ABSTRACT
Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, says that to “be ashamed of one’s immorality – that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.”1 This sounds strange. How could one become ashamed of one’s morality without stepping outside the very practice that renders shame possible? Nietzsche is suggesting that the morality of good and evil itself forgets or covers over injustices in the process of protecting its experience of a smooth moral economy. It suppresses the surpluses, uncertainties, and paradoxes in its own economy of judgment. Nietzsche wants to make us ashamed of the established logic of moral equivalences so that we might become amenable to a more subtle and ambiguous ethical sensibility. He seeks to anchor this shame of morality in a source on the edge of the moral tradition as we receive it.
