Introduction-States of Shame

Introduction—States of Shame1 Il faut que le colonisé soit bien étrange, en vérité, pour qu'il demeure si mystérieux après tant d'années de cohabitation ... ou il faut penser que le colonisateur a de fortes raisons de tenir à cette illisibilité. —Albert Memmi, Le racisme (1982) The feeling of shame relies upon a sense of empathy that assumes that we are all the same at the same time as it relies on a sense of identity that assumes we are not all the same. [...] The aporia of shame is that it resists the very self/other distinction on which it depends. There is a necessary contradiction at its base. —Desmond Manderson, "Unutterable Shame/Unuttered Guilt: Semantics, Aporia and the Possibility of Mabo" (1998)2 STATES OF SHAME have long been understood as a powerful affective resource. They seem able to alienate and estrange others, while, paradoxically , making intimacy possible. Shame itself does double duty for individuals and groups by uniting and differentiating simultaneously. It produces both the feeling of shared regard between and amongst subjects ("We all recognize this as shameful") and yet, in that same experience of affective belonging, shame just as powerfully marks out the behaviors or desires which earn exclusion from such regard and recognition ("You must be shameless!" or "Shame on you!"). And yet, even in shame's denial of recognition, the apostrophizing words "Shame on you!" function rhetorically to beckon the subject back, to dangle the enticement οι potential, if not actual, inclusion by communicating the fitting codes and conditions of belonging: to fit in, in this context, means recognizing the appropriate sense of shame. Hence, the tremendous rhetorical power that lies in the marshaling and instrumentalizing of shame: in totalizing and totalitarian denials of state recognition to a particular group; in the recent appeals to the supplemental "community strengthening " potential of scenes of public humiliation deemed capable of remedying the failures of legal sanctions here in the U.S.; or in the spate of public apologies by Heads of State and High Court rulings, apologies that seek to arouse feelings of collective shame for past denials of recognition, as in Australia's 1992 High Court majority ruling on the native title rights of indigenous Australians , in Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland, which overthrew the colonialist doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to nobody) by mobilizing national shame in the face of a shameful past.3 And when subjects internalize Vol. XXXIX, No. 4 3 L'Esprit Créateur shame's coding of authorized and unauthorized behaviors and desires, shame fuels itself very effectively. What necessarily begins with an explicit or implicit encoding of the terms of social regulation then self-regulates and takes on a life of its own. The contributors to this issue have all asked crucial questions about the ways writers understand, and have understood, the variables—as well as the constants—of states of shame according to their diverse subjects, objects, causes, effects, and contexts. Rather than departing from any definitional unity on states of shame, instead their contributions probe the diversity of expression of these emotional states to ask how different Francophone writers , philosophers, and filmmakers represent the "relational grammar" of states of shame, be they intrapsychic, intersubjective, transgenerational, intercultural , or intracultural relations to name but a few of the passages crossed or closed, through shame's relational grammar." David Carroll, for example, examines Jorge Semprun's response to the collective transgenerational shame of the "survivor's syndrome" (feeling ashamed to be alive) in the wake of the Holocaust; Luke Bouvier also analyzes a response to the transgenerational transmission of shame, but this time in Jules Vallès's individual counter-discourse of shame-lessness in his writings on childhood humiliation. Both of these articles prompt us to ask if there are forms of shame-lessness other than the static retaliatory response of a shamelessness trapped by the very same terms of the shame it repudiates. Given that shame is such an ambivalent emotion , and that emotions themselves are so multifarious in their openness to individual and cultural development, can a writing of the emotions-in this case, shame—offer a way of disrupting...