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April 29, 2006
We can now turn back to the way that Giorgio Agamben introduces shame Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive as desubjectivised experience. This account takes as its starting point Levinas' conception of shame in On Escape. Agamben says:
According to Levinas, shame does not derive, as the moral philosophers maintain, from the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance. On the contrary, shame is grounded in our being's incapacity to move away and break from itself...in shame we are consigned to something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves. (pp.104-105)
Agamben builds on this analysis of shame. He says that:
To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates in our own intimacy; it is what is most intimate in us (for example, our own physiological life). Here the "I" is overcome by its own passivity, its own most sensibility; exappropriation and desubjectification is also an extreme and irreducible presence of the "I" to itself. It is as if our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own. (pp.105-106)
Agamben then says that in shame has no content other than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as subject.
Thus shame as a double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is Agamben's building block.
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