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ABSTRACT
This paper argues that existing accounts of shame are incomplete in so far as they don’t take account of the problem of shame. This is the problem concerning the possibility of a primary experience of shame. It is the problem Sartre considers under the terms of a “primitive shame” or shame “in its primary structure” that grounds other more complex experiences of shame. This problem is centred on the tension between shame as an immediate, pre-reflective experience and the requirement that shame must involve an awareness of some definitive aspect of the self. I’m going to suggest, correlatively, how by trying to resolve this problem we end up with a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the second part of the paper, I go on to look at how this new interpretation of shame helps us understand race. Looking at Fanon, I explore how a fundamental and overlooked ineffability in our relation to others impacts upon responses to racialized shame.
Notes
1 A discussion of the phenomenology of shame can be found in Deonna and Teroni, In Defence of Shame; Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt; and Zahavi, “Self, Consciousness, and Shame”. This can be contrasted with the “ethical” treatment of shame which goes back to Rawls, A Theory of Justice, and Williams, Shame and Necessity and, more recently, to Ally, “The Moral Appropriateness of Shame”, which involves a discussion of the moral status of the emotion.
2 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 222.
3 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 221.
4 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 221–22.
5 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.
6 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 13.
7 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 318.
8 Fuchs, “The Phenomenology of Shame, Guilt and the Body”, 18.
9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 105.
10 Fatigue, injury, or illness, and clumsiness or lack of bodily skill can also occasion the breakdown of the lived body.
11 Fuchs, “The Phenomenology of Shame, Guilt and the Body”, 4.
12 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 347.
13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 104.
14 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 341.
15 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 10.
16 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259.
17 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.
18 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 324.
19 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 318.
20 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 325.
21 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 269.
22 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.
23 Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 264–5.
25 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 261.
26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 264.
27 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 261.
28 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 288–9.
29 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 364.
30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
31 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 29.
32 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 35.
33 Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
34 Fanon 82.
35 Most discussions of Fanon focus on the ethical, historical or political aspects of his thought rather than on his phenomenology. Nigel Gibson represents this tendency when he remarks that “How to stand up and resist … is the problem he (Fanon) set himself in Black Skin, White Masks”. Ed. Gibson, Living Fanon? 6. This is also often run together with the biographical discussion of Fanon as a revolutionary. See, for example, Gordon, “Requiem on a Life Well Lived” and Belaïd, “Frantz Fanon and Abane Ramdane”. Or his politics is run together with his psychiatry, as in Marriott’s interpretation of Fanon in terms of a “psycho-politics”. Marriott, Whitter Fanon?. Moreover, even when acknowledgement is made of phenomenology, the engagement with it tends to be superficial. Thus, Lewis Gordon notes in “Requiem on a Life Well Lived”, 21, that existential phenomenology “greatly influenced Fanon’s thought”. He does not go into the details of what this existential phenomenology entails, let alone its philosophical substance (see also Macey, “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race”, 10). This is not to say that Black Skin, White Masks is straightforwardly or exclusively a work of phenomenology. In this way our approach differs from Webber’s in relation to existentialism. In Rethinking Existentialism, Webber argues that Black Skin, White Masks can be read as a unified existentialist text.
36 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363.
37 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363–4.
38 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 56.
39 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 99, 91.
40 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84.
41 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82.
42 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84–5.
43 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87.
44 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 88.
45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89.
46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90.
47 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363.
48 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.
49 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.
50 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 98.
51 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 107.
52 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18.
53 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 102.
54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 88.
55 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 91.