Thus spoke the student from Bologna: On behalf of the blush and confusion

Abstract

To the extent that philosophy deals with the blush, it is almost always as the pink blush of shame. Such is philosophy’s seeming obsession with the latter, there remains the risk of something important being lost in translation when it comes to those examples in the literature that mention the blush. I intend to focus on one such example, a scene from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, the story of the student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I will turn to Lisa Guenther and Giorgio Agamben for their reading of Antelme’s account, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but that which may have been overlooked as a result, namely confusion. I will turn also to Jean-Paul Sartre, again, not in relation to shame, rather for his brief, but no less important, phenomenological account of blushing. I will refer to recent social psychology research suggesting that confusion is a knowledge emotion – something like embarrassment (as aporia). All this in support of the argument, that when Antelme writes of the student – ‘ Il a l’air confus’ (‘He seems confused’), we are bound to take them both, the student and Antelme, the blusher and the beholder, at their word – to maintain our distance so that the scene might speak for itself and in so doing reveal signs of life.