Unraveling the Meaning of Survivor Shame

Unraveling the Meaning of Survivor Shame Alba Montes Sánchez & Dan Zahavi Center for Subjectivity Research University of Copenhagen This book chapter is published at: Montes Sanchez, A & Zahavi, D 2018, Unravelling the meaning of survivor shame. in T Brudholm & J Lang (eds), Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 162-184. Please quote only from published version. Abstract Shame, especially the so-called “survivor shame,” is one of the central emotions associated with the plight of genocide survivors and victims of atrocities. In our contribution, we will examine the experiential and ethical aspects of shame, and argue that any attempt to understand the shame of victims and survivors will require a careful differentiation between varieties of shame, on the one hand, and the temporality of these phenomena, on the other. Furthermore, we suggest that a good way to shed light on survivor shame is conceiving it as a non-uniform process unfolding over time. 1. Introduction In reading literature on mass atrocity, be it testimonies, academic studies, or artistic elaborations of those experiences, it is not uncommon to come across shame: confessions of it, descriptions of it, attempts to hide it and so on. Typically, however, it does not arise where one would expect to find it, and its meaning is far from straightforward. This alone makes it a relevant object of study for anyone investigating mass atrocity. Furthermore, shame is an emotion that has everything to do with self-identity, self-image and group identification, it touches directly on issues of who I am and how the other sees me, as well as who we are and how others see us. As such, understanding shame and dealing with it is often crucial for a whole range of processes that take place in the aftermath of mass atrocity, from therapeutic assistance 1 to the survivors to political rebuilding of societies and handling of collective memory, just to name a few. This task is made even more difficult by the fact that, as therapists know only too well, shame typically tries to hide itself: people who feel shame usually avoid talking about it and often deploy all kinds of psychological strategies to avoid even acknowledging it to themselves, so there is a real danger that shame dynamics may play hidden destructive roles without anyone being able to address them (on this topic, see e.g. Schwab 2010). For all these reasons, shame should be of interest for anyone investigating mass atrocity. As we will show in a moment, the topic of shame in relation to mass atrocity is very wide and has multiple facets and dimensions. In this chapter, we cannot address them all. We rather aim at throwing some light on the experiential and ethical aspects of one of the most baffling varieties of shame in the context of mass atrocity: survivor shame. We begin by discussing three subject positions (victim, bystander, perpetrator)1 and explain why we focus on survivor shame. We then review and discuss the analyses of survivor shame offered by two influential authors, Giorgio Agamben and Ruth Leys. We subsequently move to our own account of survivor shame, by contrasting it with related phenomena such as embarrassment and humiliation. Our central idea is that what has typically been labelled as survivor shame (or even survivor guilt, when they are seen as competing characterizations) cannot be fully understood without carefully distinguishing between peri-traumatic and post-traumatic phenomena, on the one hand, and between different members of the shame-family of emotions, on the other. Survivor shame is importantly a posttraumatic phenomenon, but not a uniform one. We suggest that it might be illuminating to think of it as a process that involves the interplay of different elements (cf. Goldie 2012, chap. 3). 2. Shame and mass atrocity: relevant subject positions Shame is often invoked as a prominent emotion in the context of genocide and mass atrocity, as an emotion that either is felt or ought to be felt by anybody who is involved in those horrid acts in any of three subject positions: victim, perpetrator or bystander. First, survivors of traumatising events often report feeling shame in connection to what happened to them; and these feelings are among the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Second, shame is often mentioned as one of the appropriate emotions that passive bystanders ought to feel when faced 1 These positions can be “extended” in various ways. They can be collectivized, i.e. applied to groups, which can be understood or understand themselves as being, for instance, collectively victims or perpetrators of mass atrocities; and they can be extended in time, in the sense of being inherited, such that they give rise to “derived” positions, like beneficiaries or descendants. The issues of collective trauma and collective responsibility (including collective guilt and shame) and their consequences for subsequent generations are of the utmost importance, especially for transitional justice and reconstruction purposes, but they fall outside the scope of this chapter. 2 with mass atrocities. Examples of this can be found in the discussions of the ordinary Germans that let the Holocaust happen or the Western nations that failed to stop the Rwandan genocide (cf. e.g., Bauman 1989; Hutchinson 2008). Admittedly, by these lights the category of “bystander” is very wide, and would include everyone from next-door neighbours of victims to TV spectators separated by huge distances from them, or even people who learn about the atrocities long after they have been committed (cf. Geras 1998). We acknowledge that there are important differences among those positions, but for our current purposes, it is not necessary to go into detail about them. A third category would be the shame of perpetrators, or as it is more frequently highlighted, their notorious lack of it or their subterfuges to avoid it (cf. e.g., Shapiro 2003; Lang 1990, 40–44). This schematic picture could lead us to think that we are dealing with two very distinct varieties of shame: post-traumatic shame, as a pathological phenomenon, a symptom of PTSD, an unfitting (and in this sense, irrational) and morally unjustified sense of inferiority and debasement induced by a deeply humiliating experience; and moral shame, a fitting and morally justified emotional response to a moral transgression, linked to the subject’s own actions or omissions. In this picture, the shame of the survivor would be of a completely different kind when compared to the shame of the bystander or of the perpetrator (if he happened to be ashamed), and they would call for two clearly distinct approaches. On the one hand, survivor shame would be a destructive and unjustified feeling of inferiority arising from severe abuse, and as such, something that the survivor ought not to feel and needs to overcome as a part of the healing process. On the other hand, the moral shame of perpetrators and bystanders would be fitting and justified to varying degrees by their immoral actions or omissions, and it could be regarded as a potentially morally constructive emotion, that signals that these people understand and share moral standards, understand they have transgressed them, and as a result assess themselves negatively. In this sense, it would be a potentially constructive emotion that could help these people change for the better (although not everyone would agree on the constructive potential of shame, but this is a separate issue). This differentiation between the traumatic shame of the survivor and the moral shame of the bystander can be helpful to a certain extent, but it is far too neat and stereotyped to capture faithfully the actual phenomena. For one, moral and traumatic causes of shame are not mutually exclusive, and they can be found in all three subject positions. In saying this, we do not mean to conflate the phenomena or the subject positions as if they were the same: there are of course crucial differences between them; we simply mean to stress the complexity of shame. On the one hand, perpetrators and bystanders can be traumatised by the violence they are exerting or witnessing, and many of them go on to develop PTSD. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of organised mass atrocities undergo forms of “training” which are nothing short of traumatising, and which are geared at twisting their psyches to make them capable of unspeakable cruelty, for instance, by instilling in them an 3 exaggerated sense of pride and superiority over their victims and highlighting values like strength, dominance and resistance to pain (often with ‘exercises’ that involve attempting to resist torture, cf. Shapiro 2003, 1147; Conroy 2000, 93–95). This makes them, among other things, despise their victims, feel contempt for their weakness and become shameless before them (Shapiro 2003, 1147). Again, with this remark we do not aim to excuse or justify their actions by any means, we simply wish to highlight that traumatic and moral causes often co-occur. On the other hand, there is a crucial moral element to survivor shame too, an element that cannot be subsumed under the pathological, because it rightly tracks the values and human relations at stake.2 Consider Primo Levi’s much quoted passage about the Soviet soldiers that liberated Auschwitz, which refers both to the shame of the bystander and the shame of the victim (our emphasis): They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to witness or undergo an outrage: the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense. (Levi 1989, 72–73) What does Levi mean when he says that the shame of the soldiers when coming to face the survivors of Auschwitz was “the same shame” that the prisoners themselves knew so well? In which sense is it “the same”? One answer could be that Levi is talking in both cases about the same type of shame: bystander shame. What Levi would be saying is that in genocide, at least in the Nazi camps, every victim was also a bystander, a passive observer of the extreme abuse endured by her neighbours. There is an element of embarrassment and of what we will later discuss under the heading of discretion shame, that accompanies this direct witnessing, a sense that one has violated the other’s dignity and privacy by seeing her in a position of subjugation. In these circumstances, survivor shame would acquire clearly moral overtones. But further, the acts of genocide and torture constitute a vicious attack on the very personhood and dignity of the victims, so their traumatic shame has a moral element at the intrapersonal level too. 2 If “pathological” is merely understood as meaning something that causes a kind of suffering that severely impairs the subject’s regular interactions with the world and others, we have no objections to the use of this adjective. The problems start when, as explained above, “pathological” is understood as meaning “crazy” in a pejorative sense, i.e. irrational, which might lead to disregard or misconstrue the moral significance of these emotions. See below. 4 These aspects are compatible with interpreting survivor shame as a symptom of PTSD, but they also clearly suggest that an account in purely pathological terms is not sufficient to understand the experience and the meaning of survivor shame. Survivor shame can be self-destructive, but in our view, it should be regarded as more than the symptom of a disorder. It is an emotion that connects whoever feels it to a world of moral value, and as such it might be preferable to no shame at all, particularly if the lack of shame is the result of a serious impairment or obliteration of the capacity to feel shame. This is not to be understood as a praise of toxic or self-destructive shame; we readily acknowledge its damaging power and potential for fatal consequences (cf. e.g., Goldblatt 2014, 262; Bryan et al. 2013; Baumeister 1990). We simply mean to shed light on the moral and existential meaning of survivor shame, which has been highlighted by many survivors themselves (cf. Levi 1989; Bauman 1989, 204–5), but which gets blurred if one approaches it as a purely irrational (pathological) phenomenon. This, of course, is only a first approach to the complications surrounding the issue, and in what follows we offer a more detailed account of survivor shame. We have chosen to focus on survivor shame because we take it to be the most baffling and most intriguing type of the three, as well as the one easiest to dismiss as being irrational and having no moral value. This conclusion is not satisfactory because of the abovementioned complexity, but also because, as Corbí (2012) argues, it amounts to dismissing the survivors’ experiences and their moral meaning as irrelevant, which inadvertently serves the purposes of the perpetrator by ignoring the victims’ experiences and silencing their voices. Understanding survivor shame is tantamount to comprehending a crucial aspect of the harm that mass atrocity inflicts on individuals and communities. Furthermore, as Margaret Walker argues in her chapter in this volume, the hope for understanding is essential for survivors to (re)construct a liveable world after their ordeal. As she emphasizes, this has been acknowledged in the development of the concept of a “right to truth”, which crucially entails listening to and taking seriously survivors’ testimonies. Indeed, as Levi (1996, 9) expresses, being listened to is one of the main aspirations of survivors. In our view, any therapeutic approach to survivor shame must bear this in mind. However, vindicating the moral import of survivor shame ought not to leave us with an account that implies that survivors who don’t feel shame are morally at fault. In this sense, it is important to distinguish between fittingness (having reason to feel something) and moral obligation: having reason to feel an emotion does not automatically imply that one has a moral obligation to feel that way. Many alternative responses might be fitting and meaningful, and yet not all of them (if any) will be required by morality. In any case, it should be clear by now that the meaning of a complex phenomenon like survivor shame is not straightforward, and even authors who consider it valuable in some sense strongly disagree on how to cash this out. Let us see if we can shed some light on the issue by carefully analysing the experience of survivor shame. 5 3. Survivor shame according to Agamben and Leys Shame is typically characterized as a distressing, often very painful, emotion, where we feel faulty and unworthy, defective, exposed and vulnerable. The intentional object of the emotion is not the situation or action that gives rise to the shame episode, but the one who is ashamed. Shame is reflexive, in the sense of being directed back at oneself, and that is why it has often been labeled as a “self-conscious emotion” or as an “emotion of self-assessment.” Another key aspect highlighted by many authors is the extent to which shame might be seen as a response to the censoring gaze of a real, an imagined or an internalized audience (see, e.g. Williams 2008; Sartre 2003; Maibom 2010). To that extent, shame might also be characterized as a distinct “social emotion.” The tension some authors perceive between characterizations of shame as selfconscious and shame as social have been the object of lively debates in recent years. We believe that an approach to shame rooted in the phenomenological tradition, which focuses on investigating the structures of experience, can help resolve this tension. Thus, the account of shame we favor is, roughly speaking, a Sartrean one: rather than labeling shame as either a self-conscious emotion or as a social emotion, we ought to recognize that it is both. It is an emotion that exemplifies social selfconsciousness and reveals our relationality, our being-for-others (cf. Zahavi 2012; 2014; Montes Sánchez 2014). According to Sartre, the experience of shame exemplifies a form of selfconsciousness that intrinsically involves a relation to another subject. He calls this our being-for-others. Consider his famous example (Sartre 2003, 286): a man is looking through a keyhole, spying on someone. In this moment, his experience is directed at the scene he is observing; he is not focusing on himself at all. His awareness of himself is tacit, non-thematic or, as many phenomenologists express it, “prereflective”. The man could later report on what he himself had been doing, precisely because he wasn’t entirely unaware of it in the first instance. At some point, however, the man hears a noise in the corridor behind him (perhaps someone is approaching and has seen him spying) and he is overcome by shame. At this point his selfexperience changes completely: he comes to focus on himself and he no longer experiences himself as the perceiving subject, but as the potential object of somebody else’s experience. The external and objective dimension of self revealed in shame is a dimension that escapes my control. Sartre also characterizes shame as an existential alienation occasioned by my encounter with the other (Sartre 2003, 286, 292, 320), and claims that shame reveals to me that I exist for, and am visible to, others. This is precisely why we have described it as an emotion of social self-consciousness. All of this is not to say that one only feels shame when a discrediting fact about oneself is exposed to others. One can certainly feel shame alone, that is, shame does not require an actual observer or audience (perhaps the noise in the corridor was just a 6 draft slamming a door). But even when others aren’t factually present or explicitly imagined, their evaluating perspectives will play a role in the structure of the emotion. Consider how both self-consciousness (focus on self, centripetality) and sociality (exposure, lack of control) are present in some key features of shame. Shame is characterized by a heightened feeling of exposure and vulnerability, and by an accompanying wish to hide and disappear, to sink into the ground. The behavioural manifestation of shame – slumped posture, downward head movement and gaze-avoidance – also emphasize the centripetality of the emotion. The experience of shame is an experience of self, but it is one that is thrust upon us. We are in the spotlight whether we want it or not. Although one can be ashamed of moral infractions, shame doesn’t have to be brought about by something one wilfully does (or fails to do). One can feel ashamed of a physical disability or of one’s parentage or skin colour. In every case, however, shame is experienced as revealing an undesirable truth about oneself. One that leads to a decrease of self-esteem and self-respect. Shame is difficult to communicate, and we lack the inclination to let others in on it (in order to obtain their sympathy and consolation), in part because exposure tends to heighten the intensity of shame. Moreover, although shame might be induced by our encounter with a specific other, we are not merely shamed vis-à-vis him or her. Our relationship to everybody is affected. Rather than simply involving a global decrease of self-esteem and self-confidence, shame is also essentially characterized by the way it affects and alters our relationship to and connectedness with others in general. “Survivor shame” is the term used specifically to refer to the shame felt by survivors of mass atrocity, genocide and abuse: shame about having been a victim, about having been abused and violated. It is, therefore, an emotion that arises after the violation, not while it is taking place (cf. Budden 2009). This phenomenon is so frequent that it is listed on various diagnostic manuals as a typical symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).3 Now, why should anyone feel ashamed of that? Why should survivors feel faulty and reproach themselves of anything, when the blame rightly belongs to the perpetrator? Some authors who have tried to understand this stress the link between the lack of agency and passivity, and the sense of inferiority. Heidi Maibom (2010), drawing on evolutionary anthropologists such as Fessler (2007; also Budden 2009), argues that the best way to understand survivor shame is to look at the evolutionary history of this emotion. From this perspective, shame is taken to descend from a proto-emotion in non-human animals that live in hierarchical social structures of dominance, where 3 In this sense, it should be noted that so-called “survivor shame” does not only affect victims of abuse, but is more generally associated with trauma from various sources. It is, for example, rather common among veteran soldiers (cf. Bryan et al. 2013). 7 assuming and displaying inferiority can serve as a mechanism of appeasement and social cohesion when confronting a hierarchical superior. This mechanism would have gained complexity and depth in human groups, which are organized in more horizontal and collaborative ways, in prestige structures that increase the importance of peers’ favourable opinions, and thus it would have developed into the human emotion of shame. Indeed, Fessler (2007) proposes that two logics can be at work in shame: there would be a primitive “subordinance shame” connected to the acknowledgement of one’s own inferior social status (and thus to hierarchy and power relations), and a more modern and complex “social acceptability shame” connected to acknowledgement of the self’s failure to conform to social norms and expectations. According to Maibom (2010) and Budden (2009), both logics would be involved in survivor shame, but the most baffling aspects of it would be explained by the more primitive logic of subordinance shame, which would explain how subjugation can cause shame through no fault of the victim (and incidentally also why perpetrators tend not to feel shame, very much in line with Shapiro 2003). Now, we have as such no quarrels with the evolutionary explanation offered, and it has the virtue of highlighting two aspects that are often absent from or marginal to other accounts: subordination and passivity, as well as stressing the relational element. But the account doesn’t go very far in terms of elucidating the experience of survivor shame and its meaning. It confines survivor shame to the domain of the irrational, since what would be the point of a continuing appeasement response when the aggressor is no longer present? Moreover, it cannot say much regarding the ethical dimension that Levi and many (albeit not all) other survivors of mass violence perceived in it. By contrast, Giorgio Agamben (1999) sought to make ethical sense of survivor shame. To do so, he relied on the analysis of shame offered by Emmanuel Lévinas in his essay On Escape. In this essay, shame is understood as one of the key phenomena that discloses to oneself the “fundamental insufficiency at the heart of the human condition” (Lévinas 2003, 126). According to Lévinas (2003, 63–64), the feeling of shame is not about being inadequate or unable to fit into a set paradigm, it is not about a flaw we can fix, it is about discovering that insufficiency and vulnerability are constitutive of our very being and can never be left behind, however much we may wish or struggle to escape from them. In Remnants of Auschwitz, where Agamben draws on Lévinas, Agamben is looking for a way of thinking of ethics after Auschwitz in non-legalistic terms. Guilt and responsibility, according to him, are notions that are indissolubly linked to the law, and, in his view, the law is clearly insufficient to solve the ethical issues raised by the Holocaust. According to Agamben, the camps were conceived as factories for the production of desubjectified individuals who could no longer be bearers of political rights, and whose killing, therefore, would not count as murder. Indeed, this 8 logic of dehumanization of the victims can be seen at play in many other instances of genocide and mass violence, where victims are presented as a pernicious plague, so that killing them becomes not only legitimate, but good, a service to the community (cf. e.g., Hatzfeld 2008 on the Rwandan genocide). Agamben’s worry therefore is that nothing in the concept of a person or of human rights offers adequate resistance to that project of dehumanization. In search for an adequate site of resistance, Agamben turns to the testimonies of Primo Levi and Robert Antelme, and reads them through Lévinas’ essay. The advantage that, according to Agamben, shame presents in this context, as opposed to guilt, is that shame is tied to the body, to the irreducibility of the embodied and situated self, and not to the moral law. The shame of the victim of a dehumanizing attack attests, according to Agamben, to the irreducibility of her humanity. So, what is the structure of shame such that it can attest to our humanity? Lévinas, in Agamben’s view, gave us the key to answering this: the disclosure of our fundamental insufficiency. Human beings are such that they can be dehumanized, as the Nazis did to their prisoners, but the very act of dehumanization and desubjectification reveals the subject that is implied in it. The blush of the student singled out randomly for execution during a death march, as reported by Antelme (1992, 231), the shame of the surviving prisoners after the selections for the gas chambers that Levi (1989, 72–3) tells us about, and the survivor shame they feel after liberation, all attest to this. This is a reaction of resistance that shows the presence of what is being destroyed. Only a subject can be desubjectified. Agamben describes shame as a simultaneous movement of subjectification and desubjectification, as a moment when the subject bears witness to her own desubjectification, when the human being bears witness to her own inhumanity.4 The shame of the victim and of the survivor attests to this irreducible core. Agamben (1999, 128) goes on to say that shame, therefore, is “the hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness”. This irreducible core of otherwise vulnerable humanity is the fundamental element of the “new ethical material” (Agamben 1999, 69, 104) that can allow us to address these horrors adequately. Now, Agamben’s discussion of ethics after Auschwitz involves many complexities and dimensions that we cannot address here, so we will not examine further his general conclusions (for extensive discussions, cf. Guenther 2012; Welz 2011; Leys 2007, chap. 5; Hutchinson 2008, chap. 2). But we do take issue with his conception of shame, which, as we will show in what follows, conflates different phenomena and obscures the intersubjective dimension of the emotion. Agamben’s arguments are built on several key passages from Levi’s Auschwitz trilogy and on one specific passage from Antelme’s The Human Race, where Antelme (1992, 231) describes a young student who blushed in being singled out for execution during a death march. One of the first things that can be said is that whereas Levi 4 The notion of bearing witness in this context is a complex philosophical problem that falls outside of the scope of our study. For pragmatic reasons, here we simply reproduce the terminological choice of Agamben’s translator, Daniel Heller-Roazen. 9 mostly talks about survivor shame of the kind that has the mixed component that we mentioned above, Antelme is describing the expression of what in clinical terms would be called a peri-traumatic emotion. In studying PTSD, clinicians distinguish between peri-traumatic and post-traumatic emotions, i.e. the emotions felt while the traumatising event was taking place, and the emotions that come and endure after the fact. Thus, “survivor shame” would be a post-traumatic emotion, while the emotion of the blushing student would be a peri-traumatic one. As Welz remarks (cf. 2011, 78– 80, where she quotes Taylor 1985) the phenomenal features and the ethical significance of these emotions are not the same. Secondly, it is not even clear that Antelme is describing shame. Hutchinson (2008, 60, 73–74) has argued that the blush here is better interpreted as a sign of embarrassment, and Leys (2007, 175) and Welz (2011, 75), referring back to Antelme’s original French for clarification, talk about the student being confused, muddled or crestfallen, something more akin to embarrassment than to shame. Agamben’s failure to respect the difference between these two emotions, and his general negligence of intersubjectivity makes him offer an individualistic account of shame, which pays little attention to the abusive relation with the perpetrator (cf. Guenther 2012, 61). This seems to reduce the whole ethical meaning of shame in these situations to a realization that human beings, or rather I, can be dehumanized and become inhuman. But there is no explanation of what that actually means and how it happens. Guenther (2012, 68–9) argues that dehumanization happens through an abuse and exploitation of our constitutive relationality, that the kind of harm that shame highlights is harm withstood by our intersubjective self. We agree, since we have both argued that shame is an emotion of social self-consciousness (Zahavi 2014; Montes Sánchez 2014). This aspect is entirely overlooked in Agamben’s account. All in all, his approach to survivor shame misses too many nuances and conflates too many aspects to be deemed satisfactory. In our next section, we will seek to articulate a more detailed picture of the phenomena. Now, for her part, Ruth Leys finds problematic precisely what Agamben sees as a virtue: that an emphasis on survivor shame diminishes the relevance of responsibility. In her book From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, Leys seeks to explain why, in looking at the plight of trauma victims, American psychiatry has shifted the focus from guilt to shame as symptoms of PTSD. According to Leys (2007, chap. 2), the concept of survivor guilt appeared as such after World War II, when efforts were made to describe the psychological damage that survivors of the Nazi camps endured as a result of their imprisonment. Partly because these efforts were led by psychoanalysts, and guilt has traditionally been regarded as a central pathogenic emotion in psychoanalysis, the feelings of strong self-reproach and inadequacy reported by many survivors were interpreted predominantly in terms of guilt rather than shame. 10 According to the standard definition, the main difference between shame and guilt lies in their objects of focus: shame focuses on the ashamed self, while guilt focuses on our behavior. In shame we feel bad about the way we are, about some characteristic or feature of ours, while in guilt we feel bad about our actions or omissions, about having done something wrong, broken a norm or harmed somebody. According to the psychoanalytic story (cf. Leys 2007, 40–47), survivor guilt is the product of an unconscious identification with the aggressor; an identification that in turn is seen as a consequence of the survivor’s loving and hostile oedipal impulses toward the lost love object. “Identification was thus defined as a mechanism of defense motivated by oedipal desire, a mechanism that was thought to come to the subject’s aid as a means of coping with his own murderous impulses that had been simultaneously revived and repressed at the time of the loved and hated parent’s death” (Leys 2007, 46). Already from the start, these ideas were criticized because they seem to imply that the victim was colluding with her aggressor, and so they seem to shift part of the blame on to the victim (Leys 2007, 22). This, of course, was not the intention of the therapists who proposed the mechanism, but since the concept of guilt implies a transgression and has a legal counterpart, it seems to call for a distinction between justified and unjustified guilt feelings, between ‘authentic’ and ‘neurotic’ guilt (cf. Leys 2007, 41–42, 49–55). This line of criticism eventually led to a shift from guilt to shame, since explaining the survivor’s self-reproach in terms of shame does not seem to require any kind of identification with the aggressor: it merely would imply the sense of being singled out, looked at and objectified. Some of the main representatives of this shift, taken to its ultimate consequences, would be Agamben (1999) and Sedgwick (cf. Sedgwick and Frank 1995). However, the shift from guilt to shame is also interpreted by Leys as symptomatic of a reaction against psychoanalysis and of a tendency to think about emotions not in relation to their meaning, but in terms of non-cognitive bodily processes. The focus would not be on why we feel something, but on how it feels. Shame, in Leys’s view, renders itself to that kind of paradigm much more easily than guilt. Furthermore, emphasizing shame over guilt invites us to focus on what we are as opposed to what we have done (Leys 2007, 13, 131, 186). Questions of agency, intention and meaning are, according to Leys, pushed to the side and issues of self and personal identity are privileged. The problem Leys sees in this approach is that it comes at the moral price of diluting responsibility. Shame can focus on many features over which one has no direct voluntary control: innate characteristics, things that befall one, and so on, that is, things one is not morally accountable for, things one couldn’t have done otherwise. Thus, in Leys’ view, a focus on shame and identity jeopardizes the chances of a dialogue about what is moral and what is not (Leys 2007, 186). Now, one of the main problems with Leys’ analysis is that it may invite one to think that all accounts of (survivor) shame share the same flaws. It is true that the authors she criticizes are interested in conceptualizing affects in general, and shame in 11 particular, as mere material bodily processes, with no connection to meaning. But it is certainly not true that all authors who are interested in studying shame in general and survivor shame in particular subscribe to that materialist, anti-intentionalist agenda (the authors of this chapter clearly do not). Indeed, as Leys herself states in a subsequent interview, many philosophers interested in emotion do not subscribe to these views (Leys and Goldman 2010, 677–78). The efforts of thinkers so varied as Scheler (1957), Williams (2008), Lévinas (2003), Deonna, Rodogno and Teroni (2011) or Hutchinson (2008), among many others, to grapple with the complexities of shame have to do with understanding its meaning and mapping its connection to responsibility and moral accountability, not with denying it. More generally speaking, it is quite unclear why an interest in selfhood or personal identity or in what an individual experiences or feels should entail an abandonment of interest in intentionality and meaning. Leys has repeatedly suggested that an emphasis on shame implies an emphasis on individuality as a pure, incommensurable difference, quite regardless of what theory of self or personal identity one subscribes to (Leys 2007, 11–12, 186). This is clearly wrong, however. Various contemporary accounts of selfhood and personal identity emphasize the role of meaning and normative commitments (cf. C. Taylor 1992; Schechtman 1996; Korsgaard 2009, etc.). Moreover, as we have both argued in previous publications, shame is a powerful example of a self-conscious emotion that reveals the exposed and social (in)visibility of the self (cf. Zahavi 2012; 2014; Montes Sánchez 2014). In shame, I become painfully aware of my objective dimension, I become aware that I can be an object of somebody else’s experience. This does not mean that I am a thing that can be described from the outside; it means that who I am is partially determined by my relation to another. Shame is relational, and its crucial meaning and its crucial value consist in revealing oneself as relational and dependent on others. This takes us back to our criticism of Agamben: shame cannot be understood as solipsistic, since the shamed self, the self of shame, is an essentially relational being that depends on others for its very existence. The underlying theory of selfhood does make a crucial difference to the interpretation of shame: we do not seek to emphasize pure difference as a tool for identity creation, we seek to emphasize relationality as a source of claims of responsibility and accountability that rest on mutual interdependence. Perhaps Leys might retort that this is precisely her motivation for emphasizing guilt, since she has talked about the relevance of intersubjectivity to understand emotions, but we believe that an exclusive focus on guilt would be too narrow. With its connection to the law, transgression and agency, guilt alone cannot fully capture all the subtleties of the self-evaluation that is a part of the survivor experience (especially not if one does not subscribe to the psychoanalytic story). But then again, certain ways of construing shame, like Agamben’s, might share a similar problem. In a 12 context such as this, it is crucial not to flatten out the phenomena at play. Let us now offer a more nuanced picture of the shame of victims and survivors. 4. Shame and related emotions in the plight of victims and survivors As we have already suggested, any plausible account of shame has to recognize its complex and multifaceted character. Not only must shame be situated within a family of related emotions, but it is ultimately also necessary to distinguish distinct forms of shame. Let us consider each of these challenges in turn. How should one distinguish shame, embarrassment and humiliation? To start with, let us express our agreement with Miller, when she observes that concepts like shame or embarrassment are not as effortlessly applied to experiences as concepts like door or table are applied to objects, and that one should therefore not assume that the emotion terms designate absolutely clear and well-bounded categories of experience (Miller 1985, 28). The fact that the same event can be felt as humiliating, shameful, or embarrassing by different people doesn’t make things easier. But although we have to reckon with a certain degree of fuzziness, it is still possible to point to certain important differences. Embarrassment has to do with social awkwardness, with unwanted attention, and with a felt uncertainty vis-à-vis others. It involves a reference to the impression one makes on others in a given situation, which is why one cannot feel embarrassed on one’s own. Embarrassment is usually considered a less painful and shattering experience than shame, and is not accompanied by a decrease of self-esteem or selfrespect and by some perceived flaw or defect of self. Given its relation to a concrete context or situation, the feeling of embarrassment can often be alleviated by simply removing oneself from the embarrassing situation. When discussing Antelme’s description of the young student who blushed when he was singled out for execution, Welz (2011, 75–6) interprets it as embarrassment mainly because, in her view, the blushing was merely a spontaneous reaction to a particularly horrific and absurd form of unwanted attention. Shame is in many ways different. It typically persists even when the shameinducing situation has changed or ceased. It is felt as more painful and unbearable, and is taken to reveal or disclose some overshadowing truth about one’s own being. This is also why it in contrast to embarrassment (and social awkwardness) isn’t really felt as an annoying hindrance or irritating limitation, but as something that is justified and deserved.5 Levi, for example, describes a situation where he and his fellow prisoners felt deep shame in Auschwitz, after being forced to witness the hanging of a 5 Given this analysis, we must disagree with Nir Eisikovits’ account of the relation between shame and embarrassment in the present volume. 13 prisoner who had collaborated in the successful attempt to blow up one of the Birkenau crematoriums. When the prisoner came on the gallows, just before being hanged, he shouted: Kameraden, ich bin der Letzt! (Comrades, I am the last one!). Levi’s subsequent words show how deep and deserved he feels his shame to be: “I wish I could say that from the midst of us, an abject flock, a voice rose, a murmur, a sign of assent. But nothing happened … At the foot of the gallows the SS watch us pass with indifferent eyes: their work is finished, and well finished. The Russians can come now: there are no longer any strong men among us, the last one is now hanging above our heads … they will only find us, the slaves, the worn-out, worthy of the unarmed death which awaits us. … Alberto and I went back to the hut, and we could not look each other in the face. … now we are oppressed by shame.” (Levi 1996, 14950; 1989, 77-78). Both shame and embarrassment often have a protective and forward-looking character. Romance languages refer to this with words related to the Latin pudor, a concept that different authors have tried to capture as “discretion shame” (Schneider 1977) or the “sense of shame” (Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2011). This refers to the particular kind of sensitivity or tact that allows us to protect ourselves and, importantly, also others, from embarrassing and shameful situations. It allows us to avoid putting ourselves or putting others in a shameful position, to protect both our own dignity and intimacy and theirs. The torturers of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq knew well that the presence of an audience can bring about or greatly intensify an experience of shame. They exploited this, by making prisoners watch the humiliations inflicted upon other prisoners, thereby shaming both sides, the direct victims and the forced onlookers (cf. Leys 2007, 1–4). Humiliation usually involves a temporary alteration of status – one is put in a lowered or degraded position – rather than a more enduring change of identity. Moreover, it usually comes about, not because you yourself are doing anything, but because somebody else is doing something to you. In that sense, it usually requires another agent, one with power over you. Whereas people tend to believe (in some cases quite wrongly, of course) that their shame is deserved and justified, they do not necessarily believe they deserve their humiliation. This is also why humiliation frequently involves a focus on the harmful and unfair other, and why it might be accompanied by a desire for revenge (Gilbert 1998). The sense of injustice and outrage that accompanies humiliation is clear in the testimony of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Francine Niyitegeka, who in a series of interviews strikes Hatzfeld as elegant, calm and dignified. At one point she says: “I do not think this will ever be over for me, to be so despised for having Tutsi blood. I think of my parents who had always felt hunted in Ruhengeri. I feel a sort of shame to have to spend a lifetime feeling hunted, simply for being what I am. The very moment my eyelids close shut on all of this, I weep inside, out of grief and humiliation.” (Hatzfeld 2008, 28). 14 However, as this quote also suggests, to humiliate someone is to attempt to assert and exert a particular insidious form of control over the person in question, since one seeks to manipulate the person’s self-esteem and self-assessment. A strong-minded and self-confident person, in a non-overwhelming and non-traumatic situation, might be able to maintain her own self-respect and not take on the fault that others attribute to her, but often the humiliated person will have difficulties keeping her identity uncontaminated by the humiliated status. She might feel soiled and burdened with an unwanted identity (which is clearly the case above, at least to some extent), and might even begin to blame herself and feel responsible for the status. In such cases, shame will follow. This is one of the reasons why people who have been subjected to various kinds of abuse might feel ashamed, though they are obviously the victims and not the perpetrators. Many of the testimonies of survivors of the Rwandan genocide collected by Hatzfeld (2008) show the (not always successful) struggles of survivors to prevent their feelings of humiliation from sliding into shame. The moment we start looking closer at shame it turns out, however, that matters are somewhat more complicated than just indicated. Compare by way of illustration the following examples: • A friend has asked you to watch over his food. In his absence, you consume it. When he returns and faces you, you feel guilty of your action, but also ashamed of having become the kind of person who would betray his trust. • You are weak and sick and soil yourself with diarrhea. You are ashamed because of your loss of control over your bodily functions, and ashamed because others are seeing you in this state. • Many years later, you remember how you during your incarceration watched your parents starve and are ashamed because you planned to steal their food. • You are forced to witness the denigration and humiliation of fellow prisoners and feel ashamed because of the public exposure of their loss of dignity. • You are being humiliated yourself and feel ashamed as a result. Be it because you internalize the other’s derogatory evaluation, or because you, say, out of fear of physical punishment, accept the humiliating situation and thereby come to exemplify a cowardice that you despise. As these different examples might illustrate, shame comes in different forms, and can become mixed with other emotions. As we have tried to argue elsewhere (Zahavi 2014; Montes Sánchez 2014), these different forms might be linked by a certain family resemblance, roughly in the Wittgensteinian sense that they share important characteristics that make them resemble each other and allow for relatively easy transitions between them (as we have argued for shame and humiliation), but there is 15 not a single central feature that links them all together necessarily. Thus understood, the shame family would include guilt as well, and indeed a feeling of guilt might be intelligible and fitting in some of the examples above. The resemblances among these phenomena make it tempting to try to lump them all together under a single label and find one explanation for all of them, but this temptation should be resisted. Before going deeper into survivor shame, let us emphasize once more that this is a post-traumatic phenomenon, and as such importantly different from the peri-traumatic ones. As the distinctions and examples above already suggest, some emotions, such as embarrassment and discretion shame, might be more likely to arise immediately as a response to the traumatic event as it happens, while others, such as guilt, might almost only be intelligible after the fact. One might argue that there is some form of shame in all of the above examples, but its precise characteristics vary for each case. Furthermore, one may add that some non-shame related phenomena, such as terror and fear, and eventually a general numbing of sensibilities (cf. Levi 1989, 75–76), are an omnipresent element in the victim’s experiences, but they later disappear or change shape dramatically. This, again, is one of the reasons why Agamben’s collapsing of the temporality of the emotions is so problematic. Turning our focus back on survivor shame specifically, these distinctions make it clear that it cannot be conceived as a unitary phenomenon. It has different shades and nuances that make a difference to anyone interested in its meaning. The shame that Levi described in connection with the hanging of “the last one” is very different from the shame-humiliation that Niyitegeka feels about being hunted for having Tutsi blood. Does this mean that we should stop talking about survivor shame and talk instead about a variety of emotions? The answer to this is both yes and no. Yes, since it is important and illuminating to keep a keen sense of the experiential differences and their meanings, and different terms can help us achieve that. No, because it is also important and illuminating to keep a sense of how closely related to each other these phenomena are, and why it is so easy for their boundaries to get blurry and slide into each other. A further reason might be that all of these emotional episodes hang together in a characteristic way. In this sense, survivor shame is a particularly good example of an emotion that is better understood as a process rather than a state, following the model that Goldie (2012, 56–75) proposed for grief. Goldie’s claim is that emotional experiences are not identical from beginning to end, but they change all the time, they unfold, and this dynamic process, not any specific phase of it, is the emotion. He argues that an emotion is “a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, that unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time” (Goldie 2012, 56). Later on, still using grief as an example, he unpacks the possible components that an emotion pattern may consist of: 16 [It] includes characteristic thoughts, judgments, feelings, memories, imaginings, actions, expressive actions, habitual actions, and much else besides, unfolding over time, but none of which is essential at any particular time. It involves emotional dispositions as well as particular experiences, and there will be characteristic interactions between these. ... The pattern is understandable as grief because it follows a characteristic shape, although it will be individual and particular to the person, and will no doubt be significantly shaped by cultural as well as biological influences. (Goldie 2012, 62) Survivor shame might be productively conceived as such a pattern with a characteristic shape, but with ample room for individual variations. This pattern will involve emotional episodes not only of shame, but also many others that are better described, for example, as guilt or humiliation, or hybrids of them. This might allow room to resolve the tension we introduced at the beginning, between approaches to survivor shame as pathological, which entail the tendency to think of it as irrational and therefore devoid of moral meaning (for more on this cf. Corbí 2012), and vindications of survivor shame as morally valuable, which might run the risk of implying that it should be cultivated, or that survivors who don’t feel it are morally at fault. Conceiving survivor shame as a process with many elements and ample room for individual variation makes it easier to discern between elements that might be selfdestructive, and elements that might be rightly tracking the values and human relations at stake, and therefore be morally valuable in some sense. Among the first, one might include the danger of a deep self-loathing that can lead to suicide (cf. Goldblatt 2014, 262; Baumeister 1990). Among the latter, one could list a recognition of shared standards and a minimal form of caring for others that attest to the presence of an ethical sensibility that has not been destroyed by the extreme humiliation endured. In order to illustrate what we have in mind here, consider the figure that Robin Dillon, discussing (idealized) types of shamelessness and their meaning, has called the “Shit-Eater”: … he views no behavior of his as degrading, beneath him, or unforgivable. There is nothing he won't do, no shit he won’t eat, in order to achieve his ends; or perhaps he just drifts along, gobbling whatever comes his way. He lacks a particular sort of standard: he has no bottom line, no “personal point of no return,” the crossing of which amounts to deep self-betrayal and a kind of self-destruction. (Dillon 1992, 129) Shame by contrast, indicates that there is a bottom line, a standard of self-value. Indeed, authors as diverse as Scheler (1957), Taylor (1985) and Deonna, Rodogno and Teroni (2011) all think that the key to shame is a self-value that we wish to protect. Someone without a bottom line or a standard of self-value would not be 17 ashamed by anything, would not find occasions for shame in any of the indignities of the camp (or anywhere else for that matter), which can certainly be regarded as a moral flaw, a sign of vileness and degradation. But the camps provided another cruel example of this in the Muselmänner, inmates who through torture, abuse and starvation were damaged to the point where that sensibility was (temporarily) lost, where bottom lines were no longer tenable, and who therefore had become living corpses more than persons (cf. Levi 1996, 90). The presence of shame indicates either that this state has not been reached, or that one has recovered and returned to a world of shame (cf. Welz 2011; Levi 1989, 77–8). According to Levi (1989), the shame of survivors (or their guilt feelings, or their shame-guilt, since he does not clearly distinguish between them and often refers to both at the same time) can have several sources. Examples of them can also be found in the Rwandan testimonies collected by Hatzfeld (2008), as well as in testimonies from other mass atrocities. The sources include: i) the state of real degradation in which the prisoners were forced to live (1989, 75); ii) their passivity in the face of their oppressors, i.e., the prisoner’s failure to fight or rebel against their conditions (1989, 76); iii) their failures of solidarity to other prisoners (1989, 78); iv) the suspicion that they might have survived in the place of another, a better or worthier person (1989, 81-82); and v) what he calls “the shame of the world” (1989, 85), which is roughly described in the passage about the Russian soldiers we quoted above: the shame of knowing that humanity is capable of horrors such as Auschwitz.6 All these sources of shame, humiliation and guilt have one thing in common: they contain a reference to decent human life and to what human beings owe to each other. They point to violations of those standards. Perhaps what shame attests to here is that, in situations of extreme coercion, where even the most basic moral behaviour becomes heroic, the normativity of what we owe to each other still asserts itself, and no degree of coercion can be experienced as a valid excuse to let certain things happen. This might be a pragmatically or instrumentally irrational thought, but it contains highly valuable insights on the strength of ethical normativity, the indelible character of harm and the limits of excuses. As Bauman writes towards the end of Modernity and the Holocaust: The issue is not whether those who survived, collectively – fighters who on occasion could not but be bystanders, bystanders who on occasion could not but fear to become victims – should feel ashamed, or whether they should feel proud of themselves. […] The choice is not between shame and pride. The choice is between the pride of morally purifying shame, and the shame of morally devastating pride. I am not sure how I would react to a stranger knocking on my door and asking me to sacrifice myself and my family to save his life. I have been 6 A more recent example is provided by the Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar, who in referring to the Tadmur Prison in Palmyra, said “Tadmur is a kingdom of death and madness. The fact that such place existed is a shame, not only on Syrians, but on all humanity,” (BBC News 2015). 18 spared such a choice. I am sure, however, that had I refused shelter, I would be fully able to justify to others and to myself that, counting the number of lives saved and lost, turning the stranger away was an entirely rational decision. I am also sure that I would feel that unreasonable, illogical, yet all-to-human shame. And yet I am sure, as well, that were it not for this feeling of shame, my decision to turn away the stranger would go on corrupting me till the end of my days (Bauman 1989, 205). While we fully agree with Bauman in emphasising the moral significance of shame in these situations, we resist the conclusion that moral shame is thereby irrational. The type of shame described by Bauman might indeed be opposed to purely calculating, instrumental rationality, but there are other forms or rationality, and, as we have argued, survivor shame can be a fitting response: a response that signals the incommensurability between the moral harm and the (im)possible excuses and “reparations” available to us. This is not an idea that we can pursue any further in this chapter (for more on this, cf. e.g., Levi 1989; Geras 1998; Hutchinson 2008; Guenther 2012); we simply want to emphasize that any approach to survivor shame also needs to keep this aspect in mind. In this chapter, we have argued that survivor shame is a complex, post-traumatic process, which should not be conflated with the peri-traumatic emotions of victims, and whose dangers and values can only be understood by distinguishing the various phenomena in the shame family that are at play in its unfolding over time. Flattening this complexity will only lead to an impoverished understanding of the emotional experience of survivor shame, and to further confusion about its moral significance. As testimonies show, survivor shame is often experienced as tense and contradictory, as unjustified in one sense, yet morally purifying in another. The distinctions we have provided clarify the sources of some of these contradictions and constitute a step towards unraveling the meaning of survivor shame. Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz. New York: Zone Books. Antelme, Robert. 1992. The Human Race: Preceded by an Homage to Robert Antelme by Edgar Morin. 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