The Shame of Being Human

Abstract

This essay develops the question of shame in the context of the memory of atrocities. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze’s claim on the shame of being man, it offers a literary and aesthetic critique of war and violence in order to cast a poetic light over the politics of shame. Addressing specifically how shame functions politically in the development of the liberal conception of humanity, it makes the case for critiquing the violence of the past through the art of the political, which is to say—the poetic field of interruption that is open to a politics to come.