A Strange Connectedness: On the Poetics and Uses of Shame In Contemporary Autobiography D i s s e r t a t i o n zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Philosophie in der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen vorgelegt von Jocelyn Elizabeth Parr aus Otahuhu, New Zealand 2016 Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Dekan: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt Hauptberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies Mitberichterstatter: Dr. Pascale Amiot (Université de Perpignan) Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 17. Dezember 2014 Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen: TOBIAS-Lib Abstract This dissertation studies the way that shame can be a pharmakon—a toxic affect or an intoxicating form—with as much potential to heal as it has to harm. I argue that shame informs, inspires, and limits contemporary forms of autobiography. I begin and end the dissertation with works of literary criticism that are loosely autobiographical autobiographical. Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling and Kate Zambreno's Heroines both aim to rebut traditional forms of literary criticism by writing in the form of memoir, thus generating a protective enclave for identities they call ‘minor’ (queer in the case of Cvetkovich, female in the case of Zambreno). Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station fictionalize their autobiographies thus questioning on both a fictional and a metafictional level whether or not anything—art, in particular—can have meaning. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets traces the shame of heartbreak, depression and longing across two hundred and forty propositions, all of which are in hot pursuit of something blue. Anne Carson's Nox articulates the various shames of personality, subjectivity and identification, but also how writing itself can gesture to a less domesticated kind of shame: to the physiology of a book that blushes, averts its gaze, hunches its shoulders. In the end, we return to literary criticism, and find shame at the very farthest reaches of subjectivity, where the subject, literary critic Timothy Bewes, writes about shame as an event in the context of the postcolonial. Taken together, these works start to paint a portrait of a self (and of a critic) that is better described in terms such as ‘becoming’ where subjectivity has about it something contingent or temporary, a kind of self, in other words, that has relinquished much of its authority and therefore its capacity to dominate. The effect of these works is a collective overturning of the subject as a starting point for ethics primarily because such a move seems necessary if we ever want to escape the subject-object structure that has supported centuries of systemic inequality. Acknowledgements For their intellectual support and encouragement, I am grateful to those who have read this work with an eye to its improvement: Ingrid Hotz-Davis, Pascale Amiot, Timothy Bewes, Jutta Kling and my colleagues at the kolloquium. For the love and friendship of those who supported the challenge of undertaking this work while living in four different countries over the course of three years, I am so thankful. Marko, Samara, Brent, Lindsay, Yana, Brian, Fannie, Amy, Fiona, Megan, Katia, Ryan, and, of course, Heather: wherever you have been, I have felt at home. For the new friends who made Tübingen a lovely place to be, especially Jutta, Becky and Gero who couldn’t have been more welcoming. For my brother and my parents. And for Carlos, who never fails to sweeten the bitter. Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 6 Genre as a source of Shame ............................................................................................................. 9 A Philosophical Shame: Shame as Structure in Being and Nothingness ................................... 11 Affect, Emotion, Intensity .............................................................................................................. 14 Kinds of Shame: Shame as Emotion, Shame as Intensity ........................................................... 17 Key ideas in Silvan Tomkins and Leon Wurmser ....................................................................... 18 Kinds of Autobiography and Theories of Selfhood ..................................................................... 22 Shame as Pharmakon ...................................................................................................................... 26 The Disappointments of Empathy: On Subjectivized Criticism ....................................... 31 Kate Zambreno’s Heroines ............................................................................................................ 34 Depression: A Public Feeling ......................................................................................................... 41 Intimate Publics and the Memoir as an Instance of Cruel Optimism ....................................... 49 The Unexpected Gifts of Shame and Contempt .................................................................. 55 On the Question of Autobiography and the Performed Self ...................................................... 57 Authentic Art in a World of Performance? ................................................................................. 65 Contempt and Ugliness as Freedom in How Should a Person Be? ............................................ 72 An essential shittiness at her core ................................................................................................. 76 Contempt and the Political ............................................................................................................ 80 Israel as Place .................................................................................................................................. 81 Shame as Commitment in Leaving the Atocha Station ............................................................... 83 Profundity in the Gaps: Poetry and Citizenship as Manifestations of Shame .......................... 83 Friendship ........................................................................................................................................ 90 Shame's Lyric: Maggie Nelson's Bluets ............................................................................... 94 On Shame and the Scholarly Girl: Anne Carson's Nox ................................................... 122 Nox As Autobiography ................................................................................................................. 143 Inadequacy and Transcendance: Shame’s Redemption .................................................. 151 Two Types of Shame ..................................................................................................................... 157 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 174 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 180 Introduction This most personal and solitary of emotions cements us into a social world, even as its experience is intensely isolating. Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame …a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre" No matter where it comes from, nor how long it lasts, nor even if one thinks of it as a feeling—like sadness— or a form—like the novel—shame is a figure of inadequacy and isolation in the midst of what matters most. American literary theorist Eve K. Sedgwick describes shame’s paradoxical movement as one that pulls us in opposing directions: “toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality" (Touching Feeling 36). Shame’s oppositional forces pull us apart, rendering us open, exposed, and vulnerable. It is typical to think of shame in association with social failures such as weakness or deviance, but this dissertation looks at the way shame expands far beyond such categories. There are individual shames which reflect society’s imprint and those which are utterly idiosyncratic, reflecting the special hopes and dreams we have for ourselves and the way we, perhaps too often, betray them. Sedgwick beautifully describes shame’s flexibility: Shame…is not a discrete intrapsychic structure, but a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cultures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—of almost anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted behavior, another affect such as anger or arousal, a named identity, a script for interpreting other people’s behavior toward oneself. (Touching Feeling 62) Sedgwick captures shame’s radical flexibility here, but slips up, it seems, on the question of permanence. While it is absolutely true that there are shames that endure for our whole lives, at other times the blush has barely reddened before the matter has come to a close. Indeed, sometimes a shame that has threatened to mark us forever can imperceptibly transform, dissipating, perhaps, or becoming later, a point of pride. 6 There are shames we adopt as we age, and shames