ABSTRACT
It comes as no surprise, I'm sure, that in a discussion of shame (the honte of my title) the question of skin and fabric may arise, all the more in the psychoanalytic context. From the pre-psychoanalytic writings of Freud to the early psychoanalytic texts, the topic of shame arises in relation to nudity, frequently alongside concepts of disgust and morality. It is also linked to unpleasure, being still or anchored in one's body, or, at other times, to movement. At least some of these — nudity, stillness, or movement — are frequently understood in visual terms in the Freudian as well as in twentieth-century phenomenological texts, whether relating to being caught in one's own gaze, looking on at oneself anchored in one's own body in a relation of splitting, or being acknowledged or ignored in one's nudity by another. Each of these possibilities in turn poses a question concerning what is meant by affect. Is shame an affect, and, if so, does that assume that people are indeed affected by objects? 1
