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She refers to a study in which both adult and child respondents reported that both shame and guilt "were each most likely to be experienced in the presence of others" (1994: 3).Īs supported by the observations of Tangney, Copjec then seems to suggest that shame is not in decline because we have progressed to an advanced stage of guilt culture that has left shame cultures behind. June Price Tangney adds that the "anthropological distinction" between shame and guilt "has not fared well in empirical investigations" (1994: 3). Copjec is of the view that the division of the world between shame cultures and guilt cultures is a "thoroughly discredited sociological division" (2007: 61). According to this distinction, as Joan Copjec (2007: 61) has written, guilt is an affect of advanced cultures that have developed "an internal principle of morality", whereas shame belongs to a "primitive culture" which is forced to rely "on the approving or disapproving gaze of other people to monitor morality".Ĭopjec contests the way in which the affects of shame and guilt are used to distinguish between cultures, because, as she writes, these affects define "a subject's relation to her culture", not the cultures themselves. This decline of shame is often attributed to the distinction between guilt and shame, which would have it that modernity inaugurates a culture of guilt, whereas shame remains reserved for societies that have not yet emerged out of pre-modernity. "here is no longer any shame", Lacan (2007: 182) remarked in closing Seminar XVII in the atmosphere of May 1968. The purpose of this article is to contribute - from a Lacanian point of view - to the renovation of a discourse of shame which, in our capitalist societies, has been in significant decline. Keywords: shame, superego, ego-ideal, death drive As such, shame is designated not only as the telos of psychoanalysis, but also as the original and originary ethical relation. Correlated to the death drive, shame offers an escape from the capitalist symbolic order's predeterminations and pre-assigned identifications. In the concluding parts of the essay, I tease out the radical socio-political consequences of a renovated Lacanian discourse of shame. Under the dialectical pressure of the ego-ideal, the superego, it is argued, plays a paradoxical but ineliminable role in the production of shame. The essay extends the Lacanian notion that shame is felt in relation to an "Other prior to the Other". The argument holds that shame is a subjective manifestation of a complex dialectics between the ego-ideal and the superego.
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E-mail: essay argues that the renovation of a discourse of shame in late capitalist society requires revisiting the conventional Freudian literature on shame from a Lacanian point of view. Prof J Barnard-Naudé, Department of Private Law, Faculty of Law, Kramer Law Building, Middle Campus, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700. An ordeal of the Real: shame and the superego