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  • Shame on You!3 scandals on which to build or bail
  • Avital Ronell (bio)

Derrida opened a huge dossier when he started addressing the animal in philosophical headquarters. Well, I always a priori have thought that Derrida’s the man, he’s the animal that I follow, tracking the outlaw ways he exceeds the anthropos.

1

Ilacked companionship in the animal world, an ongoing crisis, and one among many reasons I might have wanted that companionship—in, say, a strictly egological sense—would be to have someone in my life who wouldn’t judge me. But then I was corrected by a friend who said: Don’t kid yourself. Dogs do judge, and are quite prone to making scenes. Eventually they get over it and their horror at your misstep is not relationship-threatening, humans surmise. Animals may not subject you to endless hearings and trials. But they will say, “What do you think you’re doing?” So this in itself—judgment among and across species, even furtive flashes of something that correlates to acts of judgment, stokes my animal curiosity. I don’t feel that a ladybug judges me, necessarily, but what do I know? I’ve been very interested in judgment and the rush to judgment, the libidinal excess of judgment since the Lutheran recalibration. [End Page 202]

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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has complicated the itinerary of what we mean by modesty. He advocates it as a philosophical stance, a calculated retreat and a necessary step back, as Heidegger would say. By most measures, animals are not considered to profile stances of modesty, with its moral mantling. However, I believe that I’ve met modest animals. I think I’ve recognized animals in the streets of New York who are ashamed to have to do their business on sidewalks, in front of people. I tell you, I do have the perception (without plunging into reductions of my ostensible subjectivity or limited perspective) that they are ashamed to be forced into a certain place of nakedness and exposure. I’m alert to shame and shaming, the syntax of these diminishments, the residue of scorned being and humiliation, of which Wayne Koestenbaum has written so poignantly—what it means to know and endure humiliation. For whom or what is the experience of humiliation reserved? In a similar vein, perhaps, I’ve been working on shame and color and the long-held question of who gets to blush: I mean, it has been assumed that feeling shame, which is to say something that accompanies a moral kind of rectitude, is restricted to a white man’s capacity for social and moral decency… no comment. Strike that remark. This calls for comment and endless commentary, for a surge of outrage. Let me resume the topic for one more round, which is as important for Hawthorne as it is for Kleist, Kafka, and a number of others, all of whom gave focus to the stain or splotch, the spread of redness on a momentarily but falsely readable face. Who can blush? Who can redden? Certain skin pigments are said not to be favorable to the blush. So how does one interpret the blush and its store of codifications? Or the stain on the skin—in Hawthorne there’s a blotch on the skin, a birthmark to contend with. These marks are said to signify or to show something like an interiority that was reserved for certain kinds of so-called “races” and “peoples.” This is something that necessarily draws my attention, in part due to the exclusionary operations and fantastic yet lethal constrictions that put this anthropologically recycled view into circulation. That is to say, these marginal spurts of signification where you have to fill in the dots and try to read unreadable disruptions in pigment or surface and that have been historically hijacked to express specific types of meaning. For the most part it’s been assumed that only a certain class of beings are truly capable of expressing and feeling shame, mostly a sector of humankind. But I feel that I’ve seen animals endure shaming, feel ashamed, and also shame another, a wayward human. So if you come home late...

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