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  • Thought-Perception Beyond Form or, the Logic of Shame
  • Raji Vallury (bio)
Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011, 224pp

Few books published recently in the field of postcolonial studies can rival the virtuosic brilliance of Timothy Bewes’ The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Dense, challenging and thought-provoking, the work’s dazzling erudition, which combines highly inventive readings of an impressive array of philosophers, writers, literary and cinematic texts, opens new critical inroads into the relation between ethics and aesthetics. Bewes’ central thesis is that shame constitutes the event which gives material form and expression to the irresolvable tension between the ethical and the aesthetic that is the hallmark of postcolonial literature, indeed of all modern writing. Pace Joseph Conrad, Bewes defines shame as ‘the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance . . . in a world of desolate unintelligibility’ (pp2–3). Shame in other words, is the text’s formal articulation of its ethical, political and representational inadequacy. Sartre’s insight into the ‘shameful’ structure of perception, which destabilises the encounter between the subject of knowledge and the object of its comprehension, functions as Bewes’ analytical point of departure, while Hegel, Lukács, Adorno, Badiou and Deleuze provide the conceptual tools needed to theorise a practice of postcolonial writing ‘freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes’ (p192). True postcoloniality, or freedom from the shame built into the very structure of colonialism: such is the radical thought to which Bewes’ book attempts to give form. Illuminating the paradoxically inseparable distances, gaps and dislocations between the subject and object of perception, form and event, revolutionary potential and realisation, aesthetics and ethics in the works of writers such as Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoë Wicomb, The Event of Postcolonial Shame seeks to reformulate critical enquiry within postcolonial studies ‘not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work’ (p7). As I will suggest a little later, the luminous clarity of Bewes’ negative critique, which posits the necessary conjoining of shame and form, and which attempts to shed light on the event of shame as ‘a modality of thought that cannot adequately be accounted for by language, or reduced to what is expressible in language’ (p14), risks leaving the political in the dark by underscoring failure as the constitutive measure of the success of literature and by privileging the ethical as ‘a permanent rendering inadequate of form’ (p19).

As mentioned earlier, shame is the literary form that emblematises the gap within the perceiving subject, ‘between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other’ (p24). Bewes deconstructs the ontology of the subject that sustains Sartre’s formulation of the perceptual relation that engenders the structure of shame (a [End Page 230] formal relation that cannot be viewed as an ethical response to political inequality, but must be seen as a determinant condition built into the very apparatus of power), by arguing for shame as an experience of the dissolution and evacuation of the self. The vector of this process of de-subjectification, as Bewes demonstrates through his Deleuzian reading of Lawrence, is the negation of perception (and perceptibility) towards nothingness and abstraction (p36). The impossibility of representing the dissolution of the self towards imperceptibility finds formal expression in the shame of the postcolonial novel, of shame as the form of the experience of perceptual dissonance and discrepancy (p46). Invoking Lukács’ definition of the novel as the form of the age of ‘absolute sinfulness’ (p44), Bewes describes shame as both the experience of incommensurability between a subject and the world, as well as the formal resolution of that discrepancy (p45). He then proceeds to raise one of the most important questions of the book: how does one think in the absence of form and how does one think the absence...

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