spite’s burden and its distinction: it cannot cheat or rely on embroidery or polish. It must actually be better.

Nobody creating out of spite wonders if the work is “good” in some abstract sense. There is no paralysis over audience. Spite just gets to work. Spite is unreasonable, obsessive. Spite may be the secret ingredient in so much considered “great.” Museums may be less a collection of noble works than a cabinet of unspoken fantasies.

Spite wears a veil. The world should appreciate the work in ignorance of its catalyst. A spite-driven work is a legitimate cultural gift as well as an encrypted personal message.

What follows is an attempt to establish spite as a coherent aesthetic category. It demands recognition if only because its influence on culture has been underestimated.

1. To start generally: spite complicates our emotional taxonomy: it is neither the noble fury of righteous anger nor the clean utility of competition. Spite is more complex. Spite is the aesthetic of personal defiance, the transformation of dismissal into creative energy. It is an art form that disguises itself as a character flaw.

2. Spite-motivated work exists within a dual economy of meaning. To the public, the work presents itself as achievement. While spite has an audience of one, the world is also needed to applaud and marvel. Spite is private and public. It operates simultaneously on exoteric and esoteric levels. The artist who agonizes over being misunderstood might learn from this.

3. How much spite must be invisible in literary history! How many canonical works carry within them the genetic material of personal grievance? The hermetic nature of spite means that countless masterworks may be so motivated. We are mere bystanders.

4. It matters not whether fulfillment comes in months, years, or decades. Spite plays the long game. This persistence enables dramatic irony: the protagonist knows something other characters do not.

5. Spite has clarity of purpose. Spite demands that the work succeed so completely that mockery becomes impossible. But its targeted excellence cannot point too directly at its origin.

6. Spite is a precise tool. It is sharp for detailed, specific work. Spite requires more attention to craft because of its target. The work must withstand the scrutiny of the one motivated to find fault.

7. Spite’s signature is surplus excellence, a level of achievement beyond the necessary. This is not the aesthetic of excess. There is a distinction between overkill and going overboard. Spite-motivated work aims for supernatural excellence.

8. There is a crucial distinction between spite and resentment. Resentment is passive, an emotional stasis that feeds on itself without producing results. Spite involves productive paranoia: a heightened sensitivity to slight, dismissal, and condescension. The spiteful person curates an archive of injuries. But spite is generative. It transforms negative energy into positive action, rejection into individual achievement. The spiteful person does not stew.

9. The moral framework of spite is vindication as the highest virtue and dismissal as the gravest sin.

10. The aesthetic of spite privileges the understated over the obvious, the delayed over the immediate. Spite-driven achievement appears effortless while suggesting vast reserves of competence held in reserve. This is why spite often manifests in fields requiring technical mastery – classical music, architecture, epic poetry, sculpture, painting – where excellence cannot be faked and where there is a vast gap between amateur and professional.

11. The biographical record systematically obscures spite’s role because spite-driven creators rarely advertise their motivations. Exceptions to this rule include Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” series or Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment” featuring Biagio’s face on Minos, with donkey ears and a snake biting his genitals.

[Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1615-17 The National Gallery, London]

12. Spite houses are another exception to the privacy rule. They present a public riposte to the systems that denied them. Their genius lies in weaponizing the rules.

13. The Romantic movement’s celebration of individual genius may partly represent a collective spite response to Enlightenment rationalism’s dismissal of emotion and intuition. We read these works as philosophical statements, missing their origins in personal grievance. The secret history of modernism too may be written in spite.

14. The reservoir of spite is always full, providing endless energy. Spite maintains intensity over remarkable periods. Its self-perpetuating quality makes spite the most renewable of creative resources.

15. Spite aspires to provoke “retrospective embarrassment” in its target. This reversal of roles, this transformation of doubter into cautionary tale, represents spite’s most sophisticated achievement.

16. Spite’s relationship to achievement differs from the internally motivated artistic drive. The spiteful person may accomplish things never aspired to. Spite-success cares little about the place of the work among works of its kind and caliber. It brings no pure joy of artistic expression. Its achievement is performance art.

17. Spite has no opposite: it already exists in relation to what it opposes. Love can exist without hatred, joy without sorrow, whatever the sages say. But spite needs the specter of dismissal, which is not forgiveness. Spite is parasitic in the most literal sense: it requires a host reaction to give it life. But this dependency, rather than weakening spite, gives it its peculiar strength: spite feeds on what births it. Forgiveness yields other benefits. Dismissal is death.

18. Spite requires no announcement. The achievement speaks for itself but there can be no declared victory, only a silent one that carries the full weight of vindication. But that can never be measured. Spite operates in silence.

19. “Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write, / Or with a Rival’s, or an Eunuch’s spite.” (lines 30,31) Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711).

20. “I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze. Don’t mind, will you.” D.H. Lawrence, Letter to Cynthia Asquith Nov. 1913. The Selected Letters.

21. “Can heav’nly minds such high resentment show, Or exercise their spite in human woe?” Virgil, The Aeneid Book I.

22. “Anger has no old age but only death; The dead alone can feel no touch of spite.” Creon, in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.

23. “No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.” Sulla