Emily Churilla, SUNY Stony Brook

Resisting the Urge: Shameful Failures and Failing Ethics

This project draws on the notion that national shame can easily (following Sara Ahmed’s language) “pass over” shame and into pride thereby negating any productive repercussions of that shame.  This “passing over” of national shame, I believe, rests largely in the generalization of ethical dilemmas or moments into discourses of human rights and dignity.

Human rights and dignity discourses are often founded on economic exchanges of sympathy that hierarchize the giver of sympathy as above the givee; this hierarchy necessarily creates an inequality between the two where the recipient of sympathy is expected to reciprocate to the giver.  This giving back is often veiled in the rhetoric of dignity and humanity where the recipient of charity is expected to become more “human,” more dignified, and to work hard (maintain the “bootstrap mentality”) and assimilate into normative modes of living, qualified citizenship, and so on.

What I am terming the ethics of failure presides in the ability of one, qua Derrida, to resist the temptation of the ethical as a generalized moment thereby presenting the paradox between “general and absolute responsibility” (Gift of Death 61). This ability to fail the ethical, in general, when written through an individual shame, works to negate the possibility of an economic hierarchy often intrinsic to affect, charity, and “human rights.” 

In this project, I will look at this moment of failure in the work of literature, specifically in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, in order to find productive tensions between failure, ethics, and nations framed in the languages of shame and dignity.