Saturday, November 27, 2004
Guilt/Shame posted by Richard Seymour
Concept: "Shame requires an audience. Unlike guilt, which can fester quietly inside you, shame only arises when someone knows, or fears, they have been seen. Shame relies on the art of exposure, even if exposure is what it hates most. ... And yet shame is also an action, a transitive verb -to shame - with a very public face. Shaming someone can be a political project. ... Guilt, it is said, always arises in relation to others, whereas with shame it is your narcissism, the ideal that you like to nurture about yourself, that you betray (psychologists describe shame as the only affect which works internally, passing from one to another part of the self). People feel guilty when they violate other people, shame when they fail themselves or the group." (Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 2003, pp. 3-4).Example: "...the voice of the so-called liberal establishment in America evinces not the slightest remorse or moral reservations over the bloodletting. On the contrary, it hails the attack and calls for more of the same."
Shaming those 'liberals' who call for and cover up the crimes being committed in Iraq is not an easy task. They seem unusually reluctant to execute the kind of auto-critique many of them would demand of the antiwar movement. They also seem impervious to the daily refutations of their story of 'humanitarian justification' emerging from Iraq. And they display considerable cognitive skill in finding rationalisations not only for the original catastrophic decision to wage war but also for renewed, ever bloodier assaults. And they have a less-than-novel way of eschewing responsibility for the outcome of their war - they simply project it onto those who opposed the war.
Still, keep an eye open and you can detect the slow, wrenching agony of pro-war liberals being impaled on their own moralising .