This essay provides an account of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. This account elucidates two important insights: first, that all sexual violence and not only public gang rape humiliates and, second, that appeals to the neoliberal notion of resilience undermine feminist efforts to counter sexual violence. The first part of the essay provides an overview of the idea of a relation of self to self and its significance, presents humiliation specifically as a manifestation of (...) the self‐relation, and then turns to feminist analyses of sexual violence and its effects in order to illustrate how sexual violence against women humiliates. The second part of the essay illustrates that, given the nature and function of humiliation, neoliberal discourse generally and that of resilience more specifically reproduce the individuation and exclusion that characterize humiliation and are thus detrimental to feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. I conclude by encouraging feminist anti‐sexual violence efforts that at least counter individuation and at best promote collective and inclusive solidarity. (shrink)

How one should respond to shame is a moral consideration that has figured relatively little in philosophical discourse. Recent psychological insights tell us that, at its core, shame reflects an unfulfilled need for emotional connection. As such, it often results in psychological and moral damage—harm which, I argue, renders shaming practices very difficult to justify. Following this, I posit that a morally preferable response to shame is one that successfully addresses and dispels the emotion. To this end, I critique two (...) common responses to shame, compliance and anger, and then propose an alternative: the practice of emotional vulnerability. (shrink)

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, (...) and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

To the extent that philosophy deals with the blush, it is almost always as the pink blush of shame. Such is philosophy’s seeming obsession with the latter, there remains the risk of something important being lost in translation when it comes to those examples in the literature that mention the blush. I intend to focus on one such example, a scene from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, the story of the student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing (...) response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I will turn to Lisa Guenther and Giorgio Agamben for their reading of Antelme’s account, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but that which may have been overlooked as a result, namely confusion. I will turn also to Jean-Paul Sartre, again, not in relation to shame, rather for his brief, but no less important, phenomenological account of blushing. I will refer to recent social psychology research suggesting that confusion is a knowledge emotion – something like embarrassment. All this in support of the argument, that when Antelme writes of the student – ‘ Il a l’air confus’, we are bound to take them both, the student and Antelme, the blusher and the beholder, at their word – to maintain our distance so that the scene might speak for itself and in so doing reveal signs of life. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 977-991, September 2022. To the extent that philosophy deals with the blush, it is almost always as the pink blush of shame. Such is philosophy’s seeming obsession with the latter, there remains the risk of something important being lost in translation when it comes to those examples in the literature that mention the blush. I intend to focus on one such example, a scene from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, the story (...) of the student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I will turn to Lisa Guenther and Giorgio Agamben for their reading of Antelme’s account, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but that which may have been overlooked as a result, namely confusion. I will turn also to Jean-Paul Sartre, again, not in relation to shame, rather for his brief, but no less important, phenomenological account of blushing. I will refer to recent social psychology research suggesting that confusion is a knowledge emotion – something like embarrassment. All this in support of the argument, that when Antelme writes of the student – ‘Il a l’air confus’, we are bound to take them both, the student and Antelme, the blusher and the beholder, at their word – to maintain our distance so that the scene might speak for itself and in so doing reveal signs of life. (shrink)

This special issue explores the relevance of shame to feminist theory and practice. Across a number of contexts, theoretical frames, and disciplines, the articles collated here provide a stimulating engagement with shame, posing questions and developing analyses that have a direct bearing on feminism. For, the significance of shame to feminists lies in the complex and often troubling implications it holds as a feeling that may be experienced differently by people of certain genders (and none), and in its relation to (...) power. Indeed, as the contributions to this special issue highlight, shame may play a role in our moral development, but given its often readily acknowledged harmful effects, shame is frequently put to politically problematic and morally questionable ends. In patriarchal societies the outgrowths of this regularly entail gendered consequences, as gendered shame may form a disciplining device operating through structures of oppression, such as gender, but also class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and related intersectional categories. The question of a politics of shame therefore arises in the context of a consideration of the social and political deployment and manipulation of shame, and the reported divergence in the shame experience itself, which feminists have attributed to its manifestation through, among others, gender. (shrink)