Neutral
[...] it is assumed in the major premise that the bird of prey is able to not manifest its force, that it can hold back from its effects and separate itself from what it can do: it is evil because it does not hold itself back.
It is therefore assumed that one and the same force is effectively held back in the virtuous lamb but given free rein in the evil bird of prey. Since the strong could prevent themselves from acting, the weak could act if they did not prevent themselves.
Here we have the foundation of the paralogism of ressentiment: the fiction of a force separated from what it can do.
It is thanks to this fiction that reactive forces triumph. It is not sufficient for them to hold back from activity: they must also reverse the relation of forces, they must oppose themselves to active forces and represent themselves as superior. The process of accusation in ressentiment fulfills this task: reactive forces "project" an abstract and neutralised image of force; such a force separated from its effects will be blameworthy if it acts, deserving, on the contrary, if it does not.
[...] force, which has been divided in this way, is projected into a substrate, into a subject which is free to manifest it or not. Force is neutralised, it is made the act of a subject which could just as easily not act.
Nietzsche constantly exposes "the subject" as a fiction or a grammatical function. All subjects - the Epicureans' atom, Descartes' substance or Kant's thing-in-itself - are the projection of "little imaginery incubuses".
[...] the force thus neutralised is moralised. For, if it is assumed that a force is able to not manifest the force that it "has", it is no more absurd to assume, conversely, that a force could manifest the force that it "has not".
"Just as if the weakness of the weak - that is to say their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality - were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act"
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.123-4
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