Copjec, Joan. “May ’68, the Emotional Month.” Lacan: The Silent Partners Ed. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.
Here is a bit on Žižek’s take on shame.
The final aim of psychoanalysis, it turns out, is the production of shame.
Why is shame given such a place of honour, if we may put it that way, in the seminar? And what should the position of the analyst be with respect to it? Should she try to reduce ii, get rid of it, lower her eyes before it? No; Lacan proposes that the analyst make herself the agent of it. Provoke it.
I.ooking out into the audience gathered in large numbers around him, he accounts for their presence in his final, closing remarks thus: if you have come here to listen to what I have to say, it is because I have positioned myself with respect to you as analyst, that is: as objet cause of your desire. And in this way I have helped you to feel ashamed. End of seminar.
In response to May ’68, a very emotional month, he ends his seminar, his long warning against the rampant and misguided emotionalism of the university students, with an impassioned plea for a display of shame. Curb your impudence, your shamelessness, he exhorts, cautioning: you should be ashamed! What effrontery!
What a provocation is this seminar! But then: what are we to make of it? Because the reference to shame appears so abruptly only in the final session and without elaboration, this is not an easy question to answer. One hears echoes of the transferential words of Alcibiadcs, who has this to say in The Symposium about Socrates: ‘And with this man alone I have an experience which no one would believe was possible for me – the sense of shame.’
… an affect is what shame is.
The perceived hyperrationality of the formulas drawn on black-boards by their structuralist professors seemed arid and far removed from the turmoil that surrounded them, from the newness of extraordinary events, the violence of police beatings. and from their own inchoate feelings of solidarity with the workers. A grumbling sense that something had been left out, that something inevitably escaped these desiccated and timeless structures, was expressed in the renewed demand that Lacan begin redressing the university’s failures by recognizing the importance of affect. They had had it up to their eyeballs with signifiers and all the talk of signifiers, which only left a whole area of their experience unacknowledged: precisely the fact of their being agitated, moved by what was happening here and now.
Affect is included in the formulas of the four discourses. But where?
The specific effect of repression on affect is displacement. Affect is ALWAYS displaced, or always out of place. The question is: in relation to what? The first temptation is to answer: in relation to the signifier or representation. This would mean that representation and affect are out of phase with one another. The problem with this answer is that it tends to reinstate the old antinomy between jouissance and the signifier, and to insist finally on the deficit or failure of representation.