Shame and the Temporality of Social Life

Through positing that our capacity for physical vulnerability is at the core of original shame, Sartre's account in Being and Nothingness reveals shame as an essential structure of human existence. Reading Sartre's ontological account of 'pure shame' alongside recent writing about shame in early child development, particularly Martha Nussbaum's account of 'primitive shame,' this article will explore the inherent links between shame, the body and vulnerability, ultimately positing that our human need for belonging is the fundamental driving force behind shame, and what gives it its ontological status. In short, this article will argue that shame is not merely about a painful awareness of one's flaws or transgressions with reference to norms and others, but about a deeper layer of relationality through our bodily vulnerability.

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2017

Departing from Levinas, this paper will address the significance of shame in contemporary discourse in order to approach what could be called its ethical intrigue. Focusing on its political, social and phenomenological implications, I intend to reconsider the experience of shame as it has been appropriated within the politics of affect and account for its relation to ethics, which alone can reveal its transformative possibilities. Shame will emerge as an affect of proximity whose basic structure of being exposed is an attestation of our constitutive openness to others that towers above the politics of interest and the structures of economy that advance the drama of the Ego.

This paper focuses on the ways in which perceptions and experiences of guilt and shame are shaped by political conceptions of who belongs to the more guilty and shameful parties. Guilt is ambiguous between guilt as the fact of having done something wrong, and guilt as a felt experience. Likewise shame can be felt even when there is nothing to be ashamed of. I will examine guilt and shame and the apparent expectation and need to take these emotions on when one is not directly implicated. This phenomenon is the converse of the refusal to accept guilt when one is actually culpable, a danger with the concept of collective guilt that Hannah Arendt points out. 2 I use the debate between Karl Jaspers and Arendt over guilt and responsibility, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre's and Giorgio Agamben's work on shame, to develop an account of the political aspects of perceived and felt guilt and shame in people who are oppressed.

2016

This dissertation studies the way that shame can be a pharmakon-a toxic affect or an intoxicating form-with as much potential to heal as it has to harm. I argue that shame informs, inspires, and limits contemporary forms of autobiography. I begin and end the dissertation with works of literary criticism that are loosely autobiographical autobiographical. Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling and Kate Zambreno's Heroines both aim to rebut traditional forms of literary criticism by writing in the form of memoir, thus generating a protective enclave for identities they call 'minor' (queer in the case of Cvetkovich, female in the case of Zambreno). Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station fictionalize their autobiographies thus questioning on both a fictional and a metafictional level whether or not anything-art, in particular-can have meaning. Maggie Nelson's Bluets traces the shame of heartbreak, depression and longing across two hundred and forty propositions, all of which are in hot pursuit of something blue. Anne Carson's Nox articulates the various shames of personality, subjectivity and identification, but also how writing itself can gesture to a less domesticated kind of shame: to the physiology of a book that blushes, averts its gaze, hunches its shoulders. In the end, we return to literary criticism, and find shame at the very farthest reaches of subjectivity, where the subject, literary critic Timothy Bewes, writes about shame as an event in the context of the postcolonial. Taken together, these works start to paint a portrait of a self (and of a critic) that is better described in terms such as 'becoming' where subjectivity has about it something contingent or temporary, a kind of self, in other words, that has relinquished much of its authority and therefore its capacity to dominate. The effect of these works is a collective overturning of the subject as a starting point for ethics primarily because such a move seems necessary if we ever want to escape the subject-object structure that has supported centuries of systemic inequality.

Shame is an extraordinarily primitive element of human psychology. As a critical part of our earliest socialization -above all in the context of the family -its deeply intimate resonances might make it difficult to arrive at an "exteriorized", systematic, or self-standing theory of its inner workings.

2017

This dissertation is about one of the most controversial emotions: shame. The foundational question is: What constitutes the experience of shame as both an emotion and a dynamic of power, with an emphasis on women’s gender roles? The topic is inspired by my lived experience. Expressions of my narratives and those of others are integral to this work. The discussion begins with an overview of the history of ideas on emotions and shame. Shame was considered more important than other emotions because of its evaluative cognitive dimension. The overview highlights the continuum of inherited scholarly and culturally based gender stereotypes. Through exploring current interdisciplinary scholarly research on shame, a common theme emerged: the irrevocable presence of the ‘other’ in the shame experience. Discussions around this theme led to two basic principles: 1) the individual and the social

Human Studies, 2022

Experiences of shame are not always discrete, but can be recurrent, persistent or enduring. To use the feminist phenomenologist Sandra Lee Bartky's formulation, shame is not always an acute event, but can become a "pervasive affective attunement" (Bartky, 1990: 85). Instead of experiencing shame as a discrete event with a finite duration, it can be experienced as a persistent, and perhaps, permanent possibility in daily life. This sort of pervasive or persistent shame is commonly referred to as "chronic shame" (Pattison, 2000; Nathanson, 1992; Dolezal, 2015). Chronic shame is frequently associated with political oppression and marginalization. In chronic shame, it is the potentiality of shame, rather than the actuality, that is significant. In other words, the anticipation of shame (whether explicit or implicit) comes to be a defining feature of one's lived experience. Living with chronic shame has important socio-political consequences. Thus far, chronic shame has eluded simple phenomenological analysis, largely because chronic shame often does not have a clear experiential profile: it is frequently characterised by the absence rather than the presence of shame. The aim of this article is to provide a phenomenology of chronic shame, drawing from Edmund Husserl's formulation of the 'horizon' as a means a to discuss structural aspects of chronic shame experiences, in particular how chronic shame is characterised by structures of absence and anticipation.

Problemos, 2017

The purpose of this paper is to give a sketch of a new phenomenological approach to shame. I claim that prevailing theories of shame are too narrow and reduce shame to a mere fear of social sanctions or to an intimate experience wherein a subject becomes an object of external social norms. Instead, I demonstrate that we should understand shame as an experience wherein an individual feels his incapability of meeting the standards of the ego-ideal, since he lacks something valuable. From this perspective shame is, on the one hand, a profoundly intimate experience wherein an individual evaluates herself negatively because she lacks something she thinks she requires. On the other hand, since lack reveals itself only through a process wherein an individual compares her real self to the ego-ideal, shame always has an ideological dimension since the ego-ideal reflects the shared ideological values an individual is attached to and constitute part of one's self-conception.

In the wake of a political project spanning three decades that was committted to a rhetoric of gay pride, a few queer theorists turned to the affect of shame to rethink queer politics in the twenty-first century. This article entertains the possibility of a poli- tics of shame but ultimately suggests that a politics of shame presents an interesting paradox: shame, in one of its most important senses, seems to dissipate when it is made public or when it is shared. That is, the negative and isolating qualities that are constitu- tive of the affect of shame are negated when it is confessed. To confess one’s shame is to destroy it. The impossibility of sharing shame renders it difficult to politicize. Drawing from Freud, Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Sartre, I posit a notion of shame that is constitutive of a kind of political subjectivity, though is not itself a programmatic politics.

This text analyses issues of shame, identity, and modernity, mainly with their links to the politicization of the subject. It explores two different views on emotional tonalities for the establishment of political identity. By exploring the idea of shame as politically constitutive in Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories, he differentiates a strong immanent perspective and a weaker regional perspective to identity constitution. He points at the necessity of reformulating Foucault’s idea of biopolitics in relation to emotional tonalities. It makes possible to understand that it is not only a critique of modernity but also a narrative of the modern subject and state