Abstract
Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger.
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Notes
Kafka (2000, p. 178).
Sartre (2003, p. 296).
Sartre (2003, p. 286).
Sartre (2003, p. 283, 287).
Sartre (2003, p. 286).
Sartre (2003, p. 287, 294).
Sartre (2003, p. 286, 291).
Sartre (2003, p. 289).
Sartre (2003, p. 294).
Sartre (2003, pp. 383–452).
Sartre (2003, p. 246, emphasis added).
Sartre (2003, p. 282).
Sartre (2003, p. 291).
Sartre (2003, p. 291).
Sartre (2003, pp. 278–279, 291).
Levinas (1998a, p. 124).
Levi (1988, pp. 72–73)
Levinas (1989, p. 170).
“In the identity of the I [moi], the identity of being reveals its nature as enchainment, for it appears in the form of suffering and invites us to escape” (2003, p. 55).
For a different analysis of the relation between Levinas and Sartre, which ultimately sides with a (post-structuralist reading of) Sartre, see Visker (1999, pp. 326–356). Visker also offers an intriguing account of shame as “the philosophical cornerstone on which Levinas’ ethics rests” (1999, pp. 130–135). But, as will become apparent in the argument to follow, I disagree with Visker’s claim that Levinas’ thought, “in the final analysis, amounts to an ethicization of Sartre’s dualism” (1999, p. 140).
Levinas (2003, p. 64, emphasis added).
Levinas (2003, p. 65).
Levinas (2003, p. 74). Cited by Rolland.
Levinas (2003, p. 83).
I do not have space here to discuss the relationship between responsibility and fraternity in full detail; see Guenther (2006, pp. 77–84 and 147–55) for a discussion of fecundity, paternity and the relation between ethics and politics. For Levinas’ brief discussion of fraternity, see Totality and Infinity, pp. 278–280. The most important passage in this section for my interpretation of fraternity as political solidarity is this: “The relation with the face in fraternity, where in his turn the Other appears in solidarity with all the others, constitutes the social order, the reference of every dialogue to the third party by which the We—or the parti—encompasses the face to face opposition, opens the erotic upon a social life, all signifyingness and decency, which encompasses the structure of the family itself” (1969, p. 280).
Levinas (1969, p. 84).
“The freedom that can be ashamed of itself founds truth (and thus truth is not deduced from truth). The Other is not initially a fact, is not an obstacle, does not threaten me with death; he is desired in my shame" (1969, pp. 83–84).
“If philosophy consists in knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the other is presented as the Other, and where the movement of thematization is inverted” (1969, p. 86). The movement of shame is not from inside out, like intentionality, but from outside in, like sensibility, and like the questioning that provokes critique.
“Existence is not in reality condemned to freedom, but is invested as freedom. Freedom is not bare” (1969, p. 84). See also Totality and Infinity p. 88, where this investment of freedom is called the foundation of reason, and Totality and Infinity pp. 302–304, where Levinas contrasts this investment of a freedom which, prior to investment, “appear[s] to itself as a shame” with Sartre’s account of “the fall of my freedom” (1969, p. 303).
Levinas (1969, p. 84).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 283).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 321).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 321).
As Beauvoir puts it: “woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her” (2010, p. 41).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 321).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 329).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 321).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 287).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 293).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 295).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 292).
Beauvoir (2010, p. 340).
Beauvoir (1994, p. 106).
Beauvoir (1994, pp. 374–375).
Beauvoir and Halimi (1962).
The investment of collective shame as collective responsibility does not undermine projects to hold those who are guilty of breaking the law criminally responsible for their actions. My point is rather that the meaning of responsibility is not exhausted by criminal responsibility, and not exclusively measured by law. As Levinas puts it in Totality and Infinity: “Justice summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice, and henceforth nothing can mark the end of this march; behind the straight line of the law the land of goodness extends infinite and unexplored, necessitating all the resources of a singular presence. I am therefore necessary for justice, as responsible beyond every limit fixed by an objective law” (1969, p 245). It is precisely this “beyond” that is sketched out by shame, in distinction from guilt.
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