ABSTRACT
The effects of shame quickly spiral into a malaise of constriction and paralysis. The catching at the throat, the hives on the skin, the downcast and averted gaze: since the difficulty is precisely that because these effects, and affects, are inimical to the subject’s creativity and autonomy, indeed often simply to thought, shame presents unique challenges in the domain of culture. The language of shame is notoriously blocked, recursive, and obsessive. To be released from it into a freer sociability involves a negotiation that may have to pass through abjection and rage. What does it mean, then, to enter this space as cultural practice? Can aesthetic and literary invention represent a condition of such severe diminution from the inside? Does the writing of shame inevitably follow its psychopathology, or are there ways of engaging with it that are both responsive to its social causes and aesthetically inventive? To explore these questions I follow J.M. Coetzee’s writing of shame in Life & Times of Michael K, but we might begin with Bernard Williams’s account in classical literature.
