UE50 - Shame and Guilt, Memory and Forgetting: An Emotional Perspective on the Public Sphere

Intervenant·e·s

• Eva Illouz [référent·e]   directrice d'études, EHESS / Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP)

  In 1965, Karl Jaspers famously accused his fellow Germans. “Almost the entire world indicts Germany and the Germans. Our guilt is discussed in terms of outrage, horror, hatred and scorn. Punishment and retribution are desired, not by the victors alone but also by some of the German emigres and even by citizens of neutral countries. In Germany there are some who admit guilt, including their own, and many who hold themselves guiltless but pronounce others guilty.” What seems obvious to us today – Germans were guilty of the Holocaust—was far from obvious at the time Jaspers was writing these lines. In fact, it took a great deal of symbolic work for Germans to be convinced.

This example illustrates the premise of this seminar:  that the public sphere is saturated with emotions. In particular, the moral order which emerged after World War II seems to have articulated the rejection of shame and the attribution of guilt as two key motives of the public sphere. On the basis of the empirical analysis of texts provided by students and analyzed in class, we will explore how these two emotions play a key role in the construction of memory, how they affect the relationships between majority and minority in democracies, how they are used to account for history (for example the Shoah and colonialism). Finally, the  ultimate aim of the course is to interrogate the possibility of memory without guilt.

Shame /Shaming:

•  Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburg University Press. Compulsory Read: Chapter 5 “Shame before Others”
• Baldwin, J. (1967, April 9.). Negroes are antisemitic because they're anti-white. The New York Times. 7 pages.
• Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination. Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. Routledge. Chapter 6 “Shame and Gender” 15 pages.
• Benedict, R. (1946). The Crysanthemum and the Sword. Chapter 5 “Debtor to the Ages and the World” 15 pages + Chapter 10 “The Dilemma of Virtue” 33 pages
• Frost, L. (2020). Making Sense of Shame Theory: A Psychosocial Structure. In L. Frost, V. Magyar-Haas, H. Schoneville, & A. Sicora (Eds.), Shame and Social Work: Theory, Reflexivity and Practice (pp. 19–38). Chapter, Bristol University Press. 19 pages
• Garfinkel, H. (1956). Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology, 61(5), 420–424. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2773484 6 pages
• Gilligan, James (2022). The Role of Shame and Guilt in Political Violence: From Wars and Revolutions to Genocide and Terrorism. In: Gerodimos, R. (eds) Interdisciplinary Applications of Shame/Violence Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05570-6_2
• Goffman, E. (1975). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Compulsory read: Chapter 1 “Stigma and Social Identity”
• Goffman, E. (1967). Interactional Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chapter 1 “On Face Work” 42 pages
• Goffman, E. (1956). Embarrassment and Social Organization. American Journal of Sociology, 62(3), 264–271. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2772920 9 pages
• Lerner, J., & Stephenson, S. (2024). From Moral Indignation to Affective Citizenship: Public Shaming of Celebrity Emigration from Russia During the War Against Ukraine. American Behavioral Scientist, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241240350, 18 pages
• Neckel, S. (2020). Sociology of Shame: Basic Theoretical Considerations. In L. Frost, V. Magyar-Haas, H. Schoneville, & A. Sicora (Eds.), Shame and Social Work: Theory, Reflexivity and Practice (pp. 39–54). Chapter, Bristol University Press. 15 pages
• Nussbaum, M. (2004). Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, Shame and the Law.
• Ronson, J. - So You’ve been publicly shamed. Penguin.
• Scheff, Thomas J. (2000). Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory. Sociological Theory, 18(1), 84-99.
• Sennett, R., Cobb, J. (1977). The hidden injuries of class. p. 21-30; p.96 - 105; p. 127-130.
• Simmel, G. (1957). Fashion. American Journal Of Sociology, 62(6), 541–558. https://doi.org/10.1086/222102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2773129 19 pages.

Guilt:

• Bruckner, P. (2010). The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Princeton University Press. Compulsory Read: Chapter 1
• Campbell, B & Manning, J. (2018) The Rise of Victimhood Culture. Microagressions, Safe Spaces and New Culture Wars. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. Chapter 5. 18 pages
• Jaspers, K. (1965). The Question of German Guilt. Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzz9w. “The German Questions” p. 41 + Differentiation of German Guilt” p. 55 20 pages
• Knez, I. & Nordhall, O. (2017). Guilt as a Motivator for Moral Judgment: An Autobiographical Memory Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00750 7 pages
• Mitscherlich, A., Mitscherlich, M. (1975). The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behavior
• Steele, S - White Guilt: How Black and Whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era. Compulsory Read: Part 2 & Part 4.

Guilt & Collective Memory:

• Adorno, T. W. & Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1969). The authoritarian personality.
• Adorno, T. W. (2010). Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany. Harvard University Press.
• Adorno, T. W. & Pollock (2011). Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany. Harvard University Press.
• Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J., & Sztompka, P. (2004). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (1st ed.). University of California Press. Chapter 3 “Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” 70 pages + Chapter 4 “The Trauma of the Perpetrators. The Holocaust as Traumatic Reference of German National Identity. 43 pages
• Arendt, H. (1950, October). The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: report from Germany. Commentary. 10 pages https://www.commentary.org/articles/hannah-arendt/the-aftermath-of-nazi-rulereport-from-germany/
• Bruckner, P. (1983). The Tears of the White Man. The Free Press, Macmillan.
• Coates, T. (2014). The case for reparations. The Atlantic, 313(5), 50-71. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ 15 pages.
• Neiman, S. (2019). Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Compulsory Read: Chapter 2 “Sins of the Fathers” and Chapter 8 “Rights and Reparations”
• Olick, J. - The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. Compulsory Read Chapter 1 “Introduction: From Collective Memory to the Politics of Regret”, Chapter 2 “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures” , Chapter 6 “The Politics of Regret: Analytical Frames”, Chapter 8 “From Theodicy to Ressentiment: Trauma and the Ages of Compensation”
• Rieff, David.  In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. Yale University Press; Reprint Edition. Chapter 3 “What is Collective Memory actually good for?” p. 43 + 17 pages Chapter 4 “The Victory of Memory over History” p. 60 15 pages
• Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Chapter 2 “At the Limits of Eurocentrism: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism” 33 pages + Chapter 3 ““Un Choc en Retour”: Aimé Césaire’s Discourses on Colonialism and Genocide” 45 pages + Chapter 6 The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor 24 pages.
• Sharlet, Jeff (2023). The Undertow: Scenes from a slow civil war. WW Norton & Co.
• Smith, C. (2022, November 14.). Monuments to the unthinkable. America still can't figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?. The Atlantic. 15 pages. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/holocaust-remembrance-lessons-america/671893/ . https://advance.lexis.com/api/permalink/5dbb636c-acb5-4378-9bbf-e943d9ae0120/?context=1516831
• Wagner-Pacifici, Robin (2010). Theorizing the Restlessness of Events. American Journal of Sociology, 115(5), 1351-1386. 33 pages.