A superb essay-delightful reading ! On the subject of AI understanding of spite,I asked Deep Seek how Immanual Kant might view spite.Deep Seek replied that Kant might construct an aesthetics of spite as a form of "negative sublime" . This is indeed a good reply! Dont underestimate those AI's.
Just a couple of minor notes. In your no. 21, the reference to "spite" has absolutely nothing to do with Virgil. The entire line isn't in the Latin: it was invented by the translator to complete his rhyming couplet. And in no. 22, the Greek word translated here as "spite" is "algos", which actually means "pain" - it can be varieties of mental pain, but "spite" hardly seems right. So I don't think either of these really belongs in your essay - unless you attribute the idea to the translators rather than the credited authors!
You are correct and I deleted Dostoevsky and Chekhov quotes because I didn't really trust the original versus the translation. I thought hard about the Virgil (and the Sophocles) for the same reasons but they both circulate in classrooms so I decided to keep them. I was expecting, however, some pushback on the Sulla! If you dive deep, that epigraph comes under a lot of scrutiny. I think it's out of favor now. But it circulated for a long time in its spiteful glory. I kept it in because political spite and creative spite are related and I wanted to end with Sulla. But I'm open to serious criticism there.
The Sulla one has more to be said for it, because it is at least a rough paraphrase of the epitaph which, according to Plutarch, Sulla composed for his own tomb. A more literal translation of the epitaph (or at least, of Plutarch's Greek version of it - the Latin doesn't survive) would be "None of his friends surpassed him in doing them kindnesses, and none of his enemies in doing them injuries". That seems very much in the spirit of your version!
Rings true. My mother always worried about whether, after grandmother died, mother's talented, but mean, sister would ever take up her threatened memoir or autobiographical fiction. She was a good writer, but an unpleasant person. The middle of three, she proclaimed VERY different memories of their childhood and youth.
Pope was the one author that came to mind as I was reading this, so I was glad to see you quote him by the end! The Dunciad is the obvious work of spite, but the background of the Essay on Man shows it to be even more rooted in this sentiment.
This is very interesting indeed. In haste, but thoughts on relationship between "spite" and the (Oedipal) "anxiety of influence"? My off the cuff sense is that although the first sounds more feminine, and the latter more masculine, in either case, the rival is s/he who must be bested.
Yes! There is indeed a relationship -- Bloom works really hard to show the "anxiety" part of it and I always wondered if work responding to influence wasn't better without the anxiety. In any event yes this is good context. And AI cannot know any of this.
Completely agree about the AI point. That would require (i) a sense of self; (ii) a sense of other selves; and (iii) a mode of comparability of the individual selves (not derived from large data sets.
I think Bloom was speaking into a more Freudian/psychoanalytic/therapeutic context that has since become ubiquitous. So every competition/aggression/dominance is interpreted as reactive, defensive. You only want to win because you are anxious, insecure. Well, maybe I just want to win.
I don't think so, not exactly. So the person who seeks revenge seeks to right a wrong, to respond, in a sense. That adds another, justifying, element to the aggression. But spite, or the anxiety of influence, might arise/be felt even in situations when a person had not been wronged. And the person who felt such aggression is likely to phrase their aggression in terms of grievance, which brings us most of the way to retribution. So t's clearly akin.
I came here from a link in the MR blog and am not accustomed to the style of argumentation here.
I had a brief look at Bloom's anxiety postulate. It seems a new author "misreads" or reinterprets earlier works to establish their own distinct identity. Correct? This strikes me as hierarchical competition. ie the young building their reputation so as to displace people of longer standing and currently higher regard. I really can't see that as spite. The best outline of spite and its ramifications I see here is from Wheatpaste (in the comments).
I do think spite, like revenge, is an expensive response to perceived injury, though they differ in detail. Note, I use "perceived" as both are emotionally driven. At least in my WEIRD conception they seem somewhat gendered with the former more feminine and the latter more masculine.
Well, this is Hollis's idea, so I'll defer to her understanding of both what she's saying and how it does/does not relate to Bloom. For now I would see "anxiety of influence" not as a "postulate," but as description of the creative process, so yes, emotionally driven. Taking account of that drive is what the critic has to do, in understanding what impels the son's rebellion, and thereby both informs the son's work and colors the son's judgment of the father's work. It's Oedipus at the typewriter.
Speaking from my own experience as a writer/intellectual/academic, there is a lot to this -- especially when younger, I often hated the people I was writing against, partially because they had framed, constrained, the world in which I was working, made me unfree. And, of course, had inadequately recognized my greatness, which is a fundamental injustice. :) I don't think such emotions are restricted to male writers (or painters!), though the myth is about a male hero, and Bloom is certainly reading it through Freud, as we all unself consciously do.
The question I was asking Hollis, not really arguing because I've not thought about it over time, is whether "spite" is a larger case, or something different, perhaps arising from other passions (jealousy? a sense of heresey?). However one articulates the relations among such passions, a key consequence is for our attitude toward writing, creativity generally. Contrary to much on substack, the creative process is not always, maybe not usually, anything like nice. The muse is a bitch. And with that I profoundly agree.
"I often hated the people I was writing against, partially because they had framed, constrained, the world in which I was working, made me unfree. And, of course, had inadequately recognized my greatness, which is a fundamental injustice. :)". I love this yes. To push back and yet keep one's independence, not to be unfree, is the challenge.
At first I assumed this was satire. A kind of Sontag-meets-The-Onion reflection on the secret nobility of spite. The opening line alone (“a sentiment and power source, a secret reservoir...”) had me chuckling like I’d stumbled into a high-concept sketch about aestheticizing petty emotions.
But as kept reading, it became clear this essay wasn’t a joke. And unfortunately, once you shed the veil of irony, what’s left is neither particularly funny nor especially grounded.
This piece treats spite like an undiscovered element, delicate, rarefied, misunderstood, when most of us know it as something far more mundane: the boiling urge to prove someone wrong, felt by waitstaff and welders as much as by sculptors and essayists. You write about it as though it only exists in curated backchannels between operatic geniuses.
It’s striking how emotionally sterile the essay feels, given the subject. There’s no bark, no grit—just a long string of polished sentences that sound like an alien theorizing human psychology from a distance of several lightyears. The whole thing feels weirdly disembodied. Polished, yes. But untouched. There's no heat, no bruises. Just elevated theory, clean as polished glass, about one of the most feral and unkempt human emotions.
What’s missing is spite as it's actually lived. Not the kind that chisels marble or composes symphonies, but the kind that keys trucks and leaves $1,200 worth of paint damage. The kind that writes anonymous screeds, sends regrettable texts at 2 a.m., and tells one friend too many exactly what was really said at that party.
Where’s that? Is it beneath theorization, or just too vulgar, too real, too messy for the frame?
Take Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, for example. He’s arguably the literary embodiment of spite, and yet, he produces no great art. Just endless mental self-flagellation, street collisions, and wounded monologues. There’s no elegant transcendence. No “supernatural excellence.” Just the grotesque realism of someone so consumed by imagined slights that he becomes fossilized.
When a kid spits in another kid’s lunch because that other kid got a better score on the math test, is that and unsung sensibility?
This essay doesn’t acknowledge that world. It theorizes spite without showing any signs of having felt it. There’s no sweat in these lines. No clenched jaw. Just citations arranged like flowers in a vase.
And in the end, that’s my core difficulty with the piece: it theorizes spite without touching it.
I’m left wondering if the author has ever actually created anything out of spite, or just studied it from a safe distance.
Or maybe I’m wrong and this was meant as satire. In that case… it just wasn’t very funny.
I also came away from this — as someone who has recently experienced the long tail of fallout from someone behaving spitefully toward someone else — noticing that spite is not contained to art, even if art is involved. And I’m not understanding the thesis: is it that art-making can be fueled by spite? That spite is a thematic element expressed by art? Both of those things are observable.
I am looking for examples — is it Michelangelo and the Medici? Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights? Is an artistic rendering of spite often serving as a literal barb of spite at real people the artist wishes to impale?
And what are the consequences? Spite is obsessed with consequences. It would seem from this essay that artists are the ones dealing the spite. But in my personal case, a spiteful act has cut a friend off from their artistic endeavors, cut them off from funding and the arts community. I am noticing that when I find consequences of spite, they are often more expansive than the harm that’s being avenged, and inflict collateral damage, and require other people to help carry out the full effects. It is tough to read about it in a sterilized format when the consequences have been so personal. I am interested in the idea of spite because I find it a type of terror that we gleefully engage in.
And that there is no opposite of spite — I’m not convinced.
To me, resolution is its kryptonite. When the parties resolve their dispute, they may still feel angry and resentful, annoyed, put out, offended. They might even feel like being spiteful. But the path that spite could travel between them has been cut off by agreements that are satisfactory to them both — often because the attrition rate of spite is so damn high.
It occurs to me, having only a dilettante's knowledge of William Blake, to ask: is there any evidence that "The Poison Tree," such a classic evocation of spite, might itself have been composed out of spite?
A superb essay-delightful reading ! On the subject of AI understanding of spite,I asked Deep Seek how Immanual Kant might view spite.Deep Seek replied that Kant might construct an aesthetics of spite as a form of "negative sublime" . This is indeed a good reply! Dont underestimate those AI's.
Just a couple of minor notes. In your no. 21, the reference to "spite" has absolutely nothing to do with Virgil. The entire line isn't in the Latin: it was invented by the translator to complete his rhyming couplet. And in no. 22, the Greek word translated here as "spite" is "algos", which actually means "pain" - it can be varieties of mental pain, but "spite" hardly seems right. So I don't think either of these really belongs in your essay - unless you attribute the idea to the translators rather than the credited authors!
You are correct and I deleted Dostoevsky and Chekhov quotes because I didn't really trust the original versus the translation. I thought hard about the Virgil (and the Sophocles) for the same reasons but they both circulate in classrooms so I decided to keep them. I was expecting, however, some pushback on the Sulla! If you dive deep, that epigraph comes under a lot of scrutiny. I think it's out of favor now. But it circulated for a long time in its spiteful glory. I kept it in because political spite and creative spite are related and I wanted to end with Sulla. But I'm open to serious criticism there.
The Sulla one has more to be said for it, because it is at least a rough paraphrase of the epitaph which, according to Plutarch, Sulla composed for his own tomb. A more literal translation of the epitaph (or at least, of Plutarch's Greek version of it - the Latin doesn't survive) would be "None of his friends surpassed him in doing them kindnesses, and none of his enemies in doing them injuries". That seems very much in the spirit of your version!
Rings true. My mother always worried about whether, after grandmother died, mother's talented, but mean, sister would ever take up her threatened memoir or autobiographical fiction. She was a good writer, but an unpleasant person. The middle of three, she proclaimed VERY different memories of their childhood and youth.
Pope was the one author that came to mind as I was reading this, so I was glad to see you quote him by the end! The Dunciad is the obvious work of spite, but the background of the Essay on Man shows it to be even more rooted in this sentiment.
This is very interesting indeed. In haste, but thoughts on relationship between "spite" and the (Oedipal) "anxiety of influence"? My off the cuff sense is that although the first sounds more feminine, and the latter more masculine, in either case, the rival is s/he who must be bested.
Yes! There is indeed a relationship -- Bloom works really hard to show the "anxiety" part of it and I always wondered if work responding to influence wasn't better without the anxiety. In any event yes this is good context. And AI cannot know any of this.
Completely agree about the AI point. That would require (i) a sense of self; (ii) a sense of other selves; and (iii) a mode of comparability of the individual selves (not derived from large data sets.
I think Bloom was speaking into a more Freudian/psychoanalytic/therapeutic context that has since become ubiquitous. So every competition/aggression/dominance is interpreted as reactive, defensive. You only want to win because you are anxious, insecure. Well, maybe I just want to win.
Perhaps 'revenge' is the more masculine counterpart to spite?
I don't think so, not exactly. So the person who seeks revenge seeks to right a wrong, to respond, in a sense. That adds another, justifying, element to the aggression. But spite, or the anxiety of influence, might arise/be felt even in situations when a person had not been wronged. And the person who felt such aggression is likely to phrase their aggression in terms of grievance, which brings us most of the way to retribution. So t's clearly akin.
I came here from a link in the MR blog and am not accustomed to the style of argumentation here.
I had a brief look at Bloom's anxiety postulate. It seems a new author "misreads" or reinterprets earlier works to establish their own distinct identity. Correct? This strikes me as hierarchical competition. ie the young building their reputation so as to displace people of longer standing and currently higher regard. I really can't see that as spite. The best outline of spite and its ramifications I see here is from Wheatpaste (in the comments).
I do think spite, like revenge, is an expensive response to perceived injury, though they differ in detail. Note, I use "perceived" as both are emotionally driven. At least in my WEIRD conception they seem somewhat gendered with the former more feminine and the latter more masculine.
Well, this is Hollis's idea, so I'll defer to her understanding of both what she's saying and how it does/does not relate to Bloom. For now I would see "anxiety of influence" not as a "postulate," but as description of the creative process, so yes, emotionally driven. Taking account of that drive is what the critic has to do, in understanding what impels the son's rebellion, and thereby both informs the son's work and colors the son's judgment of the father's work. It's Oedipus at the typewriter.
Speaking from my own experience as a writer/intellectual/academic, there is a lot to this -- especially when younger, I often hated the people I was writing against, partially because they had framed, constrained, the world in which I was working, made me unfree. And, of course, had inadequately recognized my greatness, which is a fundamental injustice. :) I don't think such emotions are restricted to male writers (or painters!), though the myth is about a male hero, and Bloom is certainly reading it through Freud, as we all unself consciously do.
The question I was asking Hollis, not really arguing because I've not thought about it over time, is whether "spite" is a larger case, or something different, perhaps arising from other passions (jealousy? a sense of heresey?). However one articulates the relations among such passions, a key consequence is for our attitude toward writing, creativity generally. Contrary to much on substack, the creative process is not always, maybe not usually, anything like nice. The muse is a bitch. And with that I profoundly agree.
"I often hated the people I was writing against, partially because they had framed, constrained, the world in which I was working, made me unfree. And, of course, had inadequately recognized my greatness, which is a fundamental injustice. :)". I love this yes. To push back and yet keep one's independence, not to be unfree, is the challenge.
At first I assumed this was satire. A kind of Sontag-meets-The-Onion reflection on the secret nobility of spite. The opening line alone (“a sentiment and power source, a secret reservoir...”) had me chuckling like I’d stumbled into a high-concept sketch about aestheticizing petty emotions.
But as kept reading, it became clear this essay wasn’t a joke. And unfortunately, once you shed the veil of irony, what’s left is neither particularly funny nor especially grounded.
This piece treats spite like an undiscovered element, delicate, rarefied, misunderstood, when most of us know it as something far more mundane: the boiling urge to prove someone wrong, felt by waitstaff and welders as much as by sculptors and essayists. You write about it as though it only exists in curated backchannels between operatic geniuses.
It’s striking how emotionally sterile the essay feels, given the subject. There’s no bark, no grit—just a long string of polished sentences that sound like an alien theorizing human psychology from a distance of several lightyears. The whole thing feels weirdly disembodied. Polished, yes. But untouched. There's no heat, no bruises. Just elevated theory, clean as polished glass, about one of the most feral and unkempt human emotions.
What’s missing is spite as it's actually lived. Not the kind that chisels marble or composes symphonies, but the kind that keys trucks and leaves $1,200 worth of paint damage. The kind that writes anonymous screeds, sends regrettable texts at 2 a.m., and tells one friend too many exactly what was really said at that party.
Where’s that? Is it beneath theorization, or just too vulgar, too real, too messy for the frame?
Take Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, for example. He’s arguably the literary embodiment of spite, and yet, he produces no great art. Just endless mental self-flagellation, street collisions, and wounded monologues. There’s no elegant transcendence. No “supernatural excellence.” Just the grotesque realism of someone so consumed by imagined slights that he becomes fossilized.
When a kid spits in another kid’s lunch because that other kid got a better score on the math test, is that and unsung sensibility?
This essay doesn’t acknowledge that world. It theorizes spite without showing any signs of having felt it. There’s no sweat in these lines. No clenched jaw. Just citations arranged like flowers in a vase.
And in the end, that’s my core difficulty with the piece: it theorizes spite without touching it.
I’m left wondering if the author has ever actually created anything out of spite, or just studied it from a safe distance.
Or maybe I’m wrong and this was meant as satire. In that case… it just wasn’t very funny.
This is one of my all time favorite blog comments.
I also came away from this — as someone who has recently experienced the long tail of fallout from someone behaving spitefully toward someone else — noticing that spite is not contained to art, even if art is involved. And I’m not understanding the thesis: is it that art-making can be fueled by spite? That spite is a thematic element expressed by art? Both of those things are observable.
I am looking for examples — is it Michelangelo and the Medici? Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights? Is an artistic rendering of spite often serving as a literal barb of spite at real people the artist wishes to impale?
And what are the consequences? Spite is obsessed with consequences. It would seem from this essay that artists are the ones dealing the spite. But in my personal case, a spiteful act has cut a friend off from their artistic endeavors, cut them off from funding and the arts community. I am noticing that when I find consequences of spite, they are often more expansive than the harm that’s being avenged, and inflict collateral damage, and require other people to help carry out the full effects. It is tough to read about it in a sterilized format when the consequences have been so personal. I am interested in the idea of spite because I find it a type of terror that we gleefully engage in.
And that there is no opposite of spite — I’m not convinced.
To me, resolution is its kryptonite. When the parties resolve their dispute, they may still feel angry and resentful, annoyed, put out, offended. They might even feel like being spiteful. But the path that spite could travel between them has been cut off by agreements that are satisfactory to them both — often because the attrition rate of spite is so damn high.
The author's is a defensive apologia, which makes it interesting.
This is very good. You deserve a worthy squire.
It occurs to me, having only a dilettante's knowledge of William Blake, to ask: is there any evidence that "The Poison Tree," such a classic evocation of spite, might itself have been composed out of spite?