For Shame

The World Socialist website includes today a report on a North Carolina man, Harry Taylor, who confronted Bush during one of his recent events. Taylor

expressed the hope that the president had the “the humility and the grace” to be ashamed of himself “inside” himself.

Joan Copjec's discussion of shame in the new collection, Lacan: The Silent Partners provides an valuable counterpoint to Taylor's remarks.

I.    Here is part of the article from the WSWS:

Finally, Harry Taylor, seated in the balcony, was called on. He spoke slowly and soberly. “You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that,” he told Bush. “But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, you’d like to restrict my opportunity to make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf. You are—”

Bush interrupted him, facetiously, “I’m not your favorite guy. Go ahead. Go on, what’s your question?”

Taylor continued, “Okay, I don’t have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that I—in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate, and—”

Some in the audience booed. Bush intervened, benevolently, “No, wait a sec—let him speak.”

Taylor went on, in the same deliberate fashion, “And I would hope—I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.”

Taylor voices his own shame and in confronting Bush with this hopes to incite a sense of shame in the President. The President refuses--or is pathologically unable to feel any shame at all.

II.    Copjec's chapter on shame, anxiety, and affect, "May '68, The Emotional Month,' begins by recounting Lacan's plea that his students display some shame. She writes:

The final aim of psychoanalysis, it turns out, is the production of shame.

In fact, the analyst should herself provoke shame, be an agent of it. Thus, Copjec traces the topic of shame in Lacan's writing and finds that

shame marks not the social link as such, but that particular link which analysis is intent on forging.

Indeed,

For Lacan, shame is the subject's ethical relation towards being, his own and the other's.

Avoiding shame is precipitated by superego, that is, by a transformation of anxiety into guilt and the accompanying provision of a sham jouissance (with this I've far too briefly encapsulated a more intricate argument--it involves in part the unbearableness of anxiety, an interesting discussion of the university discourse, and a critique of Levinas  that is beyond the discussion I want to introduce here). At any rate, Copjec writes:

What anxiety exposes as ungraspable or unclaimable jouissance is that which the guilty shamelessly grasp for in the obsequious respect they pay to a past sacralized as their future. The feverish pursuit of this future ... is the poor substitute...the guilty acceptance in the place of the real sweetness of jouissance.

She concludes that Lacan's call to shame should thus be understood in terms of a call to relinquish our attachment to a sham jouissance.

Shame is not a failed flight from being, but a flight into being, where being--the being of surfaces, of social existence--is viewed as that which protects us from the ravages of anxiety ... Unlike the flight or transformation of guilt, however, shame does not sacrifice jouissance's opacity, which is finally what 'keeps it real' ... But instead of inhibiting us, this opacity now gives us that distance from ourselves and our world that allows us creatively to alter both; it gives us, in other words, a privacy, an interiority unbreachable even by ourselves.

III.    Harry Taylor attempts to induce in Bush a sense of shame. This attempt is an attempt to establish a different kind of social link, one that is more ethical, more in keeping with Bush's rhetoric regarding freedom. It is remarkable that Taylor confronts his own shame, taking responsibility for his position as a citizen within a country whose electoral procedures led to Bush. He doesn't simply blame the President. Nor does he engage him with a question. That is, he doesn't carry on the pretense of some kind of democratic deliberation--having already articulated the very factual reasons that democracy is clearly the wrong word for the politics that goes on in the US today. Instead, Taylor rejects the faulty jouissance offered by the President--and eagerly lapped up by the crowd and the msm as is described in the WSWS article--indicating the possibility of something more than what we have, something that was promised, something gestured to rhetorically, but missing nonetheless.

The crudeness, the obscene, stupid cruelty of Bush's remarks are indications of his shamelessness. He has no interiority to speak of, to speak from, or to fasten a speaking that would not grasp for the horrifying future we see unfolding before us. We should take seriously the words spoken to Senator Joe McCarthy: "have you no shame sir, have you no shame?"

But, what do we do when the answer is, "No--I have none"?