Textual Practice 15(2), 2001, 211–230

Steve Connor
The shame of being a man

‘It makes women feel like to cry and die,’ said Chhunni-ma, ‘but men,
it makes them go wild.’
‘Except sometimes,’ his middle mother muttered with prophetic spite,
‘it happens the other way round.’ 1

T h e shame of being a m a n - is there any better reason to write?’ wonders

Gilles Deleuze, and so do I. Here, ‘a man’ names a principle, a force, perhaps
even force itself for Deleuze. It names blockage, formalization, d o m i n i o n ,
m a n ‘insofar as m a n presents himself as a dominant f o r m of expression that
claims to impose itself on all matter’. ‘ W o m a n ’ , on the other hand, and
impeccably as usual, means the opposite, for ‘woman, animal, or molecule
always has a component of flight that escapes its o w n formalization’. Perhaps
w h a t this slogan means, therefore, is that to w r i t e is to be u n m a n n e d ,
meritoriously to u n m a n oneself, by taking flight i n t o the c o n d i t i o n that
Deleuze calls ‘becoming-woman’, though he is careful to specify that being
a w o m a n in the first place w o u l d not mean you had w o n the race away f r o m
domination, but w o u l d simply give you a head start, since ‘even w h e n it is
a w o m a n w h o is becoming, she has to become-woman, and this becoming
has n o t h i n g to do w i t h a state she could claim as her own’. 2
Here, I w i l l try saying that to write is not to free oneself f r o m the shame
of being a m a n , or not, at least, but for sure, if you are this one. W r i t i n g
m i g h t also be a way of meeting w i t h shame, a coming i n t o male shame-
fulness. I have surprised myself by wanting to be able to conclude that male
shame, or my k i n d , is less to be regretted than one m i g h t at first t h i n k .
I w i l l say this. First, that m e n are coming i n t o shame; men have often
before been ashamed of particular ways of falling short of being a m a n ,
but now some men are encountering the shamefulness of being a m a n as
such and at all. To be honest, being a m a n has always been a bit of a gamble,
and has always involved jeopardy, the risk of falling short of being a m a n .
Now, however, there is a swelling certainty that to be a man is in and of itself

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236011004406 9
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to fall short. Second, I will briefly review some of the thinking about
shame, especially in its relations to guilt, that has been done in philosophy,
psychology, anthropology and sociology over the last century. I will suggest
that, where shame tends nowadays to be seen as a moral emotion, and to
be discussed as an ethical problem, its reach is larger than this. I will argue
that shame is not only to be thought of as a moral prop or provocation,
but a condition of being, a life-form even, and I will offer a brief, wild
phenomenology of it. Third, I will suggest that male masochism is not
so much the expression of shame as an attempt to exorcise it, by turning
shame into guilt and thereby taking its measure and making it expiable.
Fourth, I will consider the power of shame, suggesting that it has possibilities
beyond those traditionally claimed for it. Doubtless one can die of shame,
as Salman Rushdie has said; but, stranger than this, it seems one can live of
it too.

1 Being a man

Let it at once and w i t h o u t fail be k n o w n . I am ashamed of being a m a n .

Whether I have grown ashamed of being a m a n , or merely grown aware of
always having been so, I do not yet know. W h y be ashamed of being a man?
To ask the question is to answer it. To be a m a n is more and more to be -
to be able to be, for I w a r n you it is a power as well as a predicament - a
disgrace, to be disgrace itself. M e n are spent up: masculinity is a category of
r u i n , a crashed category. It’s a bust.
One of the things this statement is meant to intimate is that it is out
of the question to be ashamed and in the same breath to say that you are.
T h e m o m e n t that you can say you are ashamed, you break free of shame’s
suffocating clasp and start puffing on the pungent insufflation of imposture,
even t h o u g h y o u are n o w exposed to the new b u t only m i n o r shame of
having distorted your shame i n t o intelligibility You have in fact taken on
one of the many ‘masks of shame’ so finely described by Léon Wurmser. 3
Properly, innocently shamed people have no words at their disposal, no
words w i t h w h i c h to clear their m u d d y names. Shame is exorbitant, there
is far too m u c h to tell of shame, w h i c h is w h y it holds its tongue. To speak
of shame is to prolong or exacerbate it. I am ashamed of being a m a n ; I am
ashamed to speak of this shame, and ashamed of the need I feel to do so,
w h i c h I accordingly pretend is a gratuitous and shameful pretence, a need
for w h i c h there is really no need. Speaking of it, speaking of any shame,
f r o m w i t h i n it, is obscurely nauseating; it is infection, i n f l i c t i o n , insult,
insolence. Shame is never so shameful as w h e n it owns itself. This is w h y we
are determined that people should face up to their guilt, but p u t strict limits
on the speaking and display of shame. People are to be shamed, but their

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shame is not to be countenanced; allowing oneself to be shamed is in itself

shameful. Shame is a dose to be gulped, not a state to be affirmed.
Still, I am though. I am ashamed of being a m a n . A statement such as
this m i g h t seem to s u m m o n a roster of reasons and remedies. W h a t is there
to be ashamed of in being a m a n , my son? W e l l , though my shame has no
definite causes (I am going to say a little later that no shame does), it does
have attributes and occasions. These follow. I am ashamed, for example, of
the advantage of having been a m a n , and of its arrogant privilege and
prospects. I am ashamed of the will-to-manhood involved in being a m a n .
I am ashamed of the stupidity and selfishness and certitude and pettiness of
being a man. I am ashamed of men’s loud, barging voices and of the sound
of my o w n , of w h i c h I hear a lot. I am ashamed of the things men carry on
agreeing to want and ashamed as well of what men have done, and what I
believe being a m a n continues to entail doing, to w o m e n and to other men,
not just accidentally but systematically, as part of the long, and now almost
comprehensively rumbled, plot of patriarchy. I am ashamed of all that is
male in my sexuality, w h i c h is all there is of it, that pittance, all the way
d o w n , not far, to the b o t t o m , and sorry for bringing it up. I am ashamed
most of all of the violence that is inseparable f r o m being a m a n . We boys
and m e n grow up in an atmosphere and expectation of violence. Violence
against w o m e n is a visible horror and a scandal because, despite everything,
we still k n o w it to be an exception. Yet the assault of boys and m e n is the
default condition, ignored or even encouraged on every front, because it is
almost entirely undertaken by other boys and men. If this makes the whole
t h i n g look weirdly consensual, it is because it is. To continue to recognize
myself as the sort of being w h o has accepted these conditions of violence
and agreed to identify w i t h the givers of it, is to o w n up that it is too late to
dissolve the essential l i n k between my being a man and this particular k i n d
of moral sleep. I did not get where I am today w i t h o u t being a man. O n l y
shame w i l l do for that, for me.

A n d so on. B u t you can tell I am not really ashamed of such things, or

I w o u l d not be bragging about t h e m . I am here t r y i n g to f i n d a way of
getting underneath the layers of this k i n d of specifiable shame - w h i c h you
w i l l soon find I w i l l want to class as precautionary guilt. N o , unfortunately
my shame does not come f r o m the shivering apprehension that it is all my
fault, and I am scornful of men (lots of them, like me) w h o load up w i t h
this k i n d of tumescent culpability. I want to t h i n k I mostly have not done
the worst of the things w o m e n and men have had done to them by other
men, though it w o u l d almost be a relief if I had. In any case, to be ashamed
of a wrong, or one’s part in it, in the way in w h i c h one m i g h t be abstractly
ashamed of one’s part in the history of slavery, or the potato famine, or the
Holocaust, is not really to be ashamed, in the sense I want to t r y to reserve
for i t ; it is already to have entered i n t o measure and apportioning and

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expiation and reversibility. Sadism, Laura Mulvey once wrote, demands

a story. Masochism craves the demand for story, and guilt supplies both with
the script they need. But there’s no story with shame. Guilt gives us the
whodunnit, the youdunnit – Oedipus Rex, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Shame gives us The Trial.
Though masculinity is my shame, I do not resent it. In my years of
hormonal ebb, I now think of ‘my’ masculinity only as a kind of battered
kettle at the heel. But we all find it hard to take masculinity as seriously
as we suppose. Perhaps you have noticed that there is now no word for
the condition of being a man that does not have tucked into it a snicker
at its bumptious presumption – ‘masculinity’, ‘manhood’, ‘virility’? Even the
seemingly bleached out zero-degree word ‘maleness’ has a daft little swagger
in it that ‘femaleness’ does not. I cannot yet take masculinity studies as
seriously as I promise I will in the end, for when I hear the word ‘masculinity’
I can call to mind only clownish and poignant prostheses: shaving brushes
and cuff-links and collars and tie-pins and jock-straps and string vests
and trouser presses and belts and braces and, for the love of God, sock
suspenders, along with all the other funny junk of the whole hopeless penny-
for-the-guy put-up job of being a man. I cannot call any of this mortuary
stuff to mind without imagining it coming back from the hospital in a
suitcase. Let me hasten to say that I hope nevertheless to restrain the
comfortable envy of becoming-woman of which Deleuze writes. I envy
women only the fact of their not being men, in the way I envy stones or
sheep, and hope to continue to have no desire to be a woman, as though
that could be any good, and indeed would regard such a desire, in me at
least, as a compound disgrace, the crassest, most puerile expression of male
ressentiment. ‘I have been a man long enough, I shall not put up with it any
more’, I read in the words of the done-for Moran at the expiry of Beckett’s
novel Molloy.4 It has been a long time and one does grow tired of being a
man, though perhaps not yet quite enough, in spite of everything. And
maybe, all the time, the condition of being a man, the imperative Dasein,
the being-stuck-with-being-a-man of being a man, is growing in its turn
weary of us, and starting to look elsewhere for a living. Let us hope so;
without much conviction there may yet be leave for such as us to hope so.
But if all else fails, as it assuredly will, there will always be the exquisite
chance of keeping my head down amidst the flood of contemporary
explication on the subject of man. For masculinity to be the subject of so
much discussion (I am reminded of Virginia Woolf marvelling, at the
beginning of A Room of One’s Own, at the pages and pages of male-authored
books on ‘Woman’ in the British Library catalogue), for it to have this
engrossingly public existence, for ‘masculinity’ to have become the name of
being a man, is doubtless gratifying for attention-seeking men and, I would
have thought, renewedly irritating for women already fed up with having

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to minister to said men’s need for attention. B u t being outed as a hetero-

sexual m a n also opens up avenues of escape, nooks of concealment, that
look promising to me. I am ashamed, you see, and the first and last impulse
of the ashamed is to hide out. A n d where better for a m a n to hide out today
than in broad daylight, in the midst of this withering lucidity, this penitential
publicity?
I also k n o w that ironic incognito - ‘you won’t get masculinity to stick
on me’ - is the costless posture of first resort among many m e n w r i t i n g on
such issues. W i l l Self is one of the most recent recruits to the cause of this
sulkily noncombatant masculinity.

W h e n someone asks me to w r i t e on the subject of ‘masculinity’, of

‘manliness’, of what it is to be one - I find myself seized w i t h the most
awful sense of inertia. I feel myself to be p l u n g i n g towards watery
extinction, weighted d o w n w i t h the ballast of my o w n masculinity yet
I cannot assay it, I do not know what it is. I feel like a kitten, spinning
around and around in a vain attempt to catch sight of its o w n tail. Yet
whenever I’ve voiced this sense of indeterminacy w h i c h surrounds my
masculinity and inheres in my very encoding - the combinations of
deoxyribonucleic acids that make me one - m e n smirk, w o m e n laugh,
and the consensus is that I could not be any more of a m a n if I shaved
my head, pierced my foreskin, shoved a rag soaked w i t h b u t y l nitrate
in my face and joined a conga line of buggery 5

It is plain that this mode of conscientious objection - a male shadowing of

the more difficult act of female self-unrecognition performed, for example,
by Denise Riley - is an easy and a natural one: masculinity’s o w n manner
rather than any defection f r o m it. 6 I find smug defiance in its O b l o m o v i a n
lethargy, even as I b u r r o w and wallow in it.
T h i s numbness or assumed insensibility is the commonest mask of
shame, but anger is another. Shaming people makes them angry. Sometimes
their anger is a flaring refusal of shame. Sometimes it breeds w i t h shame,
and becomes a composite anger-shame - the physical signs of shame and
anger are so close that this association is easily made. As Agnes Heller
has observed, shame can then be wielded as a weapon or angry mirror. 7 T h e
shamed one refuses to hang his head, but angrily makes a spectacle of his
shame, prolonging and exaggerating it, in an attempt to shame the shamer.
H a h ! L o o k at the shame y o u have perpetrated, look at the debasement
of w h i c h you are the cause! If the shamed one turns his flaring face away
f r o m the shamer, the shamer is then also impelled to t u r n away f r o m the
degradation she has brought about. Inhabiting shame gives one the power
to exhibit it. I see plenty of signs of m e n now learning to flash their shame
in something other than sheepishness or clownishness.

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W h a t is more, disgrace itself may even be becoming a male speciality.

I am astonished at the lack of concern there was about B i l l C l i n t o n
c o n t i n u i n g to serve as President in his m a i m e d c o n d i t i o n , and h o w his
h u m b l i n g in fact gave h i m a sort of Hester Prynne-like poise. (For, efter awll,
hes jist a mayan) T h e generalization of male shame adds fuel to the strangely
intensified powers of shaming and disgrace we seem to be seeing in
contemporary media culture, w h i c h creates disgraced people hungrily, as
previous eras created stars and heroes. Oscar W i l d e was the first m o d e r n
v i c t i m of media disgrace, but he was put out of sight and out of m i n d ; we
seem to want to keep our disgraced people on show, if never exactly in f u l l
view, and they too have been made to learn to crave and survive in their
exhibition. T h e electronic media are amplifying the role discharged by
newspapers for over a century now as engines of shaming. Fleet Street was
k n o w n as the Street of Shame because of this close association w i t h
newspapers and shame. T h e name should make us aware that pitch defiles,
that m u d sticks even to the flinger of it. Fame is a hair’s-breadth away f r o m
shame, and this is now part of its meaning, especially for its male bearers:
the shame of being caught, in lavatories, rented rooms and Baker Street
dungeons, and the shame of being ashamed of it. A n d maybe the example
of the President of the U n i t e d States of America shows that there is prestige
in this potlatch.

2 Shame and guilt

Most discussions of the nature of shame get their footing by setting shame
against guilt. A shame culture – the examples given are often ancient Greek
or Viking cultures, and contemporary Melanesian cultures – is said to be
one in which feelings of responsibility are borne in upon the self from
the outside in. By contrast, a guilt culture, such as ours is thought to be,
is one in which the self feels responsibility for itself, so that guilt is taken
deeply into, or may even be thought of as arising in the self. Shame is
therefore associated with the maintaining of codes of conduct in the group,
but does not lead to sickness and despair, as it does in Western cultures. It
is sometimes said that it is for this reason that shame is something that not
only manifests itself on, but also belongs to the skin or the outside of a
person. Though some have doubted the absoluteness of the distinction
between shame cultures like theirs and guilt cultures like ours, it remains
intact in many quarters, for example, in this recent characterization by Susan
Benson of the contrasting attitudes towards skin adornment in Melanesian
and Western cultures in terms of

the difference between cultures where persons are explicitly seen as

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outcomes of the actions of others and whose o w n potential for action

is to be understood in terms of relations to others, and cultures where
the meaning of personhood and the capacity for action is located in
ideas of personal autonomy and separation. 8

A similar distinction guides Rita Felski’s discussion of the shamefulness

of being lower-middle class:

G u i l t is a sense of inner badness caused by a transgression of moral

values; shame by contrast is a sense of failure or lack in the eyes
of others. It has less to do w i t h infractions of m o r a l i t y than w i t h
infractions of social codes and a consequent fear of exposure,
embarrassment, and humiliation. 9

There is m u c h that is opaque to me in this definition - w h y moral values

are thought not to involve the prospect of exposure to the judgements of
others, for example - but it has enough clarity for us to see its inadequacy.
Felski distributes guilt and shame in terms of two different kinds of infrac-
tion: of moral codes and social conventions. In reality, our use of these words
and experience of what they name involves a distinction between infraction
and n o n - i n f r a c t i o n , w i t h an associated distinction between the different
provenances of the feelings. T h e distinction between guilt and shame is a
distinction in terms of where the feeling comes f r o m .
G u i l t is certainly experienced on the inside, but what is experienced
is the i n f r a c t i o n of codes, m o r a l and social, that are not themselves
endogenous. G u i l t can certainly be introjected, and, indeed, the point of
guilt is probably that it should be, if it is to act as a regulative principle. But
guilt does not arise in or possess the self: it occurs to it. G u i l t represents the
adjustment of the self to codes of good and bad that are extrinsic to it.
Shame, by contrast, represents a judgement that appears to come f r o m
the inside, as that inside meets and massively amplifies a source or correlative
in the outside w o r l d . Shame can be thought of as an intense internalization
of guilt, b u t this is not really a clarification of its nature, so m u c h as a
prematurely clarifying transformation of it i n t o something else. Indeed,
shamed people obtain great relief f r o m the prospect of reducing their shame
to manageable proportions t h r o u g h the assumption of guilt, hence the
irrepressible desire for confession. Confession is not the desire to relieve
guilt: it is the desire to get shame to r u n along guilt’s grooves. Shame is only
knowable t h r o u g h its feints and counterfeits, of w h i c h g u i l t is the most
important.
A n d yet, since it depends u p o n my sense of another’s estimation of me,
shame also essentially comes f r o m the outside and manifests itself on my
outside. More than this, it manifests me as my outsidedness w i t h o u t residue.

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Shame, in t r u t h , is an ‘outing’. T h i s is w h y the experience of shame is

ecstatic, for, in shame as in ecstasy, one is suddenly beside or w i t h o u t oneself.
T h e meaning of shame is that suddenly I am to have no innerness any more,
that I am all in all the me that is exposed to another’s gaze. I am a temporary,
indefinite detention in the me, I must take myself to be the me that is all
that others can make of me. T h i s is not simply a diminishment. In shame,
the I spreads and swells grandiosely to meet w i t h its infinite belittling as the
me, w h i c h is perhaps w h y Blake t h o u g h t shame was the secret name for
pride.
T h e w o r d ‘me’ is itself a shame w o r d . G u i l t , by contrast, is of the ‘ I ’ ; it
represents an inner acknowledgement of my sense of i n f r a c t i o n . Where
shame results in aversion, disavowal, deflection, guilt requires confession
and the making of affirmation. Indeed, guilt cannot exist w i t h o u t this move
to acknowledgement, for guilt is a choice, an exercise of freedom, w h i c h
cannot be coerced. You can force me to say I am g u i l t y and treat me as
though I were, but it is a m u c h harder j o b to make me feel that I am indeed
truly so. A n d yet, despite this innerness of guilt, guilt is a partitioning of the
self, since it is concentrated only in that compartment of ourselves - the
person - that is implicated in the infraction and its acknowledgement. It is
for this reason that one can embrace and even affirm guilt. Indeed, our legal
system requires accused persons to make such attestations: Do you plead
guilty or not guilty? You can acknowledge guilt, and identify yourself as a
guilty person because what you are responsible for is accidental rather than
essential; guilt is not of y o u . G u i l t opens up and preserves a saving distance
in the self between w h a t it is and w h a t it has done. G u i l t is referential,
and transitive: I did it. Shame is intransitive, so that its subject is the
bearer of it, not its cause: Shame on you. You cannot embrace, or identify,
or acknowledge your shame, because you are proximally inundated in it:
your ‘you’-ness is swallowed up in its ‘it’-ness. T h e ashamed person cannot
identify w i t h his shame, because he is identical w i t h it. English makes this
distinction visible in the difference between being shamed- w h i c h is what
happens w h e n you are given a dressing d o w n , or w h e n collaborators are
ritualistically tarred and feathered - and being ashamed, w h i c h has come to
mean something more intransitive and intractable and incomparable and
unspeakable. Like the phrase I am avenged, the words I am ashamed signify
and enact a force bigger than mere individual w i l l and the actions w h i c h
accomplish it.

So, although guilt may reach further than shame into the self, it does
not include so m u c h . Shame is more superficial than guilt, but, as Helen
Lynd has pointed out, it involves the whole being. In fact it can give you an
agonizing entirety you m i g h t never have had before. It is synecdochic, the
part for the whole, the part become the whole. I am guilty of a crime; but
I am ashamed of myself. T h i s makes shame inexpiable.

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[ A ] n experience of shame can be altered or transcended only in so far

as there is some change in the whole self No single, specific t h i n g we
can do can rectify or mitigate such an experience. Unlike guilt it is -
in specific terms - irreversible. ‘ I n shame there is no comfort, but to
be beyond all bounds of shame.’ . . . [ A ] n experience of shame of the
sort I am attempting to describe cannot be modified by addition, or
wiped out by subtraction, or exorcised by expiation. It is not an isolated
act that can be detached f r o m the self. It carries the weight of ‘I cannot
have done this. But I have done it and I cannot undo it, because this
is I.’ It is pervasive as anxiety is pervasive; its focus is not a separate act,
but revelation of the whole self. T h e t h i n g that has been exposed is
what I am. 1 0

So guilt relates to actions, shame to being. G u i l t has reference to what you

may have done in the past; shame is what you carry on being. G u i l t is what
you are made to feel w h e n you have been f o u n d out; shame is what you feel
w h e n you seem to have got away scot-free. Shame has little to do w i t h the
super-ego, w i t h the Freudian distribution of the self i n t o the polarities of
subject and object, parent and child, punisher and v i c t i m . It is not the self
become an enemy to and accuser of itself. It is perhaps rather a haunting of
oneself. T h e sinner can abhor her sin and the malefactor loathe the guilt in
h i m . But the one in shame is always on the side of his shame, there being
no other side for h i m to take.
Having no definite origin, and no definite object, no definite sense of
scale or scope, being governed by no determinable processes, the experience
of shame is an experience of the paradoxical and the indefinite. Shame means
suspecting everything you are and do and feel; it means k n o w i n g that you
do not have to do anything to deserve your shame. I am in the clear, I have
done n o t h i n g : you w i l l never get anything to stick on me (except shame,
w h i c h sticks to me as I stick to myself). Because it measures the self against
the outside w o r l d , guilt can itself be measured, and makes ordeal and penalty
and the doling of debts to society possible (the association between the words
guilt and Geld is not accidental), You can account for guilt, b u t y o u can
never account for shame (except by first cashing it in for guilt). It is for this
reason that, where guilt is a matter of weight and measure, shame appears
to have no recognizable scale or units of currency, and can appear so excessive
and immeasurable. As Helen Lynd tellingly observes, shame is sometimes
caused by trivial things, and is then intensified by the recognition of this
very triviality:

Because of the outwardly small occasion that has precipitated shame,

the intense e m o t i o n seems inappropriate, incongruous, dispropor-
tionate to the incident that has aroused it. Hence a double shame is

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involved: we are ashamed because of the original episode and ashamed

because we feel so deeply about anything so slight that a sensible person
would not pay any attention to it. 11

Shame is hot and cold at once, tiny and exorbitant at once – ‘It is too
small to refer to; but it pervades everything’.12 The question of cause is only
weakly operative in shame, and then, I suspect, as a prophylactic against it.
Shame is just the excessiveness, the immeasurability against which guilt
protects. It can involve social gaffes or infractions of codes, of the drinking
the fingerbowl kind – but it need not. Indeed, an explanation of shame
in terms of its causes and occasions wipes away the phenomenological
essence of shame, which is to be exaggeration and disproportion. Shame is
the inner certainty of unworthiness, of a baseness that one takes on and
inhabits.
Shame is a skin thing.13 The fact that shame belongs to the skin is borne
out by the fact that its characteristic preposition is ‘on’: Shame on you! Guilt
too is something that rests or descends upon one, but in a different modality,
so to speak, of the ‘on’. If, as I have said, one bears guilt as a burden, a weight
that presses redeemingly down on one, shame clings to the person like a
smudge, or an insect. Guilt pricks (agenbite of inwit) and is stigmatic (in
feeling compunction, from com-pungere, one feels pricked all over). Shame,
like mud, sticks. Recently, a number of world leaders and businessmen have
been the recipients of custard pies thrown by protesters. The pie in the face
(or the tomato, with which a woman defiled Tony Blair’s suit some time
ago, reversing the story of the woman with an issue healed by the touch
of Christ’s hem; all that matters is that it should be squishy) is shaming
because it reduces its victim to an object of comedy and pity. In a sense
it relieves its victims of whatever charge might be being brought against
them: capitalist exploitation, repression of minorities, etc. For the pie in the
face is the anagram of an accusation. It aims not to denounce, which would
require and allow a response, defence, acknowledgement, but to degrade,
which leaves no possibility of response, because it degrades the crime as well
as the subject, therefore depriving the subject of the dignity of his guilt. You
may have thought you were being wicked or doing wrong, but in fact all
you were doing was being ridiculous.
How can I bear the shame?, one thinks. But it is not a case of bearing
shame. Precisely because shame is of the whole person and not a part of the
person, there is nothing to bear and nothing to bear it with. Sartre represents
the national shaming of the French people during the occupation in his play
Les Mouches, not as a burden, but as an appalling sense of weightlessness,
and a longing for the heaviness of guilt. If there is somebody still there to
bear shame, to wear it as a mask or a caption, then shame has begun to be
beaten back, as it always must.

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Shame and guilt have both tended to be analysed as moral emotions,

which enact the involvement of the person in the judgements of others
as to rightness or worth. Shame ‘is the only inborn moral feeling in us’,
writes Agnes Heller.14 Arguments about shame are usually arguments about
the relations between emotion and morality, and claims for the uses of shame
as an emotion have either condemned it as heteronomous, as the sign of the
willed or unwilled subjection of the self to the judgements of others,
or, eschewing such strong Kantian notions of moral autonomy, approved
of shame because of its evidencing of the ways in which the moral claims of
the other reach into the self.15 Writing about shame can often be reduced
to two principles: Yo u ought to be ashamed of yourself (sin); or, You should
be ashamed of being ashamed of yourself (bad faith). Either way, shame is
thought of as a vehicle or prompt to improvement, a way of either making
you something other than what you are, or preventing you from being
degraded into something other than what you are.
Female and male understandings of shame seem to split along the line
separating heteronomy from autonomy. Female shame has been frequently
presented as the heterogenic or other-originating force of a shame imposed
against the assertion of autonomy (the curiosity of Eve). Male shame seems
to be understood more frequently as autogenic or self-authorizing shame at
the failure of autonomy. So women are shamed for breaking out, men are
ashamed of falling short. Female shame elicits the hiss, male shame the
snigger. Female shame has mostly been regulatory and disciplinary. In
the shame attaching to menstruation and pregnancy and illegitimate birth
and excessive or unfeminine behaviour (drunkenness, ribaldry, lewdness,
loose talk), shaming has worked to keep females within bounds, docile,
infant, obedient. Male shame has traditionally not been the shame of
having overstepped the mark, of having exceeded definitions, but the
shame of failing to exceed definition as such. This may be why so much
male masochism depends upon fantasies of grandeur projected into the
torturer. Male masochists seek to come up against illimitability in order to
be defeated by it, and thus to lick up some of the heroism of failure with
its bitterness. Both female and male shame might be thought of as forms of
enforced social coherence, but men are more able to think of shame as a
kind of acknowledgement or affirmation. Perhaps this means that male
shame is more apt to be taken up into masochistic pleasure, in that it allows
for self-transcendence through shame, or diminishment in the interests of
expansion.
This view is crystallized in the Hegelian tradition which sees the
historical destiny of humanity as the progressive overcoming of shame.
Sartre’s definition of shame, famously dramatized in the peeper at the
keyhole who suddenly realizes that they are themselves being watched,
involves asymmetry – in the for-itself suddenly forced to take itself as an

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in-itself for another. For Sartre, ‘shame is shame of self; it is the recogni-
tion of the fact that I am indeed that object w h i c h the O t h e r is l o o k i n g
at and judging.’ 1 6 T h i s definition is probably derived f r o m M a x Scheler’s
earlier definition of shame in terms of disproportion. For Scheler, shame
‘is always conjoined w i t h an element of “astonishment,” “confusion,” and
an experience between what ideally “ought to be” and what, in fact, is.’ 1 7
Scheler maintains that the h u m a n susceptibility to shame comes f r o m the
maladjustment between our absorption in our o w n projects, in w h i c h we
reach beyond ourselves, beyond the experience of littleness and l i m i t , and
our sudden resiling i n t o the feeble, needy c o n d i t i o n of the l i v i n g - d y i n g
animal self.

[ O ] n e feels in one’s depths and knows oneself to be, a ‘bridge,’ a

‘transition’ between t w o orders of being and essence in w h i c h one has
such equally strong roots that one cannot sever them w i t h o u t losing
one’s very ‘humanity.’ No creature, therefore, w h i c h is beyond this
bridge and transition on either of its sides can have a feeling of shame:
no god and no animal. But m a n must feel shame - not because of this
or that ‘reason’ and not because we can be ashamed ‘ o f this or that - ,
we must feel shame because of our being a continuous movement and
a transition itself. Ultimately, m a n feels ashamed of himself and feels
shame ‘before’ G o d in h i m . 1 8

There are striking structural resemblances between this definition and

Bergson’s definition of the comic. Shame and masochism are comic in their
nature, though they represent different moments of the comic. Bergson saw
laughter as the dissolution of the problem that was the comic, the sudden,
saving assertion of life, or flaring out of élan vital against the threat of death-
in-life, in w h a t is nevertheless described as ‘an anaesthesia of the heart’.
Masochism is perhaps the mode of this simultaneously intensified and
anaesthetized life. Masochism is the laugh of shame: masochism is to shame
as laughter is to the degradations of the comic.
Scheler ends his essay on shame by unashamedly claiming the prerog-
ative of shame for men. Because, he thinks, ‘woman lives a less expansive
and a more bound and ego-related life’, she experiences ‘a lesser degree of
duality between spirit and body and, therewith, a lack of the condition for
the experience of psychic shame’. 19 However, Ullaliina Lehtinen argues that
men’s experience predisposes them to see m o r a l autonomy, or the power
whether or not to accede to shame, in situations - her example is a French
collaborator w i t h shaven head and German babe in arms being forced to
r u n the gauntlet of jeering neighbours - w h i c h women’s experience of shame
predisposes them to see as leaving no possibility of standing out against. 20
T h e kinds of arguments espoused by writers such as N a t h a n Rotenstreich

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and Gabriele Taylor 2 1 exemplify w h a t Lehtinen calls ‘the aristocrat’s

shame’, in w h i c h shame is a tonic episode in the life of a subject, w h o
remains ‘autonomously free - has a privilege - either to internalize or to
defy the episodic dis-esteem and de-valuation’. 2 2 T h e systematic sense
of undervaluation analysed by writers like Frantz Fanon produces shame as
‘a pervasive affective attunement to the social environment’. 2 3 T h e argument
is a strong one, and I agree that the k i n d of shame w h i c h allows one r o o m
to reserve judgement on oneself is not really shame at all, in the perhaps too-
remorseless sense I have been shaping for it here.
I imagine that Lehtinen may feel that male attitudes to shame are
not only mistaken b u t also dangerous and regressive, in that they under-
estimate the power of negative social attitudes and pressures to corrode the
self-esteem of disadvantaged groups. However, it is clear that she shares w i t h
the aristocratic conception of rational shame a sense of the pure negativity
of shame, a sense that the only question attaching to shame is h o w to
reduce or get r i d of it. For the aristocratic-individualist, it is shame that is
shameful, while for the feminist-collectivist, it is shaming that is shameful.
B u t for neither is there any question b u t that shame must be a spur
to improvement, ethical or political. Perhaps this is just as well. I have no
interest in prolonging or ignoring the miseries of self-undermining endured
by disadvantaged groups, nor in persuading them to make the best of it,
and, if I were w r i t i n g m o r a l or political philosophy, or t h o u g h t that the
w r i t i n g of it could contribute significantly to reducing the violent uses of
shame, I w o u l d be saying very different things. However, I do suspect that
the conditions of shame as a whole way of life have been more t h i n l y
described than they could be. So I am not speaking for the time being about
the part that shaming plays in rational m o r a l i t y or moral reasoning, nor
about the forceful uses of shame: not because there is n o t h i n g to be said
about these things, but because other things strike me as having been unsaid
about the phenomenology of shame, about the kinds of life it procures. I
do not want to make shame more desirable, as though that were anyway
possible, but I hope to make it more describable. I t h i n k that the chances
of persuading Ullaliina Lehtinen that the k i n d of male shame about w h i c h
I am attempting to write could ever be other than the ruffling of aristocratic
composure are very remote, but for that I see no help.

3 Shame and masochism

In the first of a series of works w h i c h bear variously upon the assumptions

of shame, his long essay on Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Gilles Deleuze
proposes a series of distinctions between sadism and masochism, both of
w h i c h he insists are entire and specific and self-determining worlds, rather

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than different combinations of invariant elements. O n e of these absolute

distinctions is between the principle of negation that is at w o r k in sadism
- the destruction or setting at naught of what is called ‘secondary nature’ -
and the principle of disavowal that is at w o r k in masochism.

Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of

an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but
rather in radically contesting the validity of that w h i c h is: it suspends
belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon
opens up beyond the given and in place of it. 2 4

According to this account, sadism is a f o r m of transcendence,

masochism a Deleuzian ‘plane of immanence’, w h i c h tilts and agitates every
sign and value. Sadism seeks to go beyond number and quantity in its search
for universal suffering, though, as in the works of the dreary and ubiquitous
Marquis, it is condemned to the counting and enumeration of acts for this
very reason. Sadism is just more of the same: survival of the fittest, per ardua
ad astra, business as usual. Masochism does not t r y to get outside or
beyond anything, but rather toils to w o r m itself i n t o the inside of the inside
of things. It finds its identity in the extremity of its proximity, its inwardness
w i t h exposure, exposure not to t r u t h , but to dissimulation and delay and
diversion. Masochism is too busy for identity. T h u s sadism is insatiably
acquisitive, b u t masochism, as A n i t a Phillips has so p i q u a n t l y said, is
inquisitive.25
M u c h though I w o u l d like to be able to dignify my o w n masochism
in this way, I am not sure that I w i l l accept Deleuze’s rescue of masochism
as disavowal rather than denial. We should note that male shame, like male
masochism in general, has a crudely and traditionally heroic aspect. I have
said that jeopardy is at the heart of maleness, and the risk of being shamed
is under some circumstances as invigoratingly tonic as the fear of death or
injury. (The ‘crisis of masculinity’ is w h a t masculinity has always been.)
There is a huge power, for example, in the forms of suffering traditionally
claimed by m e n in many religions. Christianity is so irresistible as a religion,
because its central image, the crucified Christ, is one of shaming and
suffering, rather than power and t r i u m p h . Christianity has prospered on the
opportunities for servitude and h u m i l i a t i o n that it offers. T h e prostrating
power of Islam, w h i c h means submission, comes a close second in this respect,
and for the same reasons. Of course, it is a male body w h i c h is so gloriously
tormented in C h r i s t i a n i t y and the prerogative of shame has been appro-
priated by m e n in the Christian C h u r c h . T h e Origenic hankering for
self emasculation w h i c h is so regularly attested to among males of displaced
or humiliated cultures, or those now aspiring to such debasement - the good
people w h o party at www.eunuch.org, for example - is now undergoing a

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m i n o r revival across the West and wherever else the wires can reach. Such
acts and urges are a reassertion of a male power of debasement that w o m e n
have often been unable to prevent themselves f r o m wanting for themselves.
For w o m e n w h o have taken on the glory of the stigmata there is an extra
humiliation, and therefore extra glory, in the shameful display of their selfish
hunger for glorious degradation. We have p u t aside the religious and
mystical languages w h i c h allowed the commerce of pride and shame to be
thought on, but we perhaps still have need of them to make sense of the
embracing of the signs of degradation, the degradation into the condition
of a sign, w h i c h are so abundant today. T h e Christian Emperor Constantine
forbade the marking of slaves in the f o u r t h century, on the grounds that this
k i n d of insult to the body was a shame for the perpetrators as well as the
victims. T h e survival of ideas of stigmata, i n t o cosmetic practice and sexual
ritual, is a refusal of the Levitican p r o h i b i t i o n on the m a r k i n g of the skin,
a shameful transgression at the heart of Christianity, w h i c h w i l l not allow
the new skin of the immaculate conception.
No doubt female masochism continues to exist and perhaps even
calmly to m u l t i p l y , b u t in traditionally circumspect and self-preserving
forms. It is striking that the theme of the contractual basis of masochism,
first identified by Deleuze in his ‘Coldness and cruelty’ essay, has been
stressed by female writers on the subject. So, if masochism represents itself
in one sense as a taking on of the helplessness and passivity traditionally
associated w i t h w o m a n (though not, let us note, by many male masochists),
it is clear that it also allows a traditional male exposure to risk and what may
be called the infinite of finitude, the finitude that goes infinitely far beyond
me in p u t t i n g a stop to my hubristic reaching after illimitability. It is hard
for m e n to write in shame w i t h o u t attempting to coin glory f r o m it. W r i t i n g
of sacrifice, Georges Bataille evokes the Christian ‘man-god’ w h o dies ‘both
as rottenness and as the redemption of the supreme person’. In its proleptic
embrace of the ‘empty infinity’ of its death, ‘the me raises itself to the pure
imperative, l i v i n g - d y i n g for an abyss w i t h o u t walls or floor; this imperative
is formulated as “die like a dog” in the strangest part of being’. 2 6 Deleuze
too looks to shame for its possibilities of glory. I am unpersuaded or perhaps
just insufficiently inflated by all these phallic, masterful, life-enhancing,
willing-to-power kinds of destitution, k n o w i n g f u l l well that I do not come
up to them, and meaning not to. Deleuze’s Life is shameless, an i m m o r t a l
mortality. N o t , alas, for me, and the legion such as me, the flight f r o m shame
into shameless becoming.
Female shame expresses itself as alienation: to be ashamed of one’s
body is to be alienated f r o m the ideal f o r m of it one wishes one had. Female
shame cooperates w i t h narcissism, male shame w i t h centreless self-disgust.
Females are encouraged to hate their bodies, as a way of keeping them in
agreement about the ideal forms of beauty attainable in the female f o r m .

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Men are disgusted by their bodies, not because they feel they fall short
of some equivalently agreed ideal male form, but because they are so much
like other men’s. Female shame is shame by reference to a model; male
shame is shame by reference to the transcending of models. Corporeality
used to be thought of as female; corporeality, the body as dog’s body, is
now male. Deleuze and Guattari are right to identify shame with the
animal, or with the becoming animal.27 What, now, are men but dogs?
What, now, do we want but intervals when we can stop pretending that we
are not? Dominatrices throughout the Western world know that their clients
have no desire to be treated like cats, pigs, sheep, monkeys, horses, or any
of the other animals that are victims of human use and abuse; but from
Istanbul to the Isle of Wight no dungeon worthy of the name is without its
kennel.
Male shame operates without models or objects. This may be one
of the reasons for the energetic production of consensual male narcissism
to match that of women. Without the projection and internalization of
narcissistic ideals, the intensity of shame being undergone by men might
become quite unbearable. (But it is quite unbearable.) To be ashamed of
oneself without a regulatory ideal, or sense of a standard, from which one
has fallen short, for that kind of unorientated self-disgust to prosper, would
be dangerous indeed. In one sense, a strong pedagogy of the masculine such
as we have today – with all these tips on male grooming, encouragement to
new forms of citizenship, the conduct manuals of women’s magazines, men’s
magazines, and, far from least, masculinity studies – multiplies the oppor-
tunities for regulatory shame. In another, it gives a containing shape and
syntax to shame, allowing shame to become savingly attached to men’s
actions or omissions and then their making good, rather than their being.
Thus it serves the purposes of masochism, and is enlisted (unavailingly)
against the true, speechless shame of the dog’s body.

4 The force of shame

Shame is the exposure of the first person. Shame must be in and of that first,
last person. T h i s is w h y shame cannot be w h o l l y negative: w h y it takes the
disgraced person in a sense beyond good and bad. T h e shamed person has
been given a k i n d of inviolability through being made to be identical w i t h
their w o u n d , or their mark. T h i s is perhaps the shameful secret of shame,
its secret, paradoxical potency; that you cannot be made ashamed by being
dehumanized, or brutalized, or impersonalized. To be ashamed you must
also be given yourself, or given to it: a new self, to be sure, a vacuum-self
made of n o t h i n g , n o t h i n g but shame, for ever, but, undiminishably, a self,
or a f o r m of being in shame. Shamed people often prefer the flight i n t o

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nothingness to the strong selfhood that shame gives t h e m . J u d i t h Butler

writes that the term ‘queer’ ‘has operated as one linguistic practice whose
purpose has been . . . shaming of the object it names, or rather the producing
of a subject through that shaming interpellation’. 2 8 Here Butler seems to be
on the b r i n k of being able to go beyond or get on the inside of her habitual
cultural determinism, to recognize the unpredictable power of shame. The
wielders of shame w a n t to silence, objectify and discipline - to make
subjectivity impossible. B u t they always risk creating horrible subjects in
shame, or subjects resistant to shame - queers, niggers, fundamentalists,
Nazis, paedophiles. For describing the w o r l d does not fix it - it changes it,
readies it for change (though not every time and not always the same k i n d
or degree of change). Descriptions annihilate their objects, not because they
usurp their place but because they release them into the w i l d , free them to
become something else.
‘ T h e shame of being a man, what better reason to write?’ T h i s shame
is the best reason, or, at least, a reason than w h i c h no better can be f o u n d ,
to write. It is a w r i t i n g w h i c h ‘exists only w h e n it discovers beneath apparent
persons the power of an impersonal - w h i c h is not a generality but a singu-
larity at the highest point: a m a n , a w o m a n , a beast, a stomach, a child’. 2 9
But, seen in this way, w r i t i n g is not itself shameful but the harvest of shame.
For Deleuze, one flies f r o m shame i n t o glory, as in the writings of T.E.
Lawrence. Shame, not fame, is the spur for Deleuze, and w h e n he says ‘a
man’, he means ‘Man’, the man w h o struts and frets as one. Deleuze’s shame,
like Skegness in a seaside poster I recall, is so bracing.
T h i s is w h y shame is an ideal c o n d i t i o n for w r i t i n g , for the k i n d of
w r i t i n g on w r i t i n g of w h i c h Deleuze speaks in his Dialogues, despite the fact
that Deleuze sees w r i t i n g as the attempt to avoid shame:

My ideal, w h e n I write about an author, w o u l d be to write n o t h i n g

that w o u l d cause h i m sadness, or if he is dead, that w o u l d make h i m
weep in his grave. T h i n k of the author you are w r i t i n g about. T h i n k
of h i m so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that
you cannot identify w i t h h i m . Avoid the double shame of the scholar
and the familiar. Give back to the author a little of the joy, the energy,
the life of love and politics that he knew how to give and invent. 3 0

A n d it is also w h y w r i t i n g about shame m i g h t at this moment be feebly

flaring: because there is an affinity between shame and w r i t i n g . It certainly
seems true, for example, that there is a strong male tradition of attempting
to write the weakness of shame, beginning perhaps w i t h Swift and extending
through Melville, Kafka, Beckett, Genet and Coetzee, while w o m e n writers
- w i t h certain exceptions, perhaps Rhys, Duras - have seen their task as the
m u c h more urgent one of w r i t i n g themselves out of shame rather than i n t o

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it. W o m e n may then have temporarily abandoned, in the sure and certain
hope of the life to come, some of the fugitive advantages that the inhabi-
tation of shamefulness can give. W h e n he writes of this male t r a d i t i o n ,
Deleuze seems to see w r i t i n g as the attempt to expiate shame, to find the
glory in shamefulness, as in his essay on T.E. Lawrence. But to write about
Kafka, to hope to ‘please’ the writer w h o wrote of the hope for an enduring
shame, wrote for and in the endurance of shame, can never simply be to
restore ‘the j o y the energy, the life of love and politics’. W h e n he glosses
the final phrase of Kafka’s The Trial- ‘it was as if the shame of it must outlive
him’ - w i t h the judgement that ‘shame enlarges the man’, Deleuze surely
succumbs to the double shame against w h i c h he warns himself. 3 1 For he
rewrites Kafka aggressively on his o w n terms, as he does in the superbly
cowardly reading he undertakes w i t h G u a t t a r i of Kafka, as a k i n d of
Lawrentian prophet of life and becoming. Shame is not to be identified w i t h
the ‘life’ on w h i c h Deleuze and Guattari so tediously and oppressively insist,
but then, life isn’t everything.
So shame is not a merely negative condition, any more than masochism
is the simple embrace of suffering, the mistaking of suffering for life. Shame
is a whole mode of being, not a deprived or depleted version of ordinary
‘full’ existence. Shame is not any k i n d of shortfall of being: it is an intolerable
excess of it. Shame is heightened attentiveness, w h i c h may be w h y shaming
or h u m i l i a t i o n are so i m p o r t a n t in rites of passage. G u i l t looks on itself,
face to face, seeing itself for w h a t it is. Shame seems rather to be of the
ear, for it cannot see r o u n d itself, or even of the listening, prickling skin.
It is an aversion of the eye, a straining to hear, an absorption, a curious
obedience.
I have kept circling back to Léon Wurmser’s insight that w h a t we
take to be shame is always in part a front or mask, protecting against the
annihilation of shame itself, than w h i c h n o t h i n g can be more annihilating,
aside f r o m pain and actual b o d i l y destruction. B u t any apotropaic also
harbours the thought and possibility of that w h i c h it forfends, becoming its
secret home. M a n y of the signs of shame - stony pallor, bowed head,
downcast eyes - are inhibitions or dammings of the flooding overstimulation
of shame that also hold and hoard it. T h e mask of shame preserves shame
for the ego, as well as preserving the possibility of an ego against it. There
is strength and value (its o w n k i n d of value) in this manner of narcissism,
w h i c h can open on to the being in unbeing of the self. There is elation
in the mortifications of shame, and also exaltation, longing, quickening,
tenderness, endurance, awe, astonishment and the taking of care. You cannot
live in shame, b u t u n t i l you’ve been ashamed you’ve never lived. This is w h y
shame has been so powerfully operative in the history of religious feeling,
in the heretical eruptions of spiritual and bodily destitution to be f o u n d ,
for instance, in medieval mysticism and seventeenth-century religious

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dissidence, before they were themselves subjected to shaming discipline on

the part of religious institutions. M a n y of these u n b o u n d affects in religious
enactments of shame have passed across i n t o the erotic, that great swirling
sink of unfinished business, though now even that erotism is perhaps already
on the way to something else. Shame, as always, is on the move, as though
it were meant to outlive us, and it is.
Birbeck College, London

Notes

1 Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 39.

2 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and life’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 1.
3 Léon Wurmser, The Mask of Shame (Baltimore, M D , and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981).
4 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1973), p. 176.
5 W i l l Self and David Gamble, Perfidious Man (London: Viking, 2000), p. 7.
6 Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in
History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
7 Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 23.
8 Susan Benson, ‘Inscriptions of the self: reHections on tattooing and piercing in
contemporary Euro-America’, in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European
and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (London: Reaktion Books, 2000),
p. 234.
9 Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to declare: identity, shame and the lower middle class’,
PMLA, 115 (2000), p. 39.
10 Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search For Identity (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1958), p. 50.
11 Ibid., p. 42.
12 Ibid., p. 50.
13 Andrew Strathern, ‘Why is shame on the skin?’, Ethnology, 14 (1975), pp.
347-56.
14 Heller, The Power of Shame, p. 6.
15 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and
Oxford: University of California Press, 1993).
16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological
Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 261.
17 Max Scheler, Person and Self-Value: Three Essays, trans. Manfred S. Frings
(Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and Lancaster, 1987), p. 5.
18 Ibid., p. 6.
19 Ibid., p. 84.
20 Ullaliina Lehtinen, ‘How does one know what shame is? Epistemology,
emotions, and forms of life in juxtaposition’, Hypatia, 13 (1998), pp. 56-77.
21 Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On shame’, Review of Metaphysics, 19 (1965), pp.
55-86; Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self Assessment
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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22 Lehtinen, ‘How does one know what shame is?’, p. 62.

23 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Sandra
Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 85.
24 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and cruelty’, in Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs (New
York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 31.
25 Anita Phillips, A Defence of Masochism (London: Faber and Faber, 1998),
p. 152.
26 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. Allan
Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 133.
27 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), pp.
155–6.
28 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 226.
29 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 3.
30 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 119.
31 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 121.

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