Foreword

Summary

The moment when “explanations are in order” may rightly give rise to the desire to withhold … long enough, at any rate, to draw attention to what is most compelling in the demand for them.

(Miller 1988: vii)

Shame has flourished as an academic topic during the last decade. This development is not shocking, given the circumstances prevailing in the academic market. Because neoliberal academia functions in a way that requires productive scholars, shame appears to encapsulate, in a strange manner, “a feel for the time.” While many scholars seem to have more freedom to choose unconventional topics—such as affects, for example—it is also clear that they are pressured to produce more and more work. The freedom to create seems to generate more discipline and feelings of inferiority. As most of us know, if you do not want to feel unworthy or deficient, you have to produce quality work, an effort that paradoxically produces more anxiety and a greater sense of failure. In the writing of this book, I share this anxiety with my colleagues, but the additional step I want to take is to interrogate the conditions of its production.

Like many others, I feel ashamed not only when I have to live with the demand to be productive, but also when I am in direct encounters with direct mechanisms of repression. When I am stopped by the police, I face the demand to show my papers. Without exception, I always feel that I am doing something bad, or that I am somewhere I should not be. In responding to this feeling, I do sometimes question either the demand to open the trunk of my car or to tautologically repeat that I am a citizen at that special moment when I have to cross the border. I know I want to resist the demand to show my papers. “But officer …” is my hesitant effort to articulate what may count as resistance. Because my papers, like yours, are never without a fl aw, I want to postpone the moment of showing to the police that I qualify as a moral person.