Shame and guilt are improperly used to define kinds of cultures; for what they define, rather, is a subject’s relation to her culture. I use culture here to refer to a form of life that we inherit at birth, to all those things - such as family, race, ethnicity, and national identity - we do not choose, but which choose us. Call them gifts of our ancestors. The manner in which we assume this inheritance, and the way we understand what it means to keep faith with it, are, I argue, what determine shame or guilt.
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To experience shame is to experience oneself not as a despised or degraded object, but to experience oneself as a subject. I am not ashamed of myself, I am the shame I feel: shame is there in the place of an object. Giorgio Agamben puts this clearly when he designates shame as the “proper emotive tonality of subjectivity” (Remnants of Auschwitz 110), as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject” (107). The entire thrust of Sedgwick’s argument, in fact, goes in this direction; shame, she says, is the sentiment that “attaches to and sharpens the sense of who one is” (37). The searing pain associated with shame is not one of being turned by another into an object, of being degraded; it has to do with the fact that one is not “integrated” with oneself (44), one is fundamentally split from oneself. (But isn’t this the very definition of a subject?)
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The unbearable question of who we are was no sooner raised by modernity than resolved by capitalism as a matter no longer of being, but of possessing an identity. Like all possessions, identity turned out to be susceptible to measurement. One could have more or less of it, better or worse forms of it, but one cannot fully acquire it. Around this insufficiency a traffic in identity grows up and the value of modesty recedes drastically.
-Joan Copjec, "The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema"
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