This White ‘I’: The Reciprocal Shame of Oppressor and Oppressed

Abstract

Vice’s answer to the question of this white ‘I’ who must try to live well in South Africa, configures shame, political silence and humble self-reconfiguration. I accept her insightful analysis of ‘whiteness’ in terms of the oppressor’s shame, but find that her specification of identity does not accommodate the multiplicity of privilege/oppression relations in which individuals participate. Since this implies that many South Africans, albeit unevenly, share the oppressor’s shame, her advice concerning ‘whites only’ political withdrawal seems inappropriate and curiously self-subversive. Focussing instead on her reflections concerning moral emotions in ethically-compromised selves, which should motivate self-reconfiguration, and drawing from Kristeva on ‘forgiveness’, I argue that compromised selves in privilege/oppression relations cannot reconfigure themselves independently, and should rather negotiate on-going forgiveness relationships. Further, since privileged and oppressed shoulder different but reciprocal ethical responsibilities, besides considering the privileged self who should appeal for forgiveness,¹ one must address a gap in Vice’s argument concerning the reciprocal shame of the oppressed.     

How Whites Should Live in This Strange Place

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Samantha Vice is correct to claim that whites should feel shame and regret, though perhaps not guilt, at their whiteness. She is wrong, however, to suggest that there is a sense in which whites should live in silence and humility, and withdraw from public political space. In particular, I argue that this latter claim has absurd consequences, since it implies a withdrawal from non-public and non-political spaces also. Besides, whites, as complex selves, face conflicting reasons for action which Vice insufficiently grapples with. I conclude, however, that Vice is best interpreted as rightly suggesting that whites should live in careful reflective self-awareness of how their whiteness, and whiteliness, unfairly privileges them, still. This is preferable advice to Vice’s notions of silence and humility which are rightly but unnecessarily susceptible to confusion and compelling counterargument. Or so I argue.     

Vice’s Vicious Virtues: The Supererogatory as Obligatory

Abstract

Samantha Vice’s essay, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, is a sensitive and subtle exploration of the difficult moral terrain of the issues of white responsibility and white moral self-reform in a South Africa that is formally post-apartheid, but still profoundly shaped by the legacy of white domination, both in its enduring socio-economic structures and in its citizens’ typical moral psychologies. Vice’s conclusion is that shame is the moral emotion most appropriate for whites unable to free themselves from white privilege and live up to what she sees as the required standards of moral excellence. In response, I argue that she is in effect making the supererogatory obligatory, and constructing an unrealistic schedule of virtues. Drawing on various recent writings on non-ideal theory, I suggest that standard moral distinctions need to be relocated to take systemic social oppression into account, thereby yielding a more forgiving moral taxonomy than Vice’s own over-demanding mapping.     

Antiracist Moral Identities,or Iris Murdoch in South Africa

Abstract

I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I delineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities—the ‘white ally’ and the ‘person committed to racial justice’—that can guide civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distortions of whiteness. I argue that Vice’s recommendation of withdrawal from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally appropriate response to white privilege.     

The invisibility of richness: A critique of Vice’s ‘strange place’

Abstract

This article builds on Samantha Vice’s argument on the problem of whiteness in contemporary South Africa. I will explore the thesis of invisibility regarding whiteness and argue for its relevance to the rich per se. This thesis demonstrates how white privilege and affluence, despite being glaringly visible in a concrete sense, is rendered invisible together with the mostly black poverty by which it is contrasted. The invisibility of whiteness translates and flows into the so-called ‘invisibility of richness’, which involves anyone who is economically affluent in this country and has the same effect of rendering poverty invisible. The massive and ever-growing divide between rich and poor means that both have fundamentally incommensurate experiences of life in this country, which is why post-apartheid South Africa is such a strange place to live in for all of its inhabitants. In the latter part of the article, a suggestion will be made about what the appropriate response to the injustices of this strange place might look like for whites.     

Sartre and Fanon: The Phenomenological Problem of Shame and the Experience of Race

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that existing accounts of shame are incomplete in so far as they don’t take account of the problem of shame. This is the problem concerning the possibility of a primary experience of shame. It is the problem Sartre considers under the terms of a “primitive shame” or shame “in its primary structure” that grounds other more complex experiences of shame. This problem is centred on the tension between shame as an immediate, pre-reflective experience and the requirement that shame must involve an awareness of some definitive aspect of the self. I’m going to suggest, correlatively, how by trying to resolve this problem we end up with a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the second part of the paper, I go on to look at how this new interpretation of shame helps us understand race. Looking at Fanon, I explore how a fundamental and overlooked ineffability in our relation to others impacts upon responses to racialized shame.     

White Privilege,Psychoanalytic Ethics,and the Limitations of Political Silence

Abstract

The moral and philosophical interrogation of white privilege remains an imperative in post-apartheid South Africa. Whereas the critique of whiteness involves both philosophical and psychological scrutiny, subsequent calls for white political silence and withdrawal have yet to be subjected to adequate psychological analysis. This paper offers such an analysis by questioning, firstly, the idea of appropriate emotions for white South Africans (shame, guilt, regret), posing instead the problems of mimed affect and neurotic goodness. White approaches to guilt-alleviation and political passivity are queried, secondly, via the claim that such agendas lead all too easily to types of white exceptionalism and condescension, respectively. The ethical problems of political silence and withdrawal – implied superiority, non-participation and an unequal ‘rights of silence’ – provide a third area of questioning. The paper ends by introducing the Lacanian ideas of subjective destitution and identification with the symptom. These concepts throw a critical light on disavowals of white privilege and provide a novel means of thinking how white narcissism might be relinquished.     

Democracy and equity: the idea of the just state (Rechtsstaat) before and after 1994

Abstract

The recent publication of a special number of the SAJP dedicated to a discussion of Samantha Vice’s thoughts on being a white South African prompted this reflection on justice, equity and the modern idea of the state – against the background of moral feelings of guilt and shame, cultural diversity and merging identities. Its aim is to provide a perspective on the unity of the public legal order of the state, the distinct meaning of citizenship and affirmative action in terms of the distinction between constitutive and regulative legal principles also helping white South Africans to understand how affirmative action relates to injustices of the past. The classical understanding of equity will play a key role in this discussion, aimed at showing how we can avoid the apparent impasse of equality before the law and of “fair discrimination.”     

The True Confessions of a White Rawlsian Liberal: An Argument for a Capacities Approach to Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure the constitutional talks in South Africa in the early 1990’s. I suggest that liberal rather than democratic values held a particular attraction to South African political philosophers like me. Taking the example of Rawlsian liberalism, I show how liberalism locates the normative anchors of legitimacy outside the democratic process and is content with a weak interpretation of political equality. As an alternative I sketch a capacities approach to democratic legitimacy drawing on the work of Sen and Nussbaum. In particular I argue that the capacity to participate in democratic practices is what grounds and legitimizes principles of democratic justice agreed to by citizens. I conclude by suggesting that South Africa’s democracy would have been stronger if the state had attended to the capacities of citizens to participate in the democratic process.     

On learning how to live in this strange place

In “How do I live in this strange place?”, Samantha Vice contends that white South Africans ought to feel shame for their unjustly acquired privilege and their morally compromised selves, and recommends that they engage with humility and political silence in projects of personal transformation though private, critical self-examination. On one view, philosophy is in part concerned with practical inquiry into how one might lead a good life, and for many, at least, this necessitates some form of moral learning. Ideally, the philosophers concerned with this question could give practical, action-guiding advice on how one might undertake this moral learning, advice well-supported by evidence and with reasonably good prospects for success. I argue that philosophically “therapeutic” projects of the kind advocated by Vice necessarily involve forms of moral learning, and that a range of empirical research in cognitive, moral, and educational psychology thus bear on their methods and prospects. These considerations undermine the outlook of therapeutic projects that rely principally on solitary methods of critical reflection and introspection. I challenge philosophers to develop more practical, actionable, evidence-based counsel on how to engage in moral learning of the type that Vice and her critics recommend, and I articulate several candidate proposals inspired by research from the educational, learning sciences and debiasing literatures.     

Scenes of shame,social roles,and the play with masks

This article explores various scenes of shame, raising the questions of what shame discloses about the self and how this self-disclosure takes place. Thereby, the common idea that shame discloses the self’s debasement will be challenged. The dramatic dialectics of showing and hiding display a much more ambiguous, dynamic self-image as result of an interactive evaluation of oneself by oneself and others. Seeing oneself seen contributes to the sense of who one becomes. From being absorbed in what one does, one might suddenly become self-aware, shift viewpoints and feel pressed to put on masks. In putting on a mask, one relates to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself. In being at once a moral agent and a performing actor with an audience and norms in mind, one embodies and transcends the social roles one takes. In addition to the feeling of shame, in which the self finds itself passively reflected, the self’s active reflections on its shame are to be taken into account. As examples from Milan Kundera, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line from Kingsley Amis, a speech by Vaclav Havel and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments indicate, self-(re)presentation in the public and the private sphere is a complex hermeneutical process with surprising twists.     

Inadequate Innocence of Korean <Emphasis Type="Italic">Comfort Girls-Women</Emphasis>: Obliterated Dignity and Shamed Self

The experiences of Korean comfort girls-women before and during World War II are a paradigmatic example of how military sexual violence has the power to obliterate women’s dignity and shame them into nonexistence. I propose that their horrific experience of sexual slavery under the Japanese military caused intense and lasting shame that resulted in the Korean comfort girls-women’s sense of self being entrenched in shame. Moreover, I argue that the innocence of Korean comfort girls-women was and continues to be inadequately recognized. The Japanese government refuses to admit its legal accountability and has not provided just reparations to Korean comfort girls-women for its treacherous and systematic sexual enslavement of Korean and other comfort girls-women. The Korean government and the people of Korea have been too slow to accept the innocence of these women, to embrace their pain, sorrow, and suffering, and to advocate for justice for them. This conversion of their innocence into inadequacy or shame, actively by the Japanese government and passively by the Korean government and its people, compounded these women’s long, miserable suffering for half a century until the silence was broken in 1991 by a brave woman, Kim Haksun, with the support of Korean activists.     

Shame,Belonging, and Biopolitics: Agamben Among the Phenomenologists

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s (at times rather confusing) terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging.     

How does anybody live in this strange place? A reply to Samantha Vice

Abstract

Samantha Vice has argued that ‘white’ South Africans are so tainted by the history of racial oppression in their country that they are incapable of attaining a great degree of moral virtue. She recommends that they should live in humility and political silence. There are a number of flaws in her argument. First, none of the characteristics of ‘white’ South Africans that she says provides the basis for these conclusions can distinguish (almost) all ‘white’ South Africans from (almost) all ‘black’ South Africans. Second, because it is not only ‘white’ South Africans but everybody in the world who either perpetrates serious injustice or is tainted by others’ perpetration of it, her argument, if sound, would imply that nobody is capable of great virtue and that everybody ought to be politically silent. Finally, her recommendation that ‘white’ South Africans should be politically silent is a very dangerous one.     

How to do philosophy of religion: towards a possible speaking about the impossible

Abstract

It is postulated from different philosophical traditions, and explicitly in recent literature, that there is no further need for doing philosophy of religion – it has become an impossible task. I argue, however, that there remains a philosophical space for this practice and that this space determines greatly how philosophy of religion can be done. The starting point of my argument is the current discussion in the SAJP between De Wet and Giddy and the significance of my article is that it puts this debate within the broader international philosophical context by engaging the work of Trakakis and Desmond to resolve some of the apparently intractable issues raised. Trakakis discusses the divide between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions in which De Wet and Giddy’s work is further contextualized and clarified. Desmond’s work is seminal in its search for a metaxology wherein he advocates a new ‘in between’ position for doing philosophy of religion. I take this view of Desmond further by applying it to the current debate in South Africa and also using it to indicate some possibilities of speaking about the impossible.     

Liberalism,Communitarianism and the Project of Self

Abstract

In this article the authors seek to conceptualize a dynamic and inclusive understanding of personal identity within multicultural democracies such as South Africa, which will draw on both the liberal and communitarian traditions’ respect for the project of self. A preliminary layout for such a project emerges from a literature survey of recent, primarily South African publications on identity and culture, and it suggests that selfhood depends on: a) virtues, cultivated within cooperative communities which allow for effective freedom; b) a venture into existential uncertainty, which alleviates that fear of loss of identity that is supposedly central to many multicultural conflicts; c) the hermeneutic construction of identity through narratives that allow for a plurality of voices; and d) the creative transcending and re-interpretation of values and traditions. The authors contend that such an understanding of identity goes some way towards addressing the question of the way that diverse personal and group identities are to be accommodated in South Africa’s multicultural democracy, and to rethinking the unity which underlies diversity without resorting to liberalism’s reduction of personal identity to rational autonomy.     

Working with chronic and relentless self‐hatred,self‐harm,and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections (Paper 2 of 2)

This second of two papers focuses on the shame which emerged in the first 14 years of analysis of a woman who was bulimic, self‐harmed, and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. To explore this intense and pervasive shame I draw on Jung's and Laplanche's emphasis on experiences of unresolvable, non‐pathological ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ at the heart of the psyche. Images, metaphors, elements of clinical experience, and working hypotheses from a number of analytic traditions are used to flesh out this exploration. These include Kilborne's use of Pirandello's image of shame as like a ‘hole in the paper sky’ which, I suggest, points to a crack in subjectivity, and reveals our belief in the efficacy of the self to be illusory. Hultberg's observations on shame as having an existential mode (function) are also explored, as is the nature of analytic truth. Using these ideas I describe my patient's process of finding some small but freeing space in relation to her shame and self‐hatred. Through enduring and learning from her shame in analysis she realized that it was part of a desperate unconscious attempt to draw close to her troubled father and so to ‘love him better’.