The Political Significance of Shame

Ann Murphy
University of New South Wales

The Denigration of Shame

1. In recent debates concerning the responsibilities that individuals and nations should
or should not assume, the issue of justice to the past looms large. In recent politics, we
witness an increasing reluctance on the part of individuals to acknowledge and
apologize for the horrors of history. Witness, for instance, the various debates
surrounding reparation and apology in the United States and Australia. The current
denigration of collective responsibility accomplished through an ahistorical
understanding of obligation and justice attests to a dangerous unwillingness on the
part of many to consider the ways in which past wrongs reverberate in the present. It is
argued that political responsibilities cannot be delineated by history, for this would
make them too expansive. It is this ahistorical rendering of responsibility that has
contributed to an ever diminishing sense of shame and responsibility in politics.
2. The insistence on the ahistorical nature of responsibility is particularly obvious
when one takes note of the denigration of shame and guilt in current politics. Shame is
of interest as a political phenomenon to the degree that it signals cognisance of
individual and collective responsibility. Knowing this, one should take note of the
dangerous dismissal of guilt and shame in contemporary politics by both the right and
the left. The rights attack on guilt has frequently been couched in terms of the
"bleeding heart liberal," whose attempts to be empathetic to others is condemned as a
delusional and wrong-headed approach to issues of cultural difference. In an attempt to
publicly undermine the efficacy of social policies such as welfare, the right has
persisted in labelling the advocates of such policies "bleeding hearts," whose rational
capacity for judgment has been clouded by their emotions. Allegedly, "bleeding
hearts" cannot be trusted to rationally deliberate issues of politics. This line of
argumentation is likely grounded in the belief that we inherit from Kant, and those
who work in his wake, that justice in its proper sense is to be rendered via the avenues
of reason, and not those of the heart. In this context, shame and guilt become
problematic insofar as they hamper political rationality.
3. It would be disingenuous, however, to assign blame wholly to the political right. To
be fair and admittedly with a few notable exceptions the discourse on shame has
arguably suffered equal abuse at the hands of the left. While there is no disputing the
claim that the right has frequently coopted the discourse on empathy in order to shirk
certain social responsibilities, it is also the case that the left has demonstrated a marked
reluctance to delve into the politics of collective guilt. Particularly amidst a theoretical
landscape inherited from Levinas and Derrida that privileges the stranger, the

foreigner, and the radically other, the worry surrounding guilt and shame is that there
is something in the experience of these emotions that is perhaps narcissistic, indulgent,
and even patronizing. In short, the fear of addressing shame and guilt is grounded in
the worry that these emotions in the end only recuperate certain privileges. Shame and
guilt are self-regarding emotions, and so one worries that they may detract from the
genuine consideration of others and that at heart they are egoistic. Add to this the
worry that guilt in and of its own right does not necessarily motivate concrete action,
and one sees why even those with progressive political agendas express reticence
regarding the issue of guilt, not simply in regard to the danger of appearing
patronizing, but likewise out of suspicion regarding its efficacy in motivating action.
4. What is worrisome, however, is the fact that the hesitations surrounding the issues
of guilt and shame may be read as symptomatic of the diminished sense of
responsibility that seems to reign in politics these days. Perhaps just as ominous is the
fact that the very same dispassionate thinking that is used to pathologize and vilify
shame is also being employed to undermine charitable social policy. This refusal to
acknowledge the importance of shame and guilt is tied to the indictment of charity
insofar as both are motivated by a refusal to assume responsibility for others, and most
especially for the privileges that one inherits historically. For the purposes of this
essay, I would like to explore what is behind the progressive erosion of social
responsibility, an erosion that motivates not only the devaluation of shame and guilt
but likewise the virtues of political generosity.
Responsibility and the Social Contract
5. Exactly what is motivating this flight from responsibility in politics? Rationalism or
liberalism run amok perhaps? One might suggest that it is the obsession with reason in
politics that has motivated the divisive treatment of emotion and affect, as they come
to be construed as some type of contaminant that perverts political rationality. For
those aiming to protect political rationality, shame and empathy alike represent the
threat of affect and emotion. One could likewise attribute the degradation of collective
responsibility to the prominence of political liberalism and its attendant focus on the
individual as the locus of power and right. For the purposes of this paper, however, I
would like to focus on the claim that it is the increasingly contractual nature of
obligation and responsibility that has eroded our sense of social responsibility.
6. To presuppose that ones responsibilities to another are to be derived from a social
contract however tacit ones consent to this contract may be is to presuppose that
these obligations are finite and calculable, and that consequently they are
responsibilities from which one might excuse oneself. Hence the litany of excuses that
have become all too familiar regarding ones responsibility for past injustices, excuses
that have come to mark various discourses on reconciliation, reparation, and apology.
("I wasnt even alive then, why should I be held accountable," etc.) Such excuses are
indebted firstly to a convenient amnesia regarding the way in which past injustices
reverberate in the present and consequently continue to bestow benefits on some and
injustice on others and second to an inability to recognize that the very being of the
oppressor/colonizer has grown and defined itself in reference to the subjugation of the
oppressed. It is to presume that complicity is to be debated and chosen, and that it is
not always already constitutive of the self. In order to deny ones complicity in the

oppression and suffering of others, one must somehow denigrate the ties that bind one
to others historically and materially. To conceive of responsibility as strictly
contractual is in many ways to do just that.
7. As Nancy Fraser has suggested, the result of the increasing hegemony of contractual
norms is that there appears to be less and less conceptual space for the forms of
noncontractual reciprocity and solidarity that constitute the moral basis of citizenship
(Fraser 1994: 61). As justice is rendered in reference to the calculus of contract and
legality, the space for charity and political generosity is being eroded. This erosion
seems to be accomplished as a double movement; firstly in the division of justice and
charity, a breach that seems to imply that the two are antithetical, and secondly in the
increasing erosion of charity by the calculus of justice. As charity is increasingly
construed as the "other" of justice, it is not unlike the experience of shame
construed as an phenomenon that surpasses and exceeds the obligations to others that
are dictated within the parameters of the law, or the discourse on rights. Thus justice
and charity are increasingly thought in opposition to each other, as though there is
something in charity that is excessive and superfluous, something that the scales of
justice do not and should not weigh. The dangerous implication of this way of thinking
is that justice is not nor should it strive to be charitable.
8. And this is to say nothing of the way in which charity itself is being subsumed
beneath the calculus of distributive (and retributive) justice. As the hegemony of the
contract helped create the illusion of charity as its other, "charity appeared as a pure,
unilateral gift, on which the recipient had no claim and for which the donor had no
obligation" (Fraser 1994: 67). When defined only against contractual relations, charity
does not simply become the other of more legalistic bonds of reciprocity, but even
becomes politicised, as the giver is typically the beneficiary of social commendation
while the recipient is only further stigmatised. Thus charity may readily morph into its
opposite, a means of subjugation. It is here that one sees the emergence of the now
familiar discourse on the gift that has been with us since Marcel Mauss, who argued
that receiving a gift may well result in ones social subordination so long as the gift is
situated within the horizon of a symbolic economy wherein the recipient of the gift
becomes materially or socially indebted. A number of the authors writing in this
tradition would agree; Charity has ceased to be ideologically or concretely a
relation of reciprocity. Presumably, this is why Derrida (1991) claims that the
condition for the possibility of the gift is forgetting, as to recognize the gift as such is
to annul it by situating it within the confines of a cultural economy.
9. If we take seriously the claims emerging from the discourse on generosity and giftgiving, when generosity is thought within the confines of contract, it may become an
occasion for the substantiation of debt. In a political time where the space for the
conception and establishment of charitable and empathetic political institutions is
being eroded by a politics that favours the language of economy and retribution, we
are in dire need of a different elaboration of the place of shame and complicity in
politics. As political generosity becomes warped and diminished by this political
calculus, shame comes to be figured as problematic as well, to the extent that it also
signals a responsibility that is not being accommodated in contemporary politics, a
responsibility that is vilified due to its alleged "excesses." Yet it is precisely this excess
that Emmanuel Levinas applauds it seems, concerned as he is to illuminate a

responsibility to others that he names "unconditional, undeclinable, and absolute"

(Levinas 1974: 124). While the Levinasian elaboration of responsibility may indeed
serve as a corrective to more contractual and legalistic understandings, it is not clear
that Levinasian responsibility is not ahistorical in its own right. However, the reticence
that Levinas displays concerning the historical location of responsibility and obligation
is testament to the infinite nature of responsibility, as Levinas understands it. Hence
the Levinasian account of responsibility is ahistorical by virtue of its infinite and
irrecusable nature, and surely not by virtue of any desire to deny responsibility for the
past.
Shame and Responsibility in Levinas
10. For all of the attention that has befallen the Levinasian elaboration of
responsibility, less attention has been granted to how responsibility is, for Levinas,
experienced as shame. "Shame" as is the case with almost every ethical term that
Levinas employs undergoes a certain metamorphosis in his work. Of particular
interest is the fact that Levinas seems concerned to distance shame from guilt over the
course of this writing. For instance, Levinas is careful to describe shame as "guiltless
responsibility." Presumably, for Levinas, guilt connotes a failure to do right in a
particular instance, an inadequacy felt in the face of determinate ethical norms. Shame
is meant to connote a responsibility much more thoroughgoing and inescapable, a
responsibility that Levinas renders as "infinite" and "irrecusable." This is presumably
why Levinas is careful to dissociate shame from guilt, as guilt would imply the
finitude of responsibility, or a specific breach of a contract.
11. Indeed, Levinas goes to great lengths to sever shame from more contractual or
legalistic understandings of responsibility. In part, Levinass reticence in the face of
the traditional construal of shame may well be derived from the observation that in the
face of a contractual or legalistic understanding of responsibility, the overwhelming
response to the accusation of complicity would be attempts at exoneration and
disavowal, the offering of excuses. It is precisely this tendency that Levinas warns
against, and it is for this reason that he identifies his philosophical project as the
overcoming of good conscience (Levinas 1961: 304).
12. One of the notable characteristics of Levinass earliest discussion of shame is that
it does not occur in reference to the ethical relation. In the very early essay "On
Escape" shame is figured as a mode of the subjects relation to the world, and notably
not in reference to others. Indeed, Levinas explicitly notes that shame should not be
reserved only for phenomena of the moral order. (Levinas 1932: 63) As Levinas resists
locating shame in reference to morality, he claims that shame is first and foremost a
phenomena resulting from our inability to escape ourselves. "Shame is founded in the
solidarity of our being;" it is what demands that we take responsibility for ourselves. It
is rendered, here, as a function of the selfs very being, and not as a response to some
determinate act. What appears in shame is the fact of being "riveted to oneself," "the
unalterably binding presence of the I to itself" (Levinas 1932: 64). "Shame is, in the
last analysis, an existence that seeks excuses," but it is equally an existence that is
unable to escape itself (ibid.: 65). Hence shame is at once the necessity of the impulse
to flee the recognition of ones responsibilities and the very impossibility of this flight.
This notion of shame as an inescapable binding to the self is revived in Levinass later

work, Otherwise than Being.

13. Whereas shame was once rendered as a riveting to the self, it is now described as
identitys "gnawing away at itself" in remorse (Levinas 1974: 114). What earlier
appeared as the cementing of identity, however, is described in the later work as an
"exasperated contracting" of the self, a persecution "which the limits of identity cannot
retain" (ibid). Hence while this accusation, persecution, and remorse that I feel in the
face of the Other may indeed be a function of the impossibility of my fleeing myself, it
is likewise, a "riveting" to the self that motivates the dissolution of identity and not its
reification. Shame, writes Levinas, "is on the hither side of the limits of identity"
(ibid). "It is to hold onto oneself while gnawing away at oneself" (ibid). In "On
Escape," shame arose in the binding of the self to itself, and in the inability to fail to
take responsibility for others. What emerged was the sedimentation of the self in
shame. What is noteworthy, then, about the later discussion of shame is that it now
disturbs the boundaries of the self and troubles the limits of identity. Shame is in this
sense destructive of a notion of responsibility that is finite and historically contiguous;
indeed, shame corrodes the very coherence of the subject.
14. It is difficult to understand Levinass conception of shame without making
recourse to his thought on freedom. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas critiques the
European philosophical tradition for its failure to recognize that shame is above all
founded in an experience of unworthiness, and not in the experience of an
inadequation or failure to live up to this or that moral stricture (Levinas 1961: 83). To
prioritise a conception of shame that invests itself in the knowledge of success or
failure in regard to certain norms is to once again subordinate the ethical to the
theoretical as shame remains, here, a function of knowing. It hence prioritises the
experience of the theoretical over the ethical, and the dimension of interiority over
exteriority and the exposure to alterity.
15. Freedom is not a spontaneous faculty that stands to be limited by the moral law.
The exact inverse is true for Levinas; shame and responsibility found freedom. It is for
this reason that Levinas critiques the traditional understanding of guilt. The guilt
complex presupposes an initial freedom that is responsible for others after the
performance of a certain act, but for Levinas, there is no original or spontaneous
freedom that pre-exists the assumption of responsibility for others. Rather, "the
freedom that can be ashamed of itself founds truth" (ibid.: 84). My shame before the
other founds my freedom. The Other is not presented as an obstacle, a hindrance, an
imposition, rather, "he is desired in my shame" (ibid). Levinas claims that "shame does
not have the structure of consciousness and clarity. It is oriented in the inverse
direction; its subject is exterior to me" (ibid).
16.In the later discussion of finite freedom in Otherwise than Being, Levinas speaks of
a responsibility "over and beyond" ones freedom. Refusing to reduce the self to "the
auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event, compassionate for
another," Levinas persists in arguing for a sense of responsibility that precedes the
deliberation between good and evil. Indeed, it is in the context of this indeclinable
responsibility to others that the world is rendered intelligible in these terms (Levinas
1974: 123). To be sure, there is no way in which the presumption of an original
responsibility detracts from the dignity of freedom, for Levinas. Responsibility does

not limit but founds my freedom (ibid: 124).

Responsibility beyond History
17. What emerges from the discussion of shame in Levinas is the ahistoricism of his
account of responsibility. Given that history is understood to be synonymous with
totality and war, it is clear why Levinas would go to such pains to distance himself
from a historically binding understanding of shame. Levinass refusal to locate shame
in history places him in stark contrast to those who would dismiss demands for
reparation on the basis of historical arguments, however. The ahistoricism of his
account of responsibility is not intended to undermine historically grounded arguments
for reparation or reconciliation but rather to illumine the more expansive nature of our
responsibilities for others and their differences from us.
18. Historys soil is too finite a ground upon which to situate the limitless
responsibilities one has for and to others. Inasmuch as recent politics testify to the
uncharitable and restrictive ways in which many chose to take on the issue of justice to
the past, Levinas argues for a sense of responsibility that escapes history not to evade
it, but because such arguments are for him symptomatic of the contractual and
legalistic understanding of shame and responsibility that he critiques. In direct
contradistinction to those who would indict charity and shame alike, on the grounds
that these responses somehow pervert political rationality, Levinas argues for the
priority of care over contemplation. If complicity in the suffering of others is not to be
debated or chosen, if it is rather constitutive of the very notion of a self, then Levinas
is compelled to put forward a notion of responsibility that is ahistorical by virtue of its
expansive and infinite nature, and not by virtue of any desire to deny responsibility for
historys horrors.
19. Shame, for Levinas, is derived from an absolute passivity that forbids a coherent
notion of self to emerge from the continuity of ones past. To locate shame in reference
to a certain historical moment would seemingly forego the type of responsibility that
Levinas wishes to illuminate. It would confine this responsibility to the interests of law
courts and tribunals and hence refuse its irrecusable nature. Regarding, more
specifically, the issue of shame and history, Levinas could be no more explicit. The
responsibility that fills me with remorse is found in the "prehistory" of the ego.
Elsewhere, Levinas describes responsibility as an "immemorial susceptiveness" to the
call of the other (Levinas 1964: 122). It does not concern the concrete past, for
"persecution is the disqualification of apology" (ibid.: 121).
20. Levinas is not only reticent to situate responsibility in reference to history because
such a move would render responsibility finite. His reluctance is also grounded in the
belief that to situate an individual with reference to history is in some way to
compromise the alterity of the Other. It is none other than this worry that motivates his
critique of the phenomenological tradition.
21. Levinas embraces Merleau-Pontys account of intersubjectivity as affectivity, and
radicalises it such that responsibility for others comes to be the condition for the
possibility of sensibility. "This describes the suffering and vulnerability of the sensible
as the other in me" (Levinas, 1964: 124-125). Shame before another becomes much

more than an indictment of self, it becomes a symptom of sensibility. Compassion and

responsibility appear as the condition for the possibility of sense at all. This resituating
of humanity in a capacity for sensibility, and not in the human capacity for reason,
marks an important and radical symmetry between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas.
Despite this congruence, however, Levinas distances himself from the
phenomenologists when it comes to the way in which history is understood to inform
meaning.
22. Indeed, the Levinasian descriptions of shame and freedom are consistent with his
thinking on the relationship between history and meaning (sens). "Meaning" in the
French phenomenological tradition carries the connotation of a certain directedness of
thought, a prereflective content that endows thought and history alike with an intention
derived from an originary subjective project. Levinas takes the phenomenological
tradition to task for its historicism, an historicism that manifests as an affront to
alterity and that is hence ethically problematic. Against the historically laden account
of meaning that emerges in the phenomenological tradition, Levinas describes an
absolute responsibility that transcends history. The indictment of phenomenology,
here, concerns the focus on the totality, continuity, and unity of history as it is grasped
by consciousness, a unity and totality that refuses the alterity of others.
23. For Levinas, the integrity of ethics is bound to exteriority the transcendence of
the Other a face of humanity that overflows any idea, concept, or representation.
(Levinas, 1961: 53) Indeed, the experiences of conscience, of the self accused, and of
shame, are not commensurate with any conceptual experience; it is a "conceptless
experience" as it is irreducible to representation or disclosure within the political
arena. Levinas would distance himself from the language of intention and experience
that pervades the phenomenological tradition. The ethical relation in Levinas is
consistently figured as a relation that disrupts totality, and the seamless continuity of a
world that is given over to a constituting consciousness. For Levinas, the power of
ethics is contingent precisely upon the transcendence of the Other, or more precisely
the Others transcendence of history, his or her irreducibility to soil of the collective
past. Levinas leaves no doubt of this when in the preface to Totality and Infinity he
equates history with war, totality, and politics, and laments the sacrifice of the future to
the "already plastic forms of the epic" (Levinas 1961: 22). The responsibility to the
Other before whom I feel shame exists prior to any contract that would isolate or
prescribe a moment of reciprocity.
24. To understand shame and the attendant conception of responsibility as constitutive
of the self is to indict thinking that would progressively retreat from the legitimacy and
necessity of social and political generosity through appeal to the finite nature of ones
obligations to others. As is always the case with Levinas, however, his theory is not
readily imported into debates about reconciliation and reparation, collective guilt and
responsibility, without complication. Because the locus of shame resists location in
history, the discussions of guilt and exoneration with which we are familiar would be,
for him, situated firmly in the realm of the political. Hence despite the intimate ties
that bind ethics to justice, the unassumable nature of shame and responsibility
problematize their location in history. Levinas complicates the historical nature of
responsibility, however, not in order to deny complicity for past wrongs, but in order
to call attention to a notion of responsibility that is more expansive. The problem is not

that we cannot be responsible for history, but rather that we cannot be responsible
enough.

Ann Murphy is currently a New South Global Postdoctoral Fellow in the School
of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She received her PhD from
the University of Memphis, where she wrote her dissertation on the relationship
between ethics and politics in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault. Her
background is largely in Phenomenology, Social and Political Philosophy and
Feminist Theory. Her current research focuses on the relationship between
symbolic and material violence in relation to race and gender. Email:
a.murphy@unsw.edu.au
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