<p>This paper offers a radical reappraisal of how resistance is understood within critical social science. Against the dominant tendency to interpret subaltern resistance as inherently liberatory, creative, or transformative, it argues that such perspectives rest on romanticised and insufficiently examined assumptions. Drawing on the ultra-realism and refracting it through Nietzsche’s concept of <i>ressentiment</i>, the paper develops a methodological framework that foregrounds the reactive, punitive, and self-subjugating dimensions of resistance. Through case studies of the populist right and the identitarian left, it shows how resistance can be driven less by the pursuit of liberation than by the desire for revenge, reproducing domination rather than dismantling it. In challenging the resistance-as-liberation paradigm that has long dominated resistance studies, the paper advances a new critical agenda: one that insists on studying resistance not only affirmatively, but also dispassionately, and without flinching from its darker, affectively charged manifestations.</p>