The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Shame and Experience

Disclosure 109 ShameandExperience Like so many others, I first reacted to my diagnosis with shame, which had the advantage of allowing me to experience a wholly novel situation thanks to an affective framework already well-­ known to me. As the queer scholar Leo Bersani has noted, “A potential sexual shame is inherent in being HIV-­ positive. For the overwhelming majority of HIV-­ positive gay men, to acknowledge being infected amounts to a sexual confession: I have been fucked.” Even now, I can argue with myself until I’m blue in the face that I didn’t do anything wrong and that I have nothing to be ashamed of anyway; people can feign disbelief when I tell them that I have been struck with a paralyzing sense of failure and unworthiness that I still find difficult to shake at times; they can look puzzled on learning that I slid into depression not on hearing the news but one year later, once my viral load had plummeted , my T-­ cell count edged up, and everything looked good: all attempts at restoring a supposedly therapeutic sense of self and integrity are futile. I may now have become a regular at the hospital’s Department of Internal Medicine, but the truth is, from the get-­go, my own, deepest, most personal experience of HIV was social, an outside–­ in dynamic that I perceived as a familiar feeling of dispossession. Contemplating myself as other was not a new phenomenon for me, and I could embrace this familiar feeling of disjunction with an odd sense of reassurance. On a more general level, this will doubtless sound obvious if one considers that experience is not something the self does by itself but a form of knowledge and is, therefore, always mediated. It is nonetheless telling in that respect that one’s first consciousness of having HIV is, as is the case with any other ailment, attached to a diagnosis; that is, not to the illness itself (which, in my situation, cannot in any case be experienced apart from the social discourses that make up the disease) but to its legibility by and intelligibility to someone else—­ even if this someone else is also me positioning myself outside the disease, the old, healthy version of me that I lived with for much too long to ever completely cease to be—­ my inner, young Barbara Stanwyck. (For this reason, to become ill is always a kind of breaking up of the self.) Even beyond past and potential infections, there is no experience of HIV or AIDS that isn’t relational. Shame told me that. For feelings of shame indicate that we may experience our own sense of self only as vulnerability and openness to others—­ just as the experience of my own nakedness takes place only with (the possibility of) someone else seeing my naked body or touching it, whether kindly or not. ...