Regard for the Other: Embarrassment in the Quatrième promenade

Regard for the Other: Embarrassment in the Quatrième promenade E. S. Burt ONE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHAME AND EMBARRASSMENT in Rousseau can be stated quite simply. Shame is a passion productive of discourse. The confessions made under its aegis seem marvelously able to serve as actions of which to be ashamed, and so to provoke more confession. Embarrassment, on the other hand, is tongue-tied, an anacoluthon in the grammar of feelings. Where, under influence of timidity, Rousseau manages to blurt something out nonetheless, the effect is not to end the silence but more often than not to prolong it, rendering the hapless speaker even more incapable of timely speech. The blurted phrase rums out to be less than successful at helping along a faltering conversation. No stopgap measure after all, it serves as a conversation stopper. In "Excuses," Paul de Man has said what there is to be said on the productivity of performatives motivated by shame. De Man shows that the gesture by which Rousseau explains his accusation of Marion—a self-exculpating, other-accusing gesture that heaps more shame on him and reproduces its paradoxical structure every time he returns to right the balance through further narration —is indeed interesting in the fullest sense of the word.' Ethics and justice , the two tribunals before which Rousseau always tries his words, are interested by the slanderous, aggressive lie told out of shame over his theft. As for aesthetics, culpability, like remorse, is a parasitical passion, of the sort a beggar-poet might willingly nourish because it helps feed him lines. It is not surprising that a Baudelaire, for instance, should seek the rakeoff for artistic production given by shame-driven performatives.2 For where shame is concerned , signifiers are easily transformed into signifieds of another utterance.' Like the ribbon Rousseau accused Marion of stealing, which "can circulate symbolically as a pure signifier and become ... the articulating hinge in a chain of exchanges," the free signifiers of shame emerge as cut off from reference {coupable), and so as innocent and as guilty {coupable) as fiction itself.4 However, not everything has been said about embarrassment in Rousseau, nor about the thwarted language that distinguishes the speaker in that predicament where language is, by contrast, incompletely freed from reference or dogged by fictional elements. In his analysis of the Quatrième promenade, de Man, for instance, has set aside the lie motivated by embarrassment. In answer 54 Winter 1999 Burt to a woman's half-teasing question as to whether he had ever had children, Rousseau's response—"je répondis que je n'avais jamais eu ce bonheur"5— was instantly recognizable as a lie, as he knew himself since he had written at some length about the birth and abandonment of his five children in the Confessions . De Man has some good reasons for dismissing this lie, not the least of which is that, were he to treat a passion characterized by a lack of ideas and where the self is seen as failing to present itself, it would take him outside his announced topic of the relationship between cognition and performance in autobiography (278). Rousseau typically talks of embarrassment in a public situation where he feels called upon to utter and, having no ideas and no terms ready, represents confusedly the single idea possible: the self's inability to present itself adequately in speech, what Rousseau more than once calls "mon embarras à parler" (518). In the Neuvième Promenade, as just one instance, Rousseau claims an increasing blockage: "Je n'eus jamais ni présence d'esprit, ni facilité de parler; mais depuis mes malheurs, ma langue et ma tête se sont de plus en plus embarrassées. L'idée et le mot propre m'échappent également..." (1088). With neither ideas nor proper terms forthcoming at the moment of blockage, any statements clarifying of embarrassment are necessarily non-contemporaneous with it: "des idées lentes à naître, embarrassées et qui ne se présentent jamais qu'après-coup" (113). Because it gives rise to so limited a knowledge, and to a confused and untimely knowledge that is alienated with respect to the situation...