The Political Claim of Deleuzean Shame

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to present the political implication of Deleuze’s idea of shame as the affect of resistance through masochistic withdrawal. Shame, for Deleuze, is clearly distinct from the feeling of guilt in that it does not concern with the pleasure of suffering and self-punishment caused by the breach of prohibition. Indeed, Deleuze makes lots of efforts to save the affect of shame from being co-opted by the psychoanalytic notion pairing off with the feeling of guilt and the pleasurable pain ensued from the Oedipal punishment. Deleuze’s separation of shame from guilt coincides with his lifelong struggle with the pleasure principle of psychoanalysis and its constant Oedipalization. Another crucial dimension of Deleuze’s deterritorialization of psychoanalysis in terms of shame is the break-up of the pathological bind between sadism and masochism. Especially, Deleuze unties the ontological affect of masochism and the literality of pain from sadistic, reactive, and sexualized aggressivity which is primarily dependent on the guilt and the pleasure of punishment. Masochistic shame is newly valorized by Deleuze as the powerful resistant weapon of the minorities whose act of withdrawal from the demand of capitalist discourse constitutes the very basis of political resistance. The political implication of Deleuze’s notion of masochistic shame becomes doubly significant when it is connected to the rhythm of pain in passive synthesis; masochist contraction, like Bartleby’s inaction, against ego, pleasure, and globalization helps us to secure and re-establish free, little, local differences in the overall micropolitical resistance to the global law of injunction to enjoyment.