Behind the Blush: a small study on the productivity of Shame

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Thanks to

Merel, Georgia, Ymke and Lisanne, for the endless sessions of

thinking and drinking in the Barones.

Murat, for his unfailing sense of humor in the face of my

inability to complete this thesis.

Marieke, for the cover of shame.

The rest of you.

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3

What’s shame got to do with it?

Shame is a singular composition, an idiosyncrasy […] marking the unique chance that these entities had been retained and willed, that this combination had been thrown and not another.

(Gilles Deleuze in Essays Critical and Cilinical ) I began thinking about shame when I came across this citation. “Shame marks an unique chance,”(120) Deleuze writes . Over the past years my research has mainly revolved around the masochist relationship. From the start, the impetus of this research has been a fascination with the intensely human interplay between pleasure and pain: Be it that joyous and ambivalent feeling that is derived from a truly painful experience or - vice versa - the sensation of a pleasure that is so all-encompassing that it strikes one with painful fear. Such is the ambiguity of pleasure and pain. This relationship is formed through simultaneously bearing on and taking from other emotions or affects.

One such emotion or affect (a distinction upon which I will touch in chapter 1) that greatly

affects this interplay of pleasure and pain is shame. I could easily locate the deliberate inducing of

feelings of shame in the masochistic relationship, exploring the masochist who searches for intense humiliation through anxious anticipation of pain. The masochist draws from shame for his or her pleasure, more so than from the actual ‘strike of a whip’. Classic novels on masochism such as Story

of O by Pauline Réage (1954), Gordon by Edith Templeton (1966) and of course the famous novel

Venus in furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1870) - whose surname coined the concept - provide

ample evidence for the notion that shame plays a pivotal role in the masochist’s experience. Von Sacher-Masoch perhaps has best described the role shame plays in the masochistic relationship, a description that at once serves as a testament of the ambiguous nature of shame. This following passage is from Venus in Furs:

The sensation of being whipped before the eyes of a woman one adores by a successful rival is quite indescribable; I was dying of shame and despair. What was most humiliating was that I felt a wild and supersensual pleasure in my pitiful situation, lashed by Apollo’s whip and mocked by the cruel laughter of my Venus. (Venus in Furs, 268)

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4 The protagonist succumbs to shame through the humiliation of being whipped by his rival in this game of lovers. This shame at once sends him near death and overwhelms him with “a wild and super sensual pleasure,” once more generating feelings of humiliation. An affective circularity takes place, which could maintain itself indefinitely. This then established my preliminary understanding of shame: It makes one nearly disappear at that precise moment when one is more present, more visible, than ever before.

“Shame is a singular composition, an idiosyncrasy” Deleuze writes. The particular feelings or ideas that steered me toward writing about shame, apart from my research on masochism, have perhaps made such a singular composition. Shame interests me, because it seems in our western society we have labelled it a foe. Shame directs our eyes back upon ourselves, it exposes us and it calls us out in our relation to others. Perhaps it is because of our highly individualised zeitgeist that we aim to disregard shame; it is a social emotion, and it judges us. This probably does not bode well with an individualistic standpoint that centres on self-fulfilment at any cost; The self needs to be entirely free. One of the forces that brought about thinking of shame, is the popularity of talent shows nowadays, where people participate not so much based on talent, but on their ability to articulate their self-determination (I cannot be shamed, as long as I am behind myself).

I have touched upon some aspects already that are inextricably bound up with shame theory, such as exposure, the relation to the other and judgment. These notions will inevitably find their way into my analysis of shame. However, before I outline my theoretical framework, the methodology and the main question this thesis will pose, I want to relay two small anecdotes that are also part of this composition for writing about shame.

The first anecdote is about this nightmare, which returns every now and then: I am walking through the corridors of my former High School. The smell is familiar, a musty, stale scent that rises up from the grey walls. My senses are heightened. The place looks exactly as I have left it over ten years ago. Yet something is off. I try to make sense of my surroundings, a certain sense that makes no sense. I recognize without truly recognizing, which occurs in that peculiar mode of being in the

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5 world that is present in dreaming, a non-presence. I feel that they are watching me, although I do not know who ‘they’ are. An anxious feeling overwhelms me. Then I suddenly notice that I am naked. I try to cover myself up, but there is nothing there. The corridor turns into a black space. An uncomfortable, yet slightly arousing feeling crawls from my toes to my spine. Shame befalls me. I am becoming visible.

One more: A friend told me once that she feels deeply ashamed when she enters a room with only white people. It is as if she, being a woman of colour, suddenly notices this fact that is otherwise of no importance in her life. This implies that feeling ashamed, as in my nightmare, is not necessarily connected to any wrongdoing. Although the phenomenology of shame and guilt is often similarly theorised, shame can manifest itself within those who are guilty of nothing. This is a type of shame that is both cause and effect of visibility. This feature of shame, its negotiating between desire and pain, and its relation to the social make up the grid around which I aim to analyse shame in this thesis. I am generally one to seek for positive potential in what is mostly considered negative. As I am particularly interested in shame’s ambivalence, I will focus, counterintuitively, on the productive qualities of shame. I believe that they are present and important.

To be sure, I am aware of the vast body of thought that is currently shaping around affect in general and specifically around the concept of shame. American scholar Ruth Leys has argued in

From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (2007) that a broad shift has occurred “in the medical and

psychiatric sciences, literary criticism and even philosophy away from the “moral” concept of guilt in favour of the ethically different or “freer” concept of shame” (8). The relative freedom that these sciences assign to shame might account for such shifts toward shame theory. My analysis of the potential in shame is inspired by such criticism. It is well beyond the scope of my thesis to engage critically with all theorists that have written on the topic. However, to develop a working concept of shame, which can enter into dialogue with the cultural objects I will analyse and interpret in this thesis, it is important to position myself within the theoretical debate. I will therefore use an interdisciplinary approach through which I will look at shame, which will engage with and alternate

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6 between the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and more recent criticism on shame and affect of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Sarah Ahmed (among others of course). It is my aim to find my own (humble) stance on the matter through both my own analyses and the dialogues between various theories.

What perhaps has become clear by now is that the methodology in this thesis is based on a dialectic between shame as conceptualised in various theories and shame as an object,

phenomenon, or experience to be analysed within literature, photography and film. This dialectical approach provides a way of looking at both shame as a concept and as an object through each other. It is a methodology that is difficult to maintain, but (hopefully) productive as it brings not only the object, but also its various perceptions in theory to the fore. As such, I hope it will create an insightful dialogue.

Chapter 1 will outline various theoretical ideas about affect and, as indicated, the perceived difference between emotion and affect. I find this a vital aspect in the development of a working concept of shame, which will be mobilized in the following chapters. As shame theory is often based on a particular stance with regards to the affects (or the drives in psychoanalysis), it is necessary to explore these academic debates to find a productive basis for the analysis of shame. In Chapter 2

I will explore shame in relation to the social through the analysis of the novel Shame by Salman Rushdie (1983) and compare and contrast shame in the gaze theory by respectively Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan. Chapter 3 will be devoted to a photograph made by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer and will concentrate on shame and desire in the affective circuit between spectator and image. This chapter will be partly informed by Sarah Ahmed’s insightful article “Affective Economies” (2004), as she researches the circularity of affect in society. In the fourth and final chapter of this thesis I reconfigure shame with regards to its political implications. My focus on this relation is fuelled mostly by the writings of poststructuralist Judith Butler in Precarious Life, the

Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), in which she looks at the concept of “bodily vulnerability”

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7 To conclude this introduction, I would like to remark that I find thinking and writing about shame uncomfortable, because of its misuse in lived reality as a political tool for the oppression of many minority groups. This makes claiming shame’s productivity uncomfortable and difficult, and it is of course not the case that shame is always a force for good. Nevertheless, in my conclusion to this thesis I do hope to show that there is potential behind the blush.

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8

Affect versus emotion:

An outline of affect theory

As the body is gradually taking up centre stage in current critical theory, it only follows that the affects have now been similarly put under the microscope. In colloquial language the meaning of affect might be easily equated with the meaning of emotion, or even slip over into feeling; in critical theory, however, they are by no means the same. In a move away from Descartian mind/body dualism, a specific focus on corporeality points towards the domain of the affects, situated within the body.

In my own preliminary definition, an affect would be a bodily experience that ties in with a certain emotional state, but in fact pre-exists this state. An affect is a lived experience of a subject, but it is precisely because of that pre-emotional and corporeal foundation, that it is not truly of a subject. That is to say, if we take the subject as an intentional and conscious subject. In that case, affect rather floats above or outside the subject. Affect does not reside in the unconscious, but in the body and the body’s relations. Precisely because affectivity occurs on a corporeal level, it is difficult to grasp what exactly triggers an affect. One could feel various bodily sensations when looking at a piece of art, which would be an affective experience. This experience need not necessarily crystallise into a clear cut emotion (such as happiness), but rather transmits as an intensity. However, because we are inclined to define these bodily sensations cognitively, we easily slip into the area of defined emotions.

To take the main object and concept of this thesis as an example, shame as an affect is observable in certain facial features, like the blush and the averting of the eyes; this is shame’s embodiment. However, what triggers this affect is by no means always clear or logical, and follows perhaps a more associative path. Shame as an affect does not have to be related to an object in the world, or be caused by a specific situation per se. Shame construed as an emotion, however, already questions its material cause: Why are you feeling ashamed? What happened in the world that made you feel ashamed?

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9 The answers to these questions are necessarily bound up with belief systems, ideology, and culture. A certain necessity exists to make sense of our emotions, to point to function and meaning, to tell their story. The affects seem to circumvent such narrativisation, because of their presubjective and corporeal habitat. As such, affects are potentially productive for analysis because they resist being bound to a subject while foregrounding embodied experience.

To form a working notion of shame as an affect in its productive distinction from emotion, I need to enter into the epistemological space for thinking affect. I will respectively research the following affect theorists: William Mazzarella in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization (2010) , who engages with the affect theory of Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi developed in

Parables of The Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002)1; Sarah Ahmed, who analyses the affective circuit in current immigration politics in “Affective Economies”(2004); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Touching Feeling: Pedagogy, Affect, Performativity (2003) who draws on the affect theory developed by child psychologist Silvan Tomkins in Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962); and finally Ruth Leys, who critically assesses the current critical theory on the affects in “The Turn to

Affect” (20122).

Affects are, in the words of William Mazzarella in “Affect: What is it Good for?” (2009), ‘both embodied and impersonal’(293). What does that entail? In trying to describe affect, it seems one first needs to state what it is not. In most current theory affects are formulated as not rooted in the unconscious. They exist before the subject, whereas the unconscious (however ungraspable) resides

within the subject. Mazzarella figures the emotions as distinct from the affects. Emotions are social

blueprints or as Massumi defines them “qualified intensity” (Parables of the Virtual, 28). They are already culturally mediated and thus imbued with social meaning (they are qualified). Mazzarella explains that according to Massumi affects manifest as intensity without such qualification, and as

1

Massumi’s article “The Autonomy of Affect”, which specifically researches the affects, first appeared in 1995 and was later included in

Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.

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10 such they elude social meaning. There is no cognition (or an intentional subject) present to invest such intensity with function and meaning. It is for this aspect that Massumi, in a paraphrase by Mazzarella, characterizes the affects “as a domain of intensity, indeterminacy, and above all potentiality” (292). Following this logic, Massumi seems to equate qualification (the subject’s inscription into the social, the cultural narrative) with cultural reductionism or a form of determination that he wishes to pre-empt. By theorizing affects as such, a possibility of tracing creativity within affective life opens up, that (importantly) escapes signification.

Although my aim to recuperate shame as a productive potential would do well to follow Massumi’s conceptualisation, I have one concern. If affects are always already pre-subjective and impersonal, agency or intentionality would have no standing. Any intentionality or subject position would always already reference a cultural intervention. Not surprisingly, the question of

intentionality permeates any debate on affect. I have already indicated the anti-intentionalist stance in the conceptualisation of Mazzarella and Massumi. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,

Performativity (2003) Sedgwick also places the affects at the anti-intentionalist pole of the debate,

drawing on the “affect programs” developed by Tomkins. He asserts that an affect is an in-built automatic reaction of physiological nature that is separate from the subject3. The dominant paradigm in the field of emotions, stemming partially from Tomkins’ work, separates the basic emotions, triggered by affect programs, from belief, meaning, reason and desire (Tomkins, 247). It is with regards to this anti-intentionality that affect theory departs from psychoanalysis, in which emotions are intentional, linked to objects in the world and dependant on the drives. Because, according to the Tomkins’ paradigm, affect and cognition (our beliefs, desires and reasons) have no inherent knowledge of each other, there is a “radical dichotomy between the ‘real’ causes of affect and the individual’s own interpretation of these causes”(Tomkins, 248). Though psychoanalysis would adhere to the idea that the individual is often incapable of interpreting the real causes of

3

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11 behaviour, the claim remains that affect is ultimately invested with meaning about subject and object. Massumi, in embracing the neurosciences following the Tomkins’ paradigm, would criticize the subject-object split because there is no cognitive relation between affect and object.

To differentiate between the various implications of such conceptualizations and the grey areas between them, it is vital to turn to a scholar who applies affect to contemporary society. Sarah Ahmed traces the affective circuit in immigration politics, conceptualizing affective life partially through psychoanalysis. Through the Freudian notion of unconscious emotions, Ahmed introduces her idea of “the affective impulse [which is] perceived but misconstrued, and which becomes attached to another idea” (Ahmed, 119). She states that “what is repressed from consciousness is not the feeling as such, but the idea to which the feeling may have been first (but provisionally) connected” (“Affective Economies, 120). Although Ahmed fails to differentiate clearly between emotion, affect and feeling, what is important here is that ‘original idea’ that triggered the affect. Signification of affect here seems possible, as it stems from some form of original relation to an object in the world. However, Ahmed’s purpose is to analyse a political tendency to “stick” affects to various “signs, figures and objects”, thereby creating the illusion of a necessary relation in

retrospect4 (121, 122). Thus, an affect has an original relation to an object in the world, but comes to circulate between various objects and signs through movement and association. In contrast to Massumi and Mazzarella, Ahmed’s project underscores the possible analysis of affectivity as it moves through society.

Ahmed departs from psychoanalysis on the matter of the subject position, as she states that affects do not reside positively in the subject. And nor do they ultimately settle in the subject. She explains: “’the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin or

destination”(121). Thus the subject is neither its own beginning nor its end. In this account, Ahmed takes up the more current stance in affect theory that affect is not of the subject, but hovers over

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Ahmed productively shows how the figures of the asylums seeker and the terrorist have currently conflated and materialized through the circularity of affect in Western society.

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12 society as intensity, or as she states “it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement”(119).

This “relationship of difference” then leads me to the work of Sedgwick. For Sedgwick it is this feature of affectivity that is paramount to her project, developed. The shift away from the signification of affect, the proposed relation between affect and cognition, and the

non-essential relation between affect and its object all provide Sedgwick with a foundation for theorizing affective difference between bodies. She explains: “Thus it is the inefficiency of the fit between the affect system and the cognitive system […] that enables learning, continuity, development,

differentiation” (106). For Ahmed circulation of affect does something; it binds subjects together and incorporates the individual into the collective (121, 122). For Sedgwick affect differentiates without intention and attests to the specificity of a subject’s experience as opposed to all other subjects, without prevalence. In other words, affect points to the singularity of a subject and, in its anti-intentionality - moving away from Ahmed here- emphasizes who we are as opposed to what we do. This emphasis of course is politically viable for Sedgwick’s theory on identity formation and queer change.

Now it is time to take stock. Let me emphasise first that I have chosen these theorists because the navigation between their theories provides me with a solid base. I see value in their theories as well as in the differences between their theories, and it is from that constellation that I will set out to analyse shame in my chosen objects. It is important for my project to draw a

comprehensive overview of affect theory, though not all theorists will receive equal attention in my thesis. Furthermore, and in accordance with Ruth Leys, some critical points on these affect theories are in order.

In the quest to circumvent mind/body dualism, paired with Massumi’s aim to “show us a non-docile body” (Mazzarella, 293), the conceptualization of affect should attest to the importance of embodiment, the materialization of affect and visceral intensities that influence our cognition, but remain distinct from thinking. Though at first glance this seems to put the body in the foreground, it

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13 actually clashes with the aim to show this “non-docile body”. If everything that is not-meaning belongs to the body, and the affects are automatic processes, does this not solidify the body as ultimately passive and unattainable in analysis? This view rather underscores a dualism between body and mind, thereby making the mind the terrain of signification and the body of ungraspable intensity. As Leys puts it: “the new affect theorists’ tendency to reject psychoanalysis or to try to reconceptualise it in materialist-technological terms plays a role in this development […], on this post psychoanalytical model, what is not fully conscious must necessarily be corporeal or material”(459). Thus, with the exception of Ahmed, theorists end up in fact abandoning the possibility of an unconscious subjectivity.

This is mostly true of the theory of Brian Massumi. In Sedgwick’s writing - although she takes up the anti-intentionalist affect programs developed by Tomkins – I do locate a space in which this embodiment can relate to a form of signification, as she writes that it allows her to address the ‘middle ranges of agency’ (Touching, Feeling 13). However, Leys points towards an error that needs some attention. For Tomkins (and Sedgwick), the fact that the affects can be triggered by a vast range of objects proves that they are inherently non-relational to any object. For Sedgwick this is an essential move, because it distinguishes affects from the drives, in that they are not orientated towards an aim that is different from themselves. Sedgwick calls this “the autotelism of affects” (19). Leys, however states in From Guilt to Shame that “the mistake is thinking that multiple objects undoes objectality altogether,” 135) and I must concur. Therefore, I choose to follow Ahmed in the psychoanalytic emphasis on an ‘original idea’ related to the affect, which becomes repressed, whereby affects then behave circulatory. Though this subsequent circulation of affect makes the ‘original idea’ become inconsequential. This is why Ahmed explains that affect does not positively reside in a subject (121).

In my opinion the mistake of objectality characterizes an overall tension in affect theories. The approach of affects as either only physical intensities or as mental processes in the subject’s unconscious becomes inevitably tied up with political aspirations. Affect becomes a question of

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14 pragmatics, or even a political question. Can we analyse it? Is there room for agency? Does affect relate to an object in the world? Does this relation speak back to the affect? Does the distinction between affect and emotion provide the former with creative potential, because it is not translated into meaning? The answers seem to change according to the aim.

Massumi wants to create a space for the body, and thus needs corporeality to outweigh the mind in its intensity. Nonetheless, in his approach the mind remains the site of ‘pure reason’, which actually emphasizes a mind/body dualism. Sedgwick aims to theorize identity “without giving that space the standing of an essence” (117). She thus needs an affectivity that roams freely, that is self-rewarding or self-punishing, and is not of any object. An anti-intentionalist standpoint undergirds this conceptualisation of bodies as the marks of pure difference, as ‘who we are’ without the

investment of meaning. Nevertheless, Sedgwick’s interest in “the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change” (13) betray the possibility of an inchoate

anti-intentionalism, which I will take into consideration. Finally, Ahmed takes up the psychoanalytic notion of repressed ideas, in order to pinpoint nodes in the circularity of affect in society. Furthermore, she productively moves away from the “psychological dispositions” of the psychoanalytic subject as its own beginning, aiming to “mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (119).

It is from this constellation of theories that my conceptualization of affect will depart. In researching shame as an affect with productive qualities, I am attracted to Massumi’s affects as the space for ‘unbridled intensity’. I conceptualise affects as embodied experiences, with an

ungraspability that are precisely their creative power. However, I do not contend that they remain fully distinct from the mind, or that because of their corporeality signification is categorically not possible. The body is invested with meaning, if only retroactively. As such, affects do influence our judgment and thinking, even if not through a straightforward path. The associativity of affects opens up space for a non-rigid analysis of potentiality and creativity within shame. As Ahmed shows in “Affective Economies”, an intervention within the affective circuit (in either the individual or society

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15 at large) is possible. Affect is not of the subject, but does move through the subject and does bind subjects together. As but one ‘nodal point’ in society, the subject, in my opinion, is still the site onto which affect is inscribed, and as such can be analysed. I concur that affect is attached in some way to an object, or original idea, however associative, but in analysing shame I find it not always already necessary to search for the ‘origin’. Rather, I wish to lay bare its productivity, as a form of ‘hovering energy’ in the social. I take affective experience simultaneously as deeply individual, which coincides with Sedgwick’s notion that affect punctuates the differences between bodies, and as a societal energy, through which these same bodies materialize. My analysis of shame as an affect will thus both float above and start from within the subject.

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Shame and the Social:

Shame versus shamelessness in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame.

The novel Shame by Salman Rushdie (1983) is at once a history of a people, a political satire and a fairy-tale about shame. The novel interweaves fiction with a reality that is questioned by the asides of a narrator, who comments on the novel’s legitimacy and plotlines. The reader thus deals with a story imbued with theory and sideway commentary that call into question the very nature of fiction and reality and the position of the novel. The conceptualisation of shame and shamelessness in the novel is specifically constructed upon these postmodern narratological devices, whereby form and meaning work together to delineate ideas of shame and shamelessness.

The novel is set for the most part in a fictional town named Q., but the political backdrop that propels the story is that of Pakistan before 1980. As the novel also explores a postcolonial narrative through concepts such as migration and displacement and traces connections between shame and its ‘Eastern roots’, there are ample grounds for researching the concept of shame as a cultural construct, originating (in the case of Shame, the novel) in the East. Most critiques of the novel have revolved around the representation of women in the novel. Such arguments have centred around the seemingly peripheral role that women play in the novel and its use of the feminine as a space from which shame enters the world. However, I aim to take a different route.

I will set out to analyse shame as conceptualised in the novel with regards to its implications in the social and its dialectical relation to shamelessness. This will entail an analysis that does not focus primarily on post colonialism and/or feminism, as is the case in most literary critiques, which vary between appraisal for the novel’s emancipatory views to charges about the way women are represented in the novel5. It seems that to write about shame, is already to write controversially. However, the novel’s intricate and multi-layered narrative of shame, immigration and the political and its many critiques deserve more attention than I am able to give in this chapter. Thus, for my

5

See for example Aijiz Ahmad in “Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodernism, Migrancy and Representation of Women” (1991) and “The Politics of Post-Colonial Identity in Salman Rushdie” by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham (1989).

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17 analysis of shame I will focus instead on two main characters in the novel, Omar and Sufiya, the former the epitome of shamelessness, the latter born in shame. In “The Dialectic of Shame:

Representation in the Meta Narrative of Salman Rushdie’s Shame,” (2002) Ayelet Ben-Yishai writes the following:

The ideas of shame and shamelessness are not unmediated concepts or received notions simply reflecting an external, pre-existing concept. Rather, it is only in their articulation from concrete subject positions that they become meaningful. (203)

In accordance with the abovementioned, I will thus investigate shame from these two concrete subject positions. As shame is first and foremost an affect that deals with exposure, veiling and our relation to others, it follows logically that this first chapter will start with analysing shame and its relation to the social, as it is on the borders of the social that its painful affectivity is most experienced.

The story starts with three sisters hosting a notorious gala night for the colonial authorities in Q. They invite the “grey-skinned” (Rushdie 12) foreigners for this indulgent feast and purposefully omit sending out invitations to the locals. On this festive night one of the sisters becomes pregnant, an obvious shameful event that leads to the sisters withdrawing themselves into their fortress, never to be seen again. From this pregnancy Omar Khayyam Shakil is born and his father remains unknown. Omar grows up being confined to the fortress until the age of thirteen. He is nursed by all three sisters, who shared the symptoms of pregnancy, so that it never becomes clear who is actually Omar’s biological mother. The story of Omar is one of the leading plotlines in the novel. What is most important as a driving force in the novel as well as for its conceptualisation of shame is that Omar at birth is forbidden by his mothers to ever have any feelings of shame. Being born from an event that was condemned as shameful by the villagers of Q., Omar is almost posed by the sisters as a counterstrike against their shame. The narrator comments on this fact:

It can be doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him), having been barred from feelings of shame (vb. Int.: sharmana) at an early age,

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18 continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later

years, yes, long after his escape from his mothers’ zone of influence? Reader: it cannot.

What’s the opposite of shame? What’s left when sharam is subtracted? That’s obvious: shamelessness.(39)

The narrator explains that the word sharam poses a problem, as its translation into the English word ‘shame’ loses some of its important connotations, such as modesty and embarrassment (39).

However, He uses these words synonymously throughout the book, and I will follow accordingly. Omar grows up utterly shameless. In the sideway commentary by the narrator the word

subtracted flags the start of a conceptualisation of shame in the novel. The word subtracted seems

to indicate that shame precedes shamelessness and that feelings of shame belong to our default setting. What is left when this shame is subtracted from Omar, is shamelessness. Shame thus precedes shamelessness. This notion is in accordance with theory on shame within the field of child psychology, in which it is established that shame is a proto-affect that occurs in infants somewhere between the third and seventh month of life. In Touching, Feeling Sedgwick paraphrases this understanding of shame very clearly, pointing to the moment original shame comes in to play:

When the circuit of mirroring expressions between the child’s face and the caregiver’s recognized face (a circuit that, if it can be called a form of primary narcissism, suggests that narcissism from the very first throws itself sociably, dangerously into the gravitational field of the other) is broken: the moment when the adult face fails or refuses to play its part in the continuation of mutual gaze; when, for any one of many reasons, it fails to be recognizable to, or recognizing of, the infant who has been, so to speak, “giving face” based on a faith in the continuity of this circuit. (36)

In other words, and consequently, shame can only occur when the continuation of the mutual gaze is disrupted, suggesting that prior to that disruption a recognizable connection between caregiver and child had to have been established.

What does this entail for Omar, not having been affected with, or forbidden even to feel any

nuances of shame? It would mean that no connection to the other has been established, and shame cannot occur. If shamelessness is the opposition of shame (as the narrator suggests), it seems shame has to be actively expelled (“subtracted” (39) ) to leave one shameless. However, Omar has since

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19 birth been unaffected with shame, which to me suggests that shamelessness is not the opposite of shame, but rather a lack of shame (or shame’s lack). Shame could not be subtracted, because it has not been able to affect Omar in the form of a disrupting mutual gaze. There have not been any “mirroring expressions” (36) between Omar and his mothers, hence no disruption of those expressions. Indeed, I do not concur with the narrator’s comment on shame and its opposite. Shamelessness, in my opinion, points to an a priori lack of shame , not to that which overtakes or (lexically) juxtaposes shame. The opposite to shame I would sooner define as honour or dignity, instead of shamelessness.

In this novel, however, shamelessness is pitted against shame, which comes into production through the character of Sufiya Zinobia, who is born in shame. This dialectic between shamelessness and shame, represented by the marriage of Omar and Sufiya, should in my opinion not be taken as a misunderstanding of the concepts but as an important indication of the novel’s way of

conceptualising shame through shamelessness and vice versa. The narrator states that “between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn […]. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence”(118). Thus, the narrator clearly states that is this dialectic through which the narrative unfolds. Ben- Yishai writes about this dialectic:

Hence the dialectic between shame and shamelessness – the latter is and can only be defined against the former; which is in turn constituted by the latter.[…] In other words, shamelessness can only be defined against shame, whereas it is through shameless behaviour that shame is created.(202)

Though I do concur that it this dialectic that is conceptualised in the novel, I do not agree with the above quote stating that it is “through shameless behaviour that shame is created” or that this is what the novel shows its readers. A dialectic does mean a relation of reciprocal influence, and Omar and Sufiya as embodying shamelessness and shame do represent such a relation, but they are not constitutive of one another. As I have explained, the fact that Omar has been prohibited to feeling shame, shows that the concept of shamelessness, at least in the character of Omar, is researched

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20 through its a priori lack of shame, not as that which is generated by shame or vice versa. Thus, in my reading of the novel this dialectic is not conceptualised as ‘the one concept generating the other’ or ‘the one inherent in the other’. Rather, I would argue that the novel tells us something different through this somewhat unbefitting opposition of the two concepts. I will develop this point

throughout my analysis in what follows, but first let me introduce our shameless protagonist Omar. What does it actually mean to be unable to feel shame for Omar? When asked what kind of man he is, Omar answers: “I am a peripheral man […] other persons have been the principal actors in my life-story”(283). In Omar’s case it seems that not being able to feel shame causes him to live peripherally. He has not been able to be the principle actor in his own life, referring in this comment to his inability to act, or to have agency in life. A preliminary relation is set up between marginality and shamelessness, which is figured in relation to the gaze (or lack thereof) and the social. A closer reading of events in Omar’s life shows that Omar is confined to the side-lines of his own life-story, and his life-story is acted out through other characters.

Omar’s first view of the world outside can be read as a poignant metaphor, which addresses the dialectic between shame and shamelessness. When born, he is held upside down by his ankles by his mothers to fill his baby-lungs with air, he gazes out the window of the fortress and sees the Impossible Mountains. But he sees them topsy-turvy: the peaks of the mountains covered in clouds, but hanging on the ground. This first gaze of an upside-down world installs in Omar “an improbable vertigo, plagued by the sense of being a creature of the edge”(24). This poetic birth narrative suits the fairy-tale story beautifully, but serves a metaphorical purpose as well. A first confrontation with the world as upside-down impresses Omar with the sense that he does not truly walk the earth of his fellowmen, as he feels that the clouds in the sky should serve as his ground to walk on. Omar’s vertigo is a physical reaction that embodies this sense of a world inverted. He is doomed to never feel his feet standing on solid ground. How is this linked to the concept of shame and, in Omar’s case, shamelessness? The passage below might highlight one of the connections between shame,

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21 shamelessness and the social bond. An old friend of Omar (Omar is named Shakil in this passage) remembers him at age sixteen, passing out after a cloud literally descends from the sky:

‘Incredible, I swear,’ she reminisced, ‘we just reached there in the jeep and at once a cloud came down and sat on the ground, right along the frontier, like it couldn’t get across without a visa, and that Shakil was so scared he passed out, he got vertigo and fainted, even though both his feet had been on solid ground. (24)

If we return to the metaphor of Omar experiencing an inversion of the world - ”Hell above, paradise below” (16) - then we can assume that this cloud to Omar must represent solid ground, his

foundation in a way. The word “visa” also interestingly points to a notion of border control. Omar, shocked from confrontation with this (his) real world, passes out. It is as if that cloud pressures him to assume centre stage, instead of periphery for once, and it is too much to bear. In confrontation with (his) ‘worldly’ space, Omar suddenly becomes present, visible at once to himself. And it makes him faint.

The relation of shamelessness with peripherality that is conceptualised in the novel is not only based on Omar’s improbable vertigo, but gains contour through several events in Omar’s young life. Being imprisoned by his mothers, physically (he is only allowed to leave the fortress from the age of thirteen) as well as emotionally (prohibiting feelings of shame), Omar has been brought up without the gaze of the other. He wanders around the fortress in a false sense of freedom, while his mothers leave him be, and Omar is able only to look at the outside world through a telescope from his bedroom window. Thus, from an early age he has been taught to assume the gaze, but has not experienced the mutual recognition of which Sedgwick writes (36). I would argue that such an absence of recognition engulfs Omar with a perpetual otherness (and thus peripherality). Omar is not able to be at the receiving end of the gaze, and can therefore not assume a subject position in the social. The following passage asserts this structure of shamelessness, the gaze and otherness :

Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. […] Omar Khayyam’s peepers were opened wide by his voyeurism, which revealed to him both the infinitely rich and cryptic texture of human life and also the bitter-sweet delights of living through other human beings. (45)

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22 Omar’s voyeurism and his lacking a gaze could be well explored through the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who develops an insightful relation between shame and the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1956). To move to philosophy for a moment, let me relay the anecdote which Sartre assigns to the subject being reduced by shame6. He speaks of a man peeping through a keyhole, completely absorbed in what he sees beyond the hallway he is standing in. This man is “on a level of non-thetic self-consciousness”(259), by which Sartre means that this man is not acting as a self that knows he is acting in a certain way. Thus far, I recognize Omar as that man who can only gaze through the keyhole at life, while his peripherality does not permit him to become an actor in the panorama before him. The telescope that functioned as his way into reality, simultaneously keeps him from participating. Sartre continues: the man looking through the keyhole suddenly hears footsteps behind him in the hallway. He becomes aware of himself as a Peeping Tom, as an object in the world of the other, just as he was looking at the objects in his world. More importantly, the man senses a voyeur, which turns out finally to be himself (259, 260). Sartre then writes: “I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my possibilities” (263). The man, becoming aware of himself as a voyeur, is reduced to feelings of shame. Sartre calls this mode of becoming an object: “being-with-others” (263). This mode of “being-with-others” then is what I call the social7.

It seems Sartre casts this mode of becoming an object in a negative light, emphasising that the subject becomes external to himself, and exists then only outside for others. However, I do not agree fully with the negativity that is attached to being ashamed because of this object-status. In my reading of Omar’s fainting spell the cloud poses the gaze that makes Omar become aware of himself as an object. This produces an anxiety (he faints) which then has the potential to transform into shame. A shame that is much needed to blow open the door to the social to introduce Omar as a subject. Precisely because the cloud represents to Omar an image of solid ground, it throws him

6

This ‘keyhole’ anecdote through which Sartre conceptualises the working of shame will also partly inform the analyses of shame in chapter 3 and chapter 4.

7

As this thesis takes up the look of ‘the other’ in the context of Sartrean philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis I will henceforth write other with a capital O.

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23 back onto himself. He then stands on the borders of the social, as we read “at the frontier: clouds, fainting fit, water sprinkled on face, reawakening, whereamI”(50). Note the “reawakening” and “whereamI” in this passage: It is a question that Omar had not been able to ask himself previously to his fainting spell. The question relates the subject to the world and as such promotes the social bond. An encounter with the gaze shows that the world does not only ‘turn’ through the perspective of the I, which is indeed a painful revelation. But it is a revelation that forces the subject into that precarious space in which “being-with-others” becomes a necessity.

I purposefully write the word ‘necessity’ in relation to “being-with-others”, because of Sartre’s emphasis on the subject existing only outside for others (263,264). Gaining object-status, to Sartre, is a necessity insofar that it throws the subject into the social, and makes him/her aware of him/herself as the other. However, Sartre does not speak of any form of pleasure that comes with entering the social, and consequently with the shame that provides the required stepping stone. I would contest that becoming external to oneself necessarily means existing then only outside for others. In my opinion it rather means constituting a bridge between I the subject and I the object, which would in turn institute that painful pleasure a masochist consciously sets out to find8.

Jacques Lacan has taken up Sartre’s concept of the gaze and developed a theory that opens up a space in which I can see a certain productivity for shame9. In contrast to Sartre’s

conceptualisation, it is important to note that in Lacanian psychoanalysis the gaze need not be another subject that looks at you. It is rather an unexpected presence or, in Lacan’s words in The

Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981) the “gaze is everything present in the field of

vision except the actual look of the person looking”(166). It is an imagined gaze that the subject assigns to “the field of the Other”(166). If in this field of vision the look of the person looking is absent, it is no surprise that Omar, in encountering the cloud, faints at its presence. At that instance he thus loses his own telescopic and voyeuristic view on the world, leaving him without any comfort. It is hard to imagine any form of pleasure in such a moment. However Lacan’s gaze “is presented to

8

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24 us only in the form of a strange contingency […] it surprises (the viewer), disturbs him and reduces him to a feeling of shame” notes Henry Krips in “The Politics of the Gaze: Lacan, Foucault, Zizek” (2010, 3) . Thus, for Lacan too, the gaze is inextricably bound up with a feeling of shame which in turn installs a certain subjectivity. Krips asserts that for Lacan the gaze is only a gaze when it

“precipitates anxiety which, in turn, transforms the viewer’s look into a self-directed, passive “being looked at”’(3). The affectivity of shame is located in that passive “being looked at” (as the eyes turn upon the self). Furthermore, what is most important for this analysis is that the Lacanian gaze is a ‘thing’ (or object) that produces in the subject simultaneous anxiety and pleasure, because it is an object in the field of the “scopic drive”, which harbours the intensely human desire to see more (Lacan, 181-182).

To return to Omar: By growing up without that gaze that reflects back on the subject, which would give him the anxious feeling of being looked at and as such fill him with shame, he is also deprived of a pleasure that is about seeing more, and ultimately about ‘being alive’. Jacques-Alain Miller ventriloquizes Lacan’s reflections on shame in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of

Psychoanalysis (2006) stating that the disappearance of shame “changes the meaning of life,

because it changes the meaning of death”(18). Such a statement echoes through Omar’s remark on his own peripherality. In my opinion it does not change a meaning inherent in death itself (I am not sure there is such meaning in death), it changes the meaning that we assign to death, only by way of (and in contrast to) assigning meaning to our lives. The disappearance of shame would thus unsettle (or unravel) life’s meaning. It would mean living Omar’s life, who can only stand on its borders, watching it play out before his eyes.

Thus to compare Sartre and Lacan: Though they both take up the emergence of the gaze as a moment of becoming (solidification) through the subject’s awareness of his/her own alterity

(alienation)(263), Lacan invests this moment with a form of anxious pleasure to always see more (182), which I relate to ‘being alive’. This ultimately shows that ‘Sartre’s shame’ is inevitable, but ‘Lacan’s shame’, in addition to necessity is also favourable (because pleasurable). The latter of

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25 course informs an analysis that explores the productivity of shame. By making Omar fall in love with a girl with an overabundance of shame, the narrator perhaps attests to a Lacanian shame.

To be sure, if one feels that shame is always already productive, then the outcome of a close-reading of Sufiya Zinobia, a girl born in shame, would show her to flourish over Omar’s demise. Yet the working of shame, in its power to transform or to destruct, is as slippery as it is ambiguous. The shameful story of Sufiya is testimony to shame’s power to create and destroy simultaneously, a conflict that is represented through (and in) the character of Sufiya. During her mother’s pregnancy, Sufiya is imagined by her parents to be a boy, and when she is born and clearly does not live up to these expectations, she instantly becomes her mother’s shame and is received as “the wrong miracle”(90). The narrator informs us:

‘and at this point’- I am quoting from the family legend again- ‘when her parents had to admit the immutability of her gender, to submit, as faith demands, to God; at this very instant the extremely new and soporific being in Raza’s arms began – it’s true!- to blush’. (90)

I have italicized the verbs admit and submit in the passage because they relate to Sufiya’s incessant feeling of shame throughout her life. At that instant when her parents have to admit and submit to her existence as a subject, she starts to blush. This is that ungraspability of affect, in this case shame, that acts out on a bodily level, before it is even narrated in consciously. Sufiya’s body reacts before she assumes subject position. Without a conscious awareness of her own ‘wrong’ gender, she still blushes for the lack that is her gender (for her parents). It is as if this first blush attests to her body perceiving its own lack, its inadmissibility.

If I take up the concept of the gaze in Sufiya’s story, I have to admit that Sufiya through this blush then necessarily enters the social as a subject. I have argued that one needs the gaze in order to feel a shame that then pushes one into the social. The tragedy in Omar’s life was his prohibition to feeling shame, therefor barring him from the social. In a first comparison to Omar, Sufiya then has acquired subject position from day one. She is after all born in shame. The following passage confirms this observation:

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26 To speak plainly: Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever

her presence in the world was noticed by others. But she also, I believe, blushed for the world. (122)

Her presence is noticed in the world, it is a form of Sartre’s “being-with-others”(263). Only it makes her blush uncontrollably. In this case, shame proves to be very unproductive and not a force of transformation but rather of destruction. How is this overabundance of shame figured in relation to the social and Omar’s shamelessness? One needs the gaze in order to feel shame. At that first moment of blushing Sufiya is disturbed by a gaze that shames her: “[T]his strange contingency which surprises and disturbs,”(96) as Lacan writes about the gaze. I would argue in this regard that the gaze in Sufiya’s story conflates with the affective experience of her own lack. Sufiya’s lack becomes the gaze. This also coincides with Lacan’s alteration of Sartre’s concept of the gaze. For Lacan the gaze “pre-exists the subject,” (98) and is assigned to the “field of the other” (166), whereas it seems that for Sartre the subject is the point of reference and the gaze is on the side of the subject (“ I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act” (263)). To me the Lacanian gaze is more productive

because it decentralizes the subject (as neither its beginning nor end10), and as such navigates along the same strands as do the affects; pre-subjective, not yet interpreted, and highly influential to our becoming-a-subject.

As such, shame functions on an affective level, and the gaze that shames Sufiya is precisely this lack (her wrong gender), which then makes her blush indefinitely (this lack is insoluble). The affectivity of shame is played out on the face in the lowering of the head and the eyes averted. If we think this through, it is the act of a look turning back onto the self, in a way aiming to invert our view. Sufiya thus looks upon herself and as such is instituted in the social as lack. The way I take up the conceptualisation of Sufiya’s shame is deferred from the above passage, which states that “she blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence was noticed”(122), but with an important alteration: in my opinion she blushes whenever the presence of her absence is noticed. Shame exposes Sufiya’s presence, which is a lack. Thus it actually exposes her absence. She is instituted into the social

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27 oversaturated with shame, and her blush speaks back to the world: ‘you cannot notice me, because ‘I’ am not there, what you perceive is lack’. She is thus constantly confronted with what she is not, and it makes her blush forever. Paradoxically, it is the overabundance of shame in Sufiya that makes her not being able to assume subject position, whereas in Omar’s case it is the very absence of shame that similarly bars him from the social.

To undergird this reading of Sufiya’s shame it is important to note the narrator’s creation of the character of Sufiya, which he gradually explains in a ‘realistic’ sideway commentary to her narrative. The real and imaginary sources for the creation of his shameful heroine are two girls and one boy. The first “ghost inside Sufiya” (117) is a girl, murdered by her Pakistani father for having a boyfriend. The second girl is reported to have been beaten up by a group of white teenage boys and is imagined by the narrator to have fought back, asking himself what could have happened “if such a fury could have been released in that girl […] breaking arms, legs, noses, balls”(118). The third ghost that joins in the creation of Sufiya, and also ‘rises’ from a news clipping, is of a boy who

spontaneously combusted and had been found “blazing in a parking lot” (120). Sufiya’s life-story turns out to be a replica of these combined news clippings. The first girl is murdered for her father’s shame and Sufiya is born the wrong gender. The second girl is imagined to revenge her

perpetrators, and Sufiya transforms into a beast that roams around the country killing people (more on that later). Finally, it takes the boy (sadly) to put the girls together as Sufiya’s death is one of spontaneous combustion, right after she has killed her husband Omar.

What does it mean for Sufiya that she is constructed out of these three ghostly figures, who are reincarnated as shame in her tiny body? It seems as though Sufiya herself is oversaturated with shame through this ‘figures of reality’ that have created her character. Omar’s narrative of

shamelessness however roams freely in the world of the imaginary, whereas Sufiya’s shame is already boxed in through an evocation of a ‘reality of shame’. What is even more constraining is the fact that Sufiya contracts brain-fever at the age of four. From then on she is not able to speak, and becomes an “idiot” (167). Sufiya materialises in the novel through her ghosts and without a voice, in

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28 a way subscribing even more to her status as lacking in the social. Ben-Yishai justifiably writes that “Rushdie’s woman characters are certainly unemancipated” (212). She continues however that “the novel formulates a critique of the domination of woman not through the women represented, but through the representation of these women”(212). Though I concur, I locate the novel’s critique in a different place.

As I have cited before, Ben-Yishai writes that it is shameless behaviour that creates shame (202). She then continues to say about Sufiya that “she now exists only in his [the narrator -mk] imagination as his “private dancer,”’(208) accusing him of personifying Sufiya as a mere concept (paradoxically) and ridding her of any specificity (209). This is how Ben-Yishai figures that Sufiya “does not have a subject position in the dialectic”(209). Though I agree that Sufiya is not able to assume a subject position, Ben-Yishai leaves out the question of Omar’s shamelessness, of which I have argued that he is not able to assume subject position either. By taking Omar’s shamelessness (and his subject position) as a given in this dialectic, she actually (unwillingly) adheres to a

favouritism of shamelessness above shame.

The pitting of shamelessness against shame in the novel is pivotal, precisely because the representation of this dialectic ends up questioning the dialectic as such: Is it shameless behaviour that creates shame? this is interrogated through the representation of this dialectic. The narrative, in my reading, attends to the concept of shame through Sufiya by constructing her out of these different ‘shame’ news clippings. Therefore, it is not shameless behaviour that creates shame, because this would mean that Omar in a way is part of the conception of Sufiya as shame while he is not. The accumulation of shame, through the newsclippings, does personify Sufiya as a concept of shame, but I would argue that it is precisely this abstraction that is paramount. The narrator questions his own responsibility, when he asks “why did I do that to her?” (118), referring to Sufiya contracting brain-fever and turning in to an idiot. This is not a misogynist appropriation of Sufiya, but a ‘showing instead of telling’, namely: through the embodiment of the accumulation of shame (that is never her own shame) in Sufiya’s tiny body, she becomes an empty vessel oversaturated with the

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29 world’s shame (“she blushed for the world” (122)). What should have been asked in ‘the reality of the news clippings’ was exactly the narrator’s question, why did we to that to her (the girls)? why do we feel shame? Why do we turn shame ‘into an idiot’ (by killing its proposed object), before we question its foundation?. This is not to say that there is any ground for the ‘honour killings’ in the news clipping (because there is not any!), but I am questioning if such things are not partly able to happen because ‘man’ repudiates engaging with his own shame.

Finally, I need to turn to the moment in the novel where I locate a form of agency in the character of Sufiya. This moment undergirds my argument that Sufiya is less constrained then we might think, and, importantly, that Omar’s shamelessness is pivotal to the dialectic in the novel and its undoing. Sufiya and Omar are opposed to each other in many ways. Omar is described as “a fat monkey”(126) and very smart whereas Sufiya is of “slight build” (127) and of course turned into an idiot at the age of four. Omar has had insomnia from an early age, not able to sleep for more than two hours a night. And when he does sleep “the dream of falling of the world, still troubles him […] assailed by a terrible vertigo, as were he on top of a crumbling mountain”(126). This dream is a residue of Omar’s birth and his inability to stand on solid ground. Both his insomnia and his

dreaming refer to this shamelessness, his standing on the borders of the social. In comparison: The moments in the novel that Sufiya undertakes action are in fact when she is sleeping. At the age of twelve she defies everyone, and especially her parents, by sleepwalking into the backyard and killing 218 turkeys and hens:

They found her in the aftermath of the Loo, sitting fast asleep under the sun’s ferocity in the turkey-yard of the widow Aurangzeb, a little huddled figure snoring gently amidst the corpses of the birds. Sufiya Zinobia had torn off their heads and then reached down into their bodies to draw their guts up through their necks with her tiny and weaponless hands. (138)

The agency here, though a violent appropriation, manifests itself in sleeping. In this pre-waking state, Sufiya rises above her own confinement, whereas Omar is only imprisoned more by his vertigo in dreams. Affectivity occurs on a pre-subjective level, not yet invested with language, ideology or culture, but does influence us a subjects relating to the world. In a way, Sufiya gains access to a form

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30 of agency in a state of dreaming that is similar to the realm of the affects: a realm which delays interpretation. Though it is a very limited form of agency, and a violent one, Sufiya is granted something that Omar has not been able to gain: the ability to demolish her ‘own’ (but not truly her own) shame, to move beyond on an affective level. This is epitomised in the moment when Sufiya, after transforming into “a beast of shame” (197) and killing people all over the country, visits her husband Omar and murders him. Mazzarella places the affects in “a domain of intensity,

indeterminacy,” (“Affect: What is it good for?” 292) and it is in this domain, I argue, that Sufiya escapes signification as merely an conceptual abstraction but simultaneously gains, in the words of Sedgwick, “a middle range of agency”(Touching, Feeling 13). It is the surplus of her shame that proves dangerously violent but similarly powerful. Ben-Yishai writes:

Thus, while declaring his interrogation of the concept he is, in fact, questioning the causal connection between shame and the violence (domination) it generates. In this he is unsuccessful: the connection cannot be severed because it is inherent in the concept itself.(212)

However, she has stated previously that shameless behaviour creates shame, which I would revise into this: Shameless behaviour creates violence (and violence should create shame). I would also argue that the narrator in his questioning of the causal connection is not as unsuccessful as Ben-Yishai claims. The violence is generated through an overabundance of shame specifically pitted against shamelessness. In Ben-Yishai attempt to focus specifically on Sufiya, she sidesteps a pivotal part of the dialectic, namely Omar. As Sufiya “blushes for the world” she blushes for those who do not feel shame, where they should indeed feel shame. The fact that Sufiya ends up killing the one epitomised as shameless, is all the more telling. The violence is generated through shamelessness rather than shame. It is not that violence is inherent in the concept of shame, it is that this concept is juxtaposed with the notion of shamelessness, which is ultimately the connection to the violence in the novel. What seems to be the power structure is that we silence our shame through violence and shameless behaviour. However, Sufiya as Shame takes revenge, as she closes her hands around her husband’s neck:

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31 His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after the Beast

has faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady un her feet. […] the power of the Beast cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts.(286)

After the murder Sufiya combusts in a “shock-wave that demolishes the house”(286). She has exploded, the overabundance of the world’s shame displaced to her tiny body. Omar simply fades away, “a silent cloud, in the shape of a giant, grey and headless man” (286). His head is gone, as a final testament to his inability to relate to others and to look and be looked at.

What I have set out to show in this first chapter is an understanding of shame in its pivotal relation to the social. Shame is about looking and being looked at and it is thus necessarily linked to the other (even if that other is the self). Through shame one becomes present, even if we affectively avert our eyes. To become present, then, is to step into the social and to accept the mode of “being-with-others”. This mode entails sliding into object-status, which does not imply becoming external to oneself, thus losing a sense of self. It rather means being aware of the fact that you are not the centre of reference, which in turn provides the realisation that there is the Other to relate to. The slide into object-status through the gaze that shames is at once pleasurable and anxiety-ridden. I might note here that this perhaps accounts for the fact that shame feels always already bound up with a form of violence. What I have aimed to show though, through the analysis of Shame, that the violent aspects we assign to shame in lived reality are often misconstrued, because we choose not to engage with shame. Shame as an affect is not inherently violent, its excess often is. This is of course not to say that one should always feel shame; The overabundance of shame in Sufiya proves to be negating and violent. However, this does not warrant assuming a shameless position, because this position similarly bars one from the social, as in Omar’s case. More importantly, shame’s affectivity provides a time-delay, because it comes before interpretation (as opposed to emotion).

In this time-delay (in Sufiya’s case the state of dreaming) we could find a space for critically engaging with shame and as such search for Sedgwick’ s “middle ranges of agency”.

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32

Shame and Desire:

A fairytale of desirous shame in Hans Bellmer’s photograph Les Yeux

de la Poupée VII.

In this chapter I will analyse the deployment of shame in a photograph titled Les Yeux de la Poupée

VII (1939) made by German artist Hans Bellmer. Surrealist artist Bellmer is acclaimed (and

denunciated) for devoting his artistic practice (from 1930) to staging scenography’s of handmade life-size female dolls. The craftsmanship of these dolls, built with wood, fibre, plastic and glue, enabled Bellmer to assemble and reassemble the dolls at his will, and to position them in sinister and erotic poses in front of his camera. The wooden ball joints with which the dolls were

constructed, offered Bellmer a way of creating new anatomical possibilities, rearranging limbs in such ways that their mechanic nature was brought to the fore, while still maintaining deeply erotic and shockingly human qualities. This blend of machinic representation and erotic imagery make his scenography’s deeply disturbing, even by today’s standards.

Bellmer is often criticized for the misogyny and sadism that marks his oeuvre. Such critiques centre on the fetishisation of the feminine through the representation of machinic desires

interweaved with the grotesque in his artistic practice. Art historian Cher Krause Knight, for example, states in “Less than playful: Hans Bellmer’s Doll, Photographs as Archive and Artwork” (2011) that “[Bellmer’s] works were not talismans of sexual freedom and exploration, but totems for oppression and abuse”, and accuses him of “staging victimization scenario’s with a persistent aura of

voyeurism” (228)11. In contrast, others have praised Bellmer’s art for its brutally honest exploration of the human condition12. In the introduction to the expansive catalogue for the 2006 Bellmer exhibition Hans Bellmer(2006), editors Michael Semff and Anthony Spira applaud Bellmer for the way his art mounts the “disjunction between the beauty of the form and the difficulty of its content”(9). Interestingly enough, whether Bellmer is acclaimed for his liberating erotica or

11

See also Andre Brink in Desire and Avoidance in Art (2007) who deems Bellmer’s art “an unsuccessful attempt to amend his life”(71). 12

In contrast to Andre Brink, Hans Bellmer biographer Peter Webb praises Bellmer in Hans Bellmer (2006) because the disturbing content of his art “correspond to authentic inner impulses”(62).

Behind the Blush: a small study on the productivity of Shame

Contents

Thanks

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Conclusion