This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white fragility, and (...) white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness. (shrink)

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series Skam, which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The series portrays the many faces and ambiguities of shame and shaming embedded in Nordic youth culture. In bringing the question of the pedagogy of cinema and TV-series to the (...) forefront, I here read Skam on three analytical levels. First, to explore the TV-series capability to captivate the viewers through a doubling of the real. Second, to examine Badiou’s idea of cinema as an ontological art, revolving around the question of the relationship between being and appearing. Third, I read Skam analytically, to consider Badiou’s claim that cinema is a democratic emblem. In sum, what may be the series’ potential for shaping the viewers’ ethical–political awareness? (shrink)

Considering the Hegelian master–slave dichotomy over the exchange of the gaze, the paper focuses on the issue of vision and visibility, reinterpreted in Sartre’s phenomenological discussions in different ways. The Hegelian emphasis on recognition finds reflection in the treatment of vision as force expressed through visibility in Sartre and as an issue of self recognition in Lacan. Drawing the Hegelian tag with a comparative argument between Sartre and Lacan, the paper focuses on the different perspectives over the concept of gaze (...) or look. It argues that even sharing the same Hegelian legacy regarding the notion of gaze and recognition Sartre and Lacan differs to a considerable extent in their treatment of the impact of gaze. While emphasising more on the phenomenological-existential analysis of the issue of individual recognition Sartre presents gaze as a strong alienating force released from another powerful subject affecting the intersubjective power relation, Lacan, stands on a non-reciprocal relation between seeing and seen by making a difference between the eyes of the subject that looks at and the gaze which is on the side of the object without having any capacity to become a subject. The paper concentrates on these issues over a broader argument on Sartre’s concept of intersubjective gaze. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the wake of a political project spanning three decades that was committted to a rhetoric of gay pride, a few queer theorists turned to the affect of shame to rethink queer politics in the twenty-first century. This article entertains the possibility of a politics of shame but ultimately suggests that a politics of shame presents an interesting paradox: shame, in one of its most important senses, seems to dissipate when it is made public or when it is shared. (...) That is, the negative and isolating qualities that are constitutive of the affect of shame are negated when it is confessed. To confess one's shame is to destroy it. The impossibility of sharing shame renders it difficult to politicize. Drawing from Freud, Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Sartre, I posit a notion of shame that is constitutive of a kind of political subjectivity, though is not itself a programmatic politics. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore bodily changes following weight loss surgery. Our empirical material is based on individual interviews with 22 Norwegian women. To further analyze their experiences, we build primarily on the phenomenologist Drew Leder`s distinction between bodily dis-appearance and dys-appearance. Additionally, our analysis is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. Although these scholars have not directed their attention to obesity operations, they occupy a prime framework for shedding light on different dimensions of (...) bodily change. In doing so, we were able to identify two main themes: The felt “inner” body versus the visible “surface” body and the “old” body versus the “new” body. In different, though interconnected ways, these main themes encompass tensions between changes the women experienced as contributing to a more “normal” and active life, feeling more accepted, and changes that generated ambivalence. In particular, their skin became increasingly problematic because it did not “shrink” like the rest of the body. On the contrary, it became looser and looser. Moreover, badsmelling folds of skin that wobbled, sweated and chafed at the smallest movement, aprons of fat hanging in front of their stomachs, batwing arms, thick flabby thighs and sagging breasts were described as a huge contrast to the positive response they received to their changed body shape when they were out and about with their clothes on. At the same time, they expressed ambivalence with regards to removing the excess skin by means of plastic surgery. Through their own and other women`s experiences they learned removing the excess skin by means of surgery could be a double-edged sword. By illuminating the experiences of the ones undergoing such changes our article offers new insight in a scholarly debate predominated by medical research documenting the positive outcomes of weight loss surgery. (shrink)

Although previous treatments of affective injustice have identified some particular types of affective injustice, the general concept of affective injustice remains unclear. This article proposes a novel articulation of this general concept, according to which affective injustice is defined as a state in which individuals or groups are deprived of “affective goods” which are owed to them. On this basis, I sketch an approach to the philosophical investigation of affective injustice that begins by establishing which affective goods are fundamental, and (...) then considers which subsidiary goods—such as freedoms, resources, opportunities, and forms of recognition—may be necessary for the provision of those fundamental affective goods. Drawing from and developing ideas in the extant literature, I argue that two such fundamental affective goods include subjective well-being and emotional aptness. I then show that by analyzing deprivations of the subsidiary goods that enable a person to pursue and attain subjective well-being and emotional aptness, it is possible to shed new light on the cases of affective injustice that have been described in the extant literature, while also identifying other kinds of cases that have not been theorized to the same extent. (shrink)

Through positing that our capacity for physical vulnerability is at the core of original shame, Sartre’s account in Being and Nothingness reveals shame as an essential structure of human existence. Reading Sartre’s ontological account of ‘pure shame’ alongside recent writing about shame in early child development, particularly Martha Nussbaum’s account of ‘primitive shame,’ this article will explore the inherent links between shame, the body and vulnerability, ultimately positing that our human need for belonging is the fundamental driving force behind shame, (...) and what gives it its ontological status. In short, this article will argue that shame is not merely about a painful awareness of one’s flaws or transgressions with reference to norms and others, but about a deeper layer of relationality through our bodily vulnerability. (shrink)

This thesis starts by introducing the theme of sensuous connections between one and other. I discuss the desire for epistemic kinship and philosophical concerns with objectivity which echo those of the natural sciences. At first, the focus is the ways in which various philosophies have attempted to bridge the gap between one and other. Then, there is a move to concentrating in particular on Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics, a system of thought that helps conceive a description of reality that (...) is made out of the processes defined by their relation to other processes. I sketch out features of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy which serves as a description of philosophical method. I then outline a description of reality as an interrelated web of prehensions which start from physical, empirical base, moves to the imaginative realm of conceptual possibility and is narrowed down to the propositions which lead to creative novelty. The case is made that in its most generalised form, this process of concrescence is a basic aesthetic mode of being, shared by human and non-human occasions of experience. I argue that coming to see the world as being constructed out of highly social processes in which we – our species and ourselves as individuals – are integral participants, bridges the modern chasm between individual and whole. I take Nietzsche’s notion of passive nihilism to be a symptom of such a gap and attempt to solve this problem using the framework of aesthetic education as means to attune oneself with the co-constructive processes which connect them with the immanent and intrinsic value in the systems around them. Finally, I engage with wider cosmopolitical implications of adopting attunement to the vibrancy of such processes, even if they are felt not known, and show the relevance of such an endeavour to an ethical disposition that is based on aesthetic feeling and directed to social change. (shrink)

Is shame a moral emotion? After the Muhammad cartoons controversy, many Danes argued that freedom of speech should be limited by a sense of decency, that insulting Islam for the sake of insult was shameful. Ten years later, the Danish government’s anti-refugee policy led some to say they were ashamed of being Danish. Here shame is given moral significance as the guardian of decency. However, psychologists like Tangney and Dearing have claimed that shame is morally counter-productive: it makes us react (...) in antisocial ways, covering up our failings, shunning contact with others or lashing out in anger. Some have recently argued that the rise of right-wing populism in many Western nations is fueled by the psychological mechanism of transforming shame into rage. This seems a case of shame backfiring to cause antisocial behavior. In this paper, I seek to illuminate this dilemma by analyzing how self and others relate in shame. I defend that shame is an emotion of social self-consciousness, where one’s own self-assessment is fundamentally mediated by others. It may pull us in moral and immoral directions, but it is anyway part of the sensibilities that make us moral. My central examples, though, are cases of group-based shame. Is shame equally appropriate, and does it have the same significance, when it is group-based? I argue that the conditions of appropriateness change, but the structure of the emotion and its moral significance remains unchanged. (shrink)