{"id":10241,"date":"2013-01-22T22:53:20","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T03:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10241"},"modified":"2013-01-25T09:18:10","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T14:18:10","slug":"copjec-shame-hejab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/01\/22\/copjec-shame-hejab\/","title":{"rendered":"copjec shame hejab"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Anxiety<\/span> is rarely experienced in the raw; something like the \u201cstem cell\u201d of affects, it is more often encountered in another form, in one of the \u201csocial affects\u201d of guilt or shame<\/strong>, which we can describe as two socially differentiated forms of<\/strong> anxiety<\/span> accompanying two different organizations of our relation to our potentiality and to our past. In brief, anxiety can best be understood as the imperative to (escape into) sociality. Unable to discern our own desire, to know who we are, we feel compelled to flee into sociality in an attempt to find there some image of ourselves<\/strong>. The society of others serves a civilizing function not, as is usually said, because it tames primitive animal instincts, but because it colonizes our savage, inhuman jouissance<\/span> by allowing us to acquire some self-image. 174<\/p>\n

In other words, what the diegetic directors disregard while making their images is the very jouissance<\/span> or unrealized surplus of self<\/strong> which makes each villager opaque to herself. The directors rob them of that and thus reduce them to disappearing phenomena.<\/p>\n

The obscenity of the Abu Ghraib photographs, as with those taken by Behzad, consists in their implicit assumption that there is no obscene, no off-screen, that cannot be exposed to a persistent, prying look.<\/p>\n

The two sets of photographs result from the same obscene denial: they deny that the prisoners and the villagers\u00a0ARE exposed to their own otherness to ourselves<\/span>.<\/p>\n

This otherness to ourselves<\/span> is what constitutes the only interiority we have; it is our privacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus the ultimate crime of the photographers is to proceed as if the prisoners and villagers have no privacy to invade.\u00a0 175<\/p>\n

At the close of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche expressed his scorn for his contemporaries\u2019 stupid insistence on trying to \u201csee\u00a0THROUGH everything.\u201d He protested the lack of reverence and discretion which fueled their tactless attempt to \u201ctouch, lick, and finger everything.\u201d The phenomenon Nietzsche decried is the frenzied desire we still see all around us, the desire to cast aside every veil, penetrate every surface, transgress every barrier in order to get our hands on the real thing lying behind it. We seem to have installed in the modern world a new \u201cbeyondness,\u201d a new untouchable, or a new secularized sacred, one that inspires a new desire for transgression. This secularized sacred originates not in a belief in the existence of another world, but from the belief that what we want in this world always lies behind a barrier which prevents our access to it.<\/p>\n

The rough desire to brush aside barriers and veils arises through a specific structuring of our relation to our culture which we can call guilt<\/span>. Common to the affects of anxiety<\/span>, guilt<\/span>, and shame<\/span> is our sense of an inalienable and yet unintegratable surplus of self.<\/p>\n

In guilt<\/span> this surplus weighs on us no longer as the burden of an unfinished past, but as the unfinished business of the present. The sentiment of our opacity to ourselves is disavowed<\/strong> and in its place arises the sentiment of being excluded from ourselves by exterior barriers.<\/p>\n

In short, we treat ourselves with the same measure of obscenity as we treat others, denying ourselves any privacy in the true sense. The mechanisms of this conversion of anxiety<\/span> into guilt<\/span> are the social and ego ideals which relieve us of the responsibility of having to invent a future without the aid of rules or scripts.<\/p>\n

Ideals give our actions directions, goals to strive for, and thus alleviate the overwhelming sentiment of anxiety<\/span>. But because ideals are unattainable, by definition, the (bitter) taste of the absolute is still discernible in them through the experience of the elusive beyond they bring into existence.<\/p>\n

It is the expansion of capitalism and the prevalence of the structure of guilt<\/span> supporting it which has made the all-but-extinct affect of shame seem primitive. It is also responsible for making the Islamic system of modesty, with its volatile disdain for the modern, capitalist passion for exposing everything, seem anachronistic, as it did to the author of The Arab Mind and it does to Behzad. Thus we return to the sequence in which he attempts to penetrate the darkness of the improbable grotto where Zeynab spends her days. My reading will focus not on the shamelessness of Behzad (which stoops to its depths here), but on the awakening of shame in Zeynab.<\/p>\n

Surely one of the most famous scenes of shame is the one presented in Being and Nothingness<\/em> where a voyeur is startled while peering through a keyhole by the sound of rustling leaves. Sartre makes the point that it is only at this moment when the voyeur feels himself being observed by another that he acquires the sentiment of self. Sartre insists also on a point Sedgwick later emphasizes in her discussion of shame: the gaze of the Other does not judge, condemn, or prohibit; the voyeur is NOT made to feel shame FOR himself nor FOR his act of lascivious looking. The gaze functions, rather, as an \u201cindispensable mediator\u201d between the voyeur and himself, the condition necessary for precipitating him out as subject from the act of looking in which he has until this point been totally absorbed (Sartre 369).<\/p>\n

Without this intervention there would be no subject, only peering through a keyhole.<\/p>\n

The meeting between Behzad and Zeynab invites us to reconsider Sartre\u2019s point in the fullness of its political implications.<\/p>\n

Zeynab requires an intervention, the presence of others as such<\/strong>, in order to emerge from the milking, from the gerundive form of her impoverished existence, as a subject. In the absence of this intervention she remains something less than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema.” Anxiety is rarely experienced in the raw; something like the \u201cstem cell\u201d of affects, it is more often encountered in another form, in one of the \u201csocial affects\u201d of guilt or shame, which we can describe as two socially differentiated forms of anxiety accompanying two different organizations of … Continue reading “copjec shame hejab”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10241"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10263,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions\/10263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}