ABSTRACT
Sartre’s intertwined concepts of shame, being-for-others, and the Look have of course been much discussed in the Sartre literature. The majority of such discussions focus on his most thoroughly developed example, that of the voyeur (B&N: 282ff.). Sartre’s initial examples – the ‘awkward’ or ‘vulgar’ gesture and ‘ugliness’ (B&N: 225-6) – receive rather less direct attention.1 My aim here is to rectify that omission, and to explore the consequences for our understanding of shame, being-for-others and the Look. I begin by showing how Sartre’s description of awkwardness or ungrace-
fulness provides phenomenological depth to the observations of those whose job it is to work with very clumsy individuals and how his account can be extended, with the help of some tantalizing hints from both himself and Bergson, to provide a parallel phenomenological description of ugliness. In the second section, I argue that shame is indeed a central feature of the experience of clumsy and ugly people, thus to an extent upholding Sartre’s conception of shame not as an awareness of wrongdoing but simply ‘the original feeling of having my being outside’. In the third, I argue that such aesthetic qualities as clumsiness and ugliness allow us to make good sense of Sartre’s claim that ‘the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me’ while also indicating a way – one that has some considerable support in Sartre’s writings – of understanding qualities that are not in any obvious sense aesthetic as likewise indispensably ontologically mediated by the Other. Finally, in the fourth section, I return to Sartre’s description of grace and explore its relationship to shame and the Look via a group of notions of ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’, tentatively drawing some conclusions about the Look that may be surprising.
