From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature's Ethical Response to Politics

The concept of shame in Western discourse has often carried a lesser moral significance than guilt. Unlike guilt that pertains to one's actions and intentions, shame relates to one's affects and emotions. While guilt is of an essentially mimetic and identificatory nature, the logic that underlies shame is of a specular kind: the experience of shame depends on the awareness of being exposed to a shaming gaze, and therefore on the consciousness of an autonomous self that is not immersed in the interpersonal dynamic to the same extent as the guilty self. Although shame is clearly not without ties to action because it is mostly experienced as an immediate consequence of one's deeds, the feeling of shame indicates both a shortcoming in behavior and a flaw in personality. One can, indeed, experience shame as a product of faulty conduct but unlike embarrassment or regret shame touches one on a deeper existential level, and even though it does not necessarily reveal a real personality flaw it always implies self-questioning. As Ruth Leys has recently put it, whereas "guilt concerns your actions, that is, what you do, or what you wish or fantasize you have done," "shame is held to concern not your actions but who you are, that is, your deficiencies and inadequacies as a person as these are revealed to the shaming gaze of the other."¹ According to this conceptual convention, a product of a long tradition in psychoanalysis and psychology—Leys's principal references include Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Silvian Tomkins, Donald Nathanson, Paul Ekman, and Carroll Izard, but one could add a parallel tradition in phenomenology and existentialism from Max Scheler to Jean-Paul Sartre—shame is secondary to guilt in terms of morality and ethics because it is too entangled in the struggle for recognition, and thus too much absorbed in the self rather than the other.

The ethical relevance of guilt and shame becomes more ambiguous once these concepts are applied in historically complex, ethically challenging and morally troublesome situations and events. It becomes questionable, for example, to explain phenomena such as survivor's guilt by principles that have been traditionally associated with the notion of guilt (in particular, the logic of complicity and regressive identification with the aggressor or the original traumatic scene). So much so that Giorgio Agamben has made a plea against the very concept of the survivor's guilt, arguing that the reaction of those who returned from concentration camps, feeling guilty that it was they who survived and not someone else, be seen as an inability—quite an understandable one, he adds, given the extreme circumstances—to deal with one's feeling of shame.² What exactly, then, asking after Agamben and beyond the academic discipline of trauma studies, are the ethical and political stakes at play in the shift of emphasis from guilt to shame? Moreover, since most theoretical conclusions about guilt and shame have been made about and from the perspective of the victim, how would the ethical and political concerns at work in this shift reflect the change of focus from the victim to situations where one was a silent accomplice (e.g., the gray majority during Nazism and Communism), or where the boundary between the victim and the perpetrator is hopelessly complex (e.g., different groups justifying and enforcing their rights over the same land), or where one does not perceive oneself as perpetrator but is perceived as one (e.g., descendants of colonizers born, and at home, in colonies fighting for independence)?

The last case is that of Albert Camus, the story of whose controversial political views during the Algerian war has been widely debated and is well known by now: a pied noir, a Frenchman born in Algeria, Camus saw himself as an Algerian and throughout the 1950s argued against Algerian independence because he feared it would lead to the expulsion of people, cultures and values deemed foreign but considered by Camus intrinsic to the diverse fabric of Algeria. Although Camus carefully avoided taking sides, his...