Moral breakdowns and their (failed) repair: The role of socionormative concerns in ressentiment formation

Conceptualizations of ressentiment imply different assessments regarding the question whether the subject of ressentiment’s (SR) initial conflict is about constitutively socionormative concerns or whether moralizing anti-sentiments and self-glorifications ground in self-centred feelings of impotence and inferiority. Although the self-deceptive affective and cognitive dynamics of ressentiment development ultimately result in a distorted evaluative outlook, the SR’s repetitive obsession with socionormative matters should not be dismissed as an a posteriori coping mechanism. Rather, the SR’s inability to realize feelings of value points to a constitutively socionormative problematic involving a fundamental disruption of implicit value orientations (moral breakdown) as well as a structurally (re-)produced inability to engage in processes of communicative repair. It is concluded that ressentiment is a psychosocial phenomenon that can only be understood by looking simultaneously at its psycho-affective as well as sociodiscursive underpinnings.