Shame.and prisons: I've been thinking about this in terms fo an ethics of the emotions. It's a hard one. Consider the recent Abu Ghraib scandal. The Abu Ghraib photos made it clear how disturbing the psychological challenges of shame are.

Why did the soldiers in those photos flash the thumbs-up sign, and grin such simian grins, while they stood over the human pyramid of naked bodies that they had built? We all remember such scenes as the young American woman festively cocking her finger at the exposed genitals of the cowering prisoner, or the tableaux vivants of naked Iraqi men forced to kneel down and push their unseeing, hooded faces into other men’s penises, in a parody of fellatio. We also all know that Abu Ghraib raises troubling questions about domestic American prisons adn Guantamo Bay. There is disturbing evidence that similar sorts of brutal and degrading practices go on in ordinary American corrections facilities.

This complicates Agamben's argument that Auschwitz's open new ethical terrain marked by shame.