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Blush Faces of Shame First Edition Probyn Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Probyn, Elspeth
ISBN(s): 9780816627202, 0816627215
Edition: First Edition
File Details: PDF, 9.24 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
Bliuh
This page intentionally left blank
 Blu^h
FACES OF SHAME

Elspeth Probyn

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis — London
"Some Like Indians Endure," by Paula Gunn Allen, reprinted with
permission of the poet.

Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Probyn, Elspeth, 1958-
Blush : faces of shame / Elspeth Probyn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2720-7 (he : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-2721-5
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Shame. I. Title.
BF575.S45P76 2005
152.4'4—dc22
2004023858

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and

employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Shame in Love ix
1 Doing Shame 1
2. Shame, Bodies, Places 37
3. The Shamer and the Shamed 75
4. Ancestral Shame 107
5. Writing Shame 129
Notes 163
Index 187
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

^O M A N Y PEOPLE HAVE H E L P E D THIS BOOK Come into

k^J being. For their engagement with the ideas as they pro-
gressed, I'd like to thank Margaret Buchanan, Jack Durack,
Adam Eldridge, Anna Gibbs, Natalya Lusty, Gail Mason,
Jeannie Martin, Rosemary Pringle, and Mandy Thomas.
I was fortunate to be invited to teach and present the
central themes of the book. My time as a Noted Scholar in the
Department of English at the University of British Columbia
was formative, and I thank Sneja Gunew and especially the
graduate students with whom I discussed ideas about affect.
My thanks also to Rosi Braidotti and to the students who
attended the master class on affect that I gave in the Women's
Studies Institute at the University of Utrecht. Invitations to
the Institute of Women's Studies at Lancaster University have
been important to the development of my thinking, and my
thanks to Jackie Stacey and Sara Ahmed as well as seminar
participants. Bev Skegss, Lisa Adkins, and Nicole Vitteloni at
the University of Manchester challenged me to reconsider the
importance of Pierre Bourdieu. The Transculturalisms sympo-
siums organized by Sneja Gunew and Ann Kaplan have been
inspiring, and I also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for
the time at the Bellagio Center. My study leave in the Depart-
ment of Sociology at the London School of Economics was
formative; my warm thanks to Nikolas Rose. The Australian

vli
Acknowledgments

Research Council provided funding, and the Australian

Academy with the Royal Academy of the Netherlands pro-
vided for my visit to Utrecht. My fondest thanks to my col-
leagues and students in the Department of Gender Studies at
the University of Sydney. Special thanks to Michael Moller,
Cathy Perkins, Melissa Gregg, and Gilbert Caluya for their
help in editing.
I have written that shame is painful to write about, and
I want to thank all those who helped at different moments,
including Wendy Brady, Robyn and Jack Durack, Jon Hird,
Alan Inglis, Rosemary Pringle, Jane Probyn, and Zoe Sofoulis.
My family's pride in my work is tremendously important, and
I especially thank my father.
Finally, to Sarah Donald, for making me shamelessly happy.

via
 Introduction

Shame In Love

EN YOU GET VERY INTERESTED in something, it

wquickly seems that the whole world is revealed in its
light. Falling in love is a good example. As I was writing this
book, a phrase echoed in my brain like a pesky tune: "shame
in love." It's ambiguous; it could refer to the shame that at-
tends being in love or to being in love with shame. Of course,
being in love offers endless possibilities for shame. But I've also
been uneasily in love with the idea of shame. It's an uneasy af-
fair, because shame is not usually thought of in a positive light.
It's like falling for a seemingly reprehensible person and having
to convince your friends that the loved one has hidden mer-
its. Along the same lines, I want everyone to understand that
shame is interesting and important: we cannot live without it,
nor should we try.
I've fallen hard for some of the ideas about shame that
I convey in this book. The compelling notion of shame's
productive role I take from the American psychologist Silvan
Tomkins (1911-1991). In the 1950$ and 19605, Tomkins elabo-
rated a complex set of ideas about shame and other affects,
such as joy, anger, disgust, and contempt. From Tomkins I
take the initially startling idea that interest and shame are
intimately connected. Shame, he argues, "operates only after
interest or enjoyment has been activated."1 Once you think
about it, this becomes obvious. Only something or someone

ix
Introduction

that has interested you can produce a flush of shame. Some-

one looks at you with interest and you begin to be interested,
only to realize she's looking at someone else. Or, as Tomkins
notes, "One started to smile but found one was smiling at a
stranger."2 If you're interested in and care about the interest
of others, you spend much of your life blushing. Conversely,
if you don't care, then attempts to shame won't move you.
Shame highlights different levels of interest. Shame goes to
the heart of who we think we are. In this sense, shame puts
one's self-esteem on the line and questions our value system.
The things that make me ashamed have to do with a strong
interest in being a good person. What that means is normally
quite nebulous, but once I've felt that hot blush, I'm reminded
of what it is that I hold dear—not hurting people unnecessari-
ly, being generous in my ideas and care for others, and so on.
My list will be different from yours. What shames me may not
shame you. But whatever it is that shames you will be some-
thing important to you, an essential part of yourself.
What makes shame remarkable is that it reveals with preci-
sion our values, hopes, and aspirations, beyond the generalities
of good manners and cultural norms. For instance, sexuality
is widely held as an area ripe for shame. But it's not a site of
shame, or not the same site of shame, for everyone. I don't
think I've ever been shamed for not being a heterosexual, but
I have been shamed for not being a good homosexual. In other
words, banal things that are supposed to make us ashamed
quite often don't. And those things that do make us ashamed
often reveal deep worries and concerns. Again, interest is the
key to understanding shame, and shame reminds us with ur-
gency what we are interested in. Shame reminds us about the
promises we keep to ourselves.
Interest involves a desire for connection. At a basic level, it
has to do with our longing for communication, touch, lines
of entanglement, and reciprocity. Listen to this passage from
Tomkins:

x
 Introduction

If you like to be kissed and I like to kiss you, we may enjoy

each other. If you like to be sucked and bitten and I like to
suck or bite you, we may enjoy each other. If you like to have
your skin rubbed and I like to do this to you, we can enjoy
each other. If you enjoy being hugged and I like to hug you,
it can be mutually enjoyable. . . . If you enjoy communicat-
ing your experiences and ideas and aspirations and I enjoy
being informed about the experiences, ideas and aspirations
of others, we can enjoy each other.3

The cadence of the writing bathes the reader in a warm

bath of love reciprocated. At the same time, it conjures up
the terror of love and interest not being mutual. The word-
ing captures the knife edge of falling in love: "we can enjoy
each other" jostles with "we may enjoy each other." Interest is
always hedged by the conditional if. That if contains the seeds
for shame. Tomkins follows with a description that speaks of
what happens when interest or love falters:
You may crave much body contact and silent communion
and I wish to talk. You wish to stare deeply into my eyes, but
I achieve intimacy only in the dark in sexual embrace. You
wish to be fed and cared for, and I wish to exhibit myself and
be looked at. You wish to be hugged and to have your skin
rubbed, and I wish to reveal myself only by discussing my
philosophy of life. . . . You wish to communicate your most
personal feelings about me, but I can achieve social intimacy
only through a commonly shared opinion about the merits
of something quite impersonal, such as a particular theory or
branch of knowledge or an automobile.4

The acuity of this description is painful. It is not the big

bang catastrophe of falling out of love, but the harder, perhaps
more mature, and deeply shaming experience of an incompati-
bility between two people. The bonds of interest slip: you wish
to be cared for, and I talk about theory; I wish to be hugged,

XL
Introduction

and you talk about yourself; you wish for silent communion,
and I need promises of love. Not quite in love enough but
enough in love to hope; interest is interrupted. The rupture is
painful: "what could have been" is such a sad and shameful
refrain.
Tomkins describes how shame can appear only once inter-
est and enjoyment have been felt and when they have been
ripped from you. At that moment the sheer disappointment
of loss translates into shame that attacks your sense of self: the
entrails of who you thought you were are suddenly displayed
for all to judge. In Tomkins's description:
The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction
of interest or joy. Hence any barrier to further exploration
which partially reduces interest. . . will activate the lowering
of the head and the eyes in shame and reduce further explo-
ration or self-exposure.5

Tomkins's insistence that shame flags the incomplete

reduction of interest and joy is a crucial insight that propels
my own argument. It describes shame as an ambiguous state
of feeling, emotion, and affect. It gestures to shame as the fine
line or border between moving forward into more interest or
falling back into humiliation.
While some will find that the ideas I cite resonate deeply,
others might find it hard to fathom why shame should be con-
sidered productive. On a basic level, shame always produces
effects—small and large, individual and collective. Shame
demands acknowledgment. As we blush, we are made visi-
ble at the very moment we want to cover our faces and hide.
But, equally, shame compels an involuntary and immediate
reassessment of ourselves: Why am I ashamed? Why did I say
or do that? Can I rectify the actions that have either brought
shame upon myself or caused someone else's shame? Shame
in this way is positive in its self-evaluative role; it can even be
self-transforming. This is possible, however, only where shame

xii
 Introduction

is acknowledged. Denying or eradicating shame, whether by

an individual or a community, seems futile to me. It is also
a waste of an important resource in thinking about what it
means to be human.
Shame is a fact of human life. In many societies and cultures
it is used to manage human social interaction. In others, it is
hidden away: "corrected" in self-help programs and denied
by governments wary of apologizing for past wrongs. Shame
is very important right now: to discussions and debates about
how to deal with pasts that could be called shameful; and to
visions of life curtailed by the idea that there is something in-
trinsically wrong with feeling shame.
That shame is seen as deeply shameful has important
implications for what we, as individuals and as a collectivity,
can do with it. My argument seeks to investigate why it is
considered shaming to admit to shame. After all, people freely
admit to other negative affects, such as anger, which can lead
to violence. In comparison, admitting shame is much more
likely to spur consideration of why one feels ashamed. Shame,
it is argued, can entail self-evaluation and transformation. To
consider shame is not to wallow in self-pity or in the resent-
ment that accompanies guilt. It is to recognize that the reduc-
tion of interest that prompts shame is always incomplete. As
such, shame promises a return of interest, joy, and connection.
This is why shame matters to individuals. And it is why studies
of shame are important.
Over the course of this book I explore some of the im-
mense variety of experiences, expressions, and thoughts about
shame. These ideas often concern questions about human-
ness, humanity, and humility. I am taken by the argument
that shame is biologically innate—that we are all born with
the capacity for shame. While in some circles this essential-
ism may be considered heretical, it seems to me that we miss a
great deal when we disregard our human similarities. In terms
of how we feel physiologically, we are much more alike than

xiii
Introduction

different—whatever the measure of difference: gender, race,

ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. This is not to say that we all ex-
perience shame in the same way or that some will not be more
vulnerable to shame. I will experience shame differently from
an Aboriginal man. But surely that does not annul our shared
capacity for feeling it. To paraphrase Sojourner Truth: prick
me, do I not bleed; shame me, do I not blush? When we deny
shame or ignore it, we lose a crucial opportunity to reflect on
what makes us different and the same.
Shame gives us a way to rethink the types of oppositions
that have become entrenched in popular debate. If, as many
have argued, pride is acceptable and even vaunted, surely we
must also acknowledge our individual and collective shame.
This should involve more than merely accepting shame in
national and cultural narratives. We must use shame to re-
evaluate how we are positioned in relation to the past and to
rethink how we wish to live in proximity to others.
In Blush, I explore the conceptual resources shame can
offer. Different disciplines have thought about shame in varied
ways. On the more scientific side of psychology, shame tells
us something about how our bodies dictate what we feel. In
anthropology and sociology, studies of shame provide fascinat-
ing glimpses into quite different ways of managing social life.
One of the abiding arguments in this book is that we need
to be more open to ideas that seem beyond our intellectual
comfort zone. Rather than dismissing or ignoring ideas about
biology, psychology, and the innate nature of shame, let's see
what these ideas do. This is not to say that arguments about
the physiology of shame are any truer than those about its
cultural expressions; it is to ask how very different ideas might
mutually inflect and extend what we know.
This book is not a dissertation; it is an invitation to come
exploring with me and to discover sidetracks of your own.
There are stories and more stories—some of them mine, others
that I retell from academic and literary sources. The emphasis

xlv
 Introduction

on narrative is important when you're dealing with new ideas

and new ways of being. With something as sensitive as shame,
it's foolhardy to weigh in with ready-made theories or pro-
nouncements. So I try not to. My stories are told in the spirit
of experimentation: wouldn't it be interesting if we could all
talk about shame in more productive ways?
The chapters build on one another. In the first I introduce
some basic ideas about shame and begin to outline my case
for why shame is interesting. I want you to see shame from
different perspectives, to hear how the body in shame can be
described. Some of the descriptions I include of shame as in-
nate, essential, biological, universal are put in such interesting
ways that they caused my previous prejudice to come undone.
Interest may be of great use in undoing the fear, anxiety, suspi-
cion, and at times loathing that can greet any description that
comes to us from an unfamiliar realm.
Whether shame is an emotion or an affect is a point
that divides much research. In general, the humanities and
social sciences lean toward emotion, and the sciences tend
to privilege affect. In other terms, and as another rough way
of understanding the division, those interested in cognition,
social expression, and the interpretation of cultures tend to
study emotions. Those interested in the workings of the brain
and the body study affects or the affect system. Very few
writers cross the divide between the social and the biological.
More often than not, one camp ignores the other. Rejecting
the possibility that there are biological, neurological, and,
more generally, bodily aspects of shame is as reductive as bald
statements that ignore the cultural context in which affects are
expressed and used within societies.
In the second chapter, driven by the ways in which Tomkins
and others make me think about the body, I narrate a moment
of shame I felt when I first experienced the awesome power of
Uluru. Coming across the sight of that monument of nature
and of Australian Aboriginal culture, I was physically struck

xv
Introduction

by a variant of shame I call the shame of being out-of-place.

This is the feeling the body registers in social and cultural
contexts when it doesn't belong. When you feel like a fish out
of water, your body reacts in shame. I draw on the French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's thoughts about habitus, a term
he uses to describe how we embody history. The body is a
repository for the social and cultural rules that, consciously
or not, we take on. Our bodies can also tell us when we have
stumbled into other people's history, culture, and beliefs of
which we are ignorant. Through my own story and those of
others, I explore how the shame of being out-of-place can
ignite a desire for connection. In the Australian context, that
desire is called Reconciliation. It is an inspiration for modes
of coexistence between non-Indigenous and Indigenous that
can succeed only if we acknowledge different types of shame
and interest.
The third chapter follows the passage of shame from the
body into the body politic. While shaming people is a power-
ful and potentially destructive and violent way to patrol the
borders of normality, in some societies it has been used to
good effect to manage antisocial behavior. It all depends on
the structure of the society and how it uses shaming. John
Braithwaite, who has made shaming an important topic
within criminology, bases his theory on a Maori tradition of
shaming members of a community who break its rules. His
ideas about reintegrative shaming have influenced policy in
several contexts. Some of these are questionable, for example,
a U.S. jurisdiction where drunk drivers are made to wear sand-
wich boards announcing themselves as such. Does shaming
as a tactic for punishment and deterrence work in a Western
context, where community bonds are not the norm and there
is often little desire to be reintegrated into a community?
This question and related ones demand precise and ground-
ed studies, which are beyond the scope of this book. However,
Braithwaite's ideas spark thoughts about forms of shaming:

xvl
 Introduction

who is shamed and who is the shamer? I use them to consider

how in popular perception feminism has taken the moral high
ground in order to shame men and sometimes women. It's a
rude critique, but I stand by the argument that any politics not
interested in those it sees as outside its ken will ultimately fail
to interest and engage.
"Ancestral Shame," the fourth chapter, follows through on
arguments about shame and proximity. I turn to the notion
of the contact zone as the space where people and ideas are
brought together, often with powerfully emotional results. I
explore the types of shame that circulate within contact zones
to produce what might be called an intimate history of shame.
Addressing my own ancestral shame, I examine a poem by my
grandmother, titled "Half Breed," and ask whether it can be
mined for a more sympathetic analysis of individuals within
postcolonial contact zones.
The last chapter, "Writing Shame," raises the question of
a shame-based ethics of writing. My argument is that a form
of shame always attends the writer. Primarily it is the shame
of not being equal to the interest of one's subject. Drawing
on examples taken from a range of writers—Stephen King,
Gilles Deleuze, and Primo Levi—I elaborate on the different
ways they tell us about the seriousness of writing, how writ-
ing shame radically rearranges bodies, and the precision and
passion that constitute honest writing. It seems to me that
sometimes cultural theory gets carried away, forgetting that
theories and theoretical writing are of interest for what they
can do, what they let us understand, and what they make us
question.
One of the more frustrating aspects of reading across studies
of emotion and affect is the tendency to speak in general terms.
The various emotions and affects are distinct: each makes us
feel different and has quite specific effects in society. They de-
mand precise description. One of the reasons we are afraid of
shame is that it tends to be paired in limiting ways: shame and

xvii
Introduction

pride, shame and guilt. The relationship between the terms is

seen as one of either opposition or mutual exclusivity, for ex-
ample, where shame necessarily detracts from pride. My claim,
backed by the findings of others, is that shame is positive. This
should not be understood as yet another celebratory account of
transgression. Shame is not subversive. Shame just is. How it
is experienced and theorized varies, but nonetheless it is a fact
of human life. It is productive in how it makes us think again
about bodies, societies, and human interaction. That shame is
both universal and particular, universalizing and particulariz-
ing, should be a resource, not a point of division. Shame raises
questions of great and enduring interest concerning what it
means to be human. Shame also demands that big questions
be asked in a modest way.
This is perhaps the most personal book I've written and
also the most objective. I had to write this book. Shame and
its interests got under my skin.6 Just as I have been engaged by
and interested in the research and writers I talk about, I hope
that some of the lines thrown out by this book will catch and
set off more interest. It's a hope that I am trying to be shame-
less about.

xviii
 1

Doing Shame

MMENTS OF SHAME: An e-mail arrives from a re-

spected colleague. She's angry at a newspaper column
I've written. She writes: "Loyalty? Shame? Irony?" In front
of my computer and a hemisphere away from her, I blush.
Thoughts of denial flit across my mind but are pushed away
by the visceral feeling of having done wrong. What can I say
but that I'm sorry? It seems such a paltry word compared with
the shame that covers me. And I don't say it. Or at least not
immediately. I waffle in reply about how I shouldn't think out
loud in print.
Another moment returns with a blush, and I am back in
time. I've made a girl cry. We must have been about eight years
old. I tease her about not having the same name as her mother.
She starts crying, and the nuns at the school chastise me. I'm
ashamed, even without knowing what I've done. I couldn't
have known that when her mother remarried she'd taken an-
other man's name. The ignorance doesn't stop me from blush-
ing. Now I feel a deeper shame at the thought of that little girl
crying from the pain of her parents' divorce.
Why is it that the mere recollection of a shameful moment
can cause you to blush? Distanced in years, an incident from
childhood returns with intensity, and one relives that horrible
feeling. As Kim Scott writes, "Bury memory deep in shame."1
Equally, the shame buried in memory seems to erupt, having

1
Doing Shame

lost none of its sharp pain. And you blush, the only feeling
that physically covers the face. In French, one blushes to the
whites of the eyes, to the ears, and to the roots of one's hair.
The tentacles of the blush, of blood rushing to the face, attest
to the inner cringe.
Blushing feels bad, and it's a reaction that cannot be faked or
brought on without experiencing or remembering the feeling
of shame. Shame makes us feel small and somehow undone.
It's no wonder that in most societies, shame tends not to be
talked about, let alone vaunted. Other negative emotions, such
as anger or rage or guilt or sadness, are regularly discussed in
both popular and academic accounts. But shame makes an
appearance only in discussions about pride, and then only as
a shameful feeling. National pride, black pride, gay pride, and
now fat pride are all projects premised on the eradication of
shame. As political projects, they clearly, and often with very
good reasons, denounce shame. Increasingly, there is a sense
that pride is an entitlement, a state we will all achieve once we
have overcome our nagging feelings of shame and once society
becomes a place where no one shames another.
It's hard not to concur with such hopes—to aspire to live
with only "good" and pleasurable emotions. There is nothing
pleasurable about shame, but there is something immensely
interesting about it in all its expressions. Certainly, compared
with guilt, shame constitutes an acute state of sensitivity. Guilt
is easier to get rid of and once dealt with is forgotten, whereas
shame lingers deep within the self. Being shamed is not unlike
being in love. The blush resonates with the first flush of desire.
It carries the uncertainty about oneself and about the object of
love; the world is revealed anew and the skin feels raw. Shame
makes us quiver. In his psychoanalytic investigation of shame,
Gerhart Piers cites this remarkable passage from Hegel:
Shame does not mean to be ashamed of loving, say on ac-
count of exposing or surrendering the body . . . but to be

2
 Doing Shame

ashamed that love is not complete, that. . . there [is] some-

thing inimical in oneself which keeps love from reaching
completion.

Piers follows with the observation that

behind the feeling of shame stands not the fear of hatred,
but the fear of contempt which, on an even deeper level of
the unconscious, spells fear of abandonment, the death by
emotional starvation.2

These descriptions brutally expose the significance of

shame. Shame emerges as a kind of primal reaction to the
very possibility of love—either of oneself or of another. The
fear of contempt and abandonment is experienced as intensely
personal, but it can be seen at a societal level. For many, shame
is understood as "a sickness of the self." In Hegel's words, we
hear the anguish of not loving enough, of not being lovable.
For Piers, the immensity of the social comes crashing through.
Shame brings the fear of abandonment by society, of being left
to starve outside the boundaries of humankind. In these de-
scriptions, it is a capacity for shame that makes us such fragile
beings. Hegel and Piers suggest that shame may provide a key
to the question that is now again gaining urgency: what is it
to be human?3
From there, and before we can even get to that question,
many others need to be asked: How do we feel shame? How
do we know it? What can we do with the feelings and the
knowledge that shame brings? These are some of the questions
that drive this book. It's my hunch or wager that something
about shame is terribly important. By denying or denigrating
it or trying to eradicate it (as in the countless self-help books
against various strains of shame), we impoverish ourselves and
our attempts to understand human life.
That's a big claim, and I will not be laying out a general
theory to back it up. To be honest, I had thought that shame

J
Doing Shame

was a fairly manageable topic for a small book. I now see that it
is huge and engages many different disciplines and many aspects
of human life. Many have written that it is somehow shameful
to speak of shame. I cannot possibly do justice to shame. One
thing I have learned is that shame enforces modesty, just as it
tugs at the writer's desire to explore "the big questions." This
book should be seen as just that: an attempt to follow the dif-
ferent lines that lie coiled within shame. In small ways, I hope
to use shame to nudge readers to question their assumptions
about the workings of our bodies and their relations to think-
ing; about the nature of emotions in daily life and in academic
reflection; and about ways of writing and relating.
Is shame cultural or physiological, or does it—and this is
my bet—demand a way of rethinking such oppositions? Does
shame disconcert us because we feel it simultaneously in our
bodies, at the core of our selves, and in our social relations?
These are big questions that are hard to nail down or even to ap-
proach head-on. I feel as if I'm tracking shame—hunting down
past and present evidence of its various forms, following up
some leads and discarding others that have attested to shame's
presence. I am stalking shame in its different manifestations and
in terms of how it has been described; I am following shame
because of where it might lead. I am consumed with why: Why
has shame been discounted? Why does shame seem so innate
when it is felt, seemingly, only in the actual or remembered pres-
ence of others? Why are we so afraid of shame?
Tackling shame brings to mind the image of Sisyphus
and his rock—up he pushes it, only for gravity to exert its will.
Human against rock, and it seems that the rock or at least the
forces of nature will always win. However, against a tragic
reading of an absurdly large project that must fail, Albert
Camus famously argued that the efforts of man, while absurd,
are also twinned with happiness. In Camus's reading, Sisyphus
is an absurd hero because of his passions and struggles: "The
struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's

4
 Doing Shame

heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Camus explicitly

links his own struggles as a writer, "to live and to create . . .
to reside in the reflection, alternately cold and impassioned,"
to the struggles of Sisyphus consigned to eternity in his task.
In other words, when we take on the absurd task of trying
to describe that which even after multiple attempts evades
us, we must nonetheless remain faithful to that exigency:
"Describing—that is the last ambition of absurd thought."
We acknowledge the impossible nature of our task and remain
honest to the impetus of our attempts to understand the seem-
ingly infinite variety of human behavior. We describe and
describe again, write and rewrite, get lost and find ourselves
in unusual places. As Camus puts it, science itself looks on to
"the ever virgin landscape of phenomena." And he urges all
writers—artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociological—to do
the same, promising that "the heart learns thus that the emo-
tion delighting us when we see the world's aspects comes to us
not from its depth but from their diversity."4 Describing shame
plunges us into that diversity.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH FEELING?

Camus's words reveal great human truths with wonderful
intimacy. However, they need to be relocated in our times
and in relation to present concerns. The passions with which
Camus contended were of a unique order: the experiences of
the two world wars were still very much present; the process of
untangling French imperialism in North Africa was brutally
acute. By contrast the passions that mark our times are harder
to categorize. Fear, boredom, terror, anger, shame—it's hard
to hear what people are feeling. This book does not pretend
to chart public feeling, but does take seriously the fact that
feelings are important. While they certainly can be channeled,
they do not easily map onto any one political agenda.
In Australia, recently there have been two most remarkable
eruptions of feeling, which did not neatly conform to any one

5
Doing Shame

political agenda. The first followed the release of a report in

1997 by the Human Rights Commission about the removal of
Aboriginal children from their families. Known generally as
the scandal of the Stolen Generations, the events described in
the report were met with widespread and very public expres-
sions of shame. Not long afterward, while those feelings still
simmered, the celebration of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney
provided another distilled moment of public feeling. It came
to a head when the Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman won
a gold medal for the 400-meter race. As she ran her lap of
honor wrapped in both the Australian and Aboriginal flags,
the nation cried with joy. In the prelude to the games, national
shame was showcased as television crews from all over the
world captured the truly awful living conditions of Australian
Aboriginals. But once the games were under way, joy and
pride, mingled with shame, interest and excitement, and dif-
ferent thoughts and futures were openly aired.5
It's easy to make too much of these momentary public
outbursts; it is also easy to be dismissive of what they might
represent. In one instance, people talked openly of their
shame; in the other, of their joy and pride. In chapter 3, I de-
scribe in some detail the expressions of shame about the Stolen
Generations and the context in which they circulated. The
public expression of emotion has not been taken up by critics
as widely as one might have thought. Strangely enough, some
of the most severe critics of public feeling have been feminists
and other "progressives." At its crudest this can be summed up
as "They voted for a conservative government. Who cares what
middle Australia (or America) feels?"6 Here I want to address
why and how some critics flee from public feeling.
One prominent critic of public sentiment, Lauren Berlant,
an American feminist well known for her work on different
forms of queer identity, investigates the ways that "painful
feelings" in the United States are mobilized. It is an interest-
ing argument against what she calls "national sentimentality."

6
 Doing Shame

Focusing on how "scandals" in the United States produce

a general outcry (her example is about sweatshops), Berlant
argues that sentimentality "operates when the pain of inti-
mate others burns into the conscious of classically privileged
national subjects, in such a fashion that they feel the pain of
flawed or denied citizenship as their pain." In other words,
through the media's representation of different forms of suffer-
ing, privileged citizens get a glimpse of pain and thereby gain a
certain sense of empathy, without, of course, having to endure
the conditions that produce pain. This constitutes a climate
of second-hand, or vicarious, feeling. Berlant's argument is
that feelings, and especially bad feelings, produce an illusion
of truth: "People believe that they know what they feel when
they feel it, can locate its origin, measure its effects." She sums
this up as "feeling politics," which she says "claims a hard-
wired truth, a core of common sense . . . beyond ideology,
beyond mediation, beyond contestation."7
It's certainly true that vicarious pain has been central to
numerous campaigns over the years—from starving children
on the back of upmarket magazines, to the spectacular politics
of Sir Bob Geldof and others. It seems that a little bit of pain
can make you feel better about yourself. Berlant is critical of
the way in which feelings have become what she calls the site
of "public pedagogy."8
The trade in feelings is limited in what we can learn, but
it may be part of the critic's responsibility to specify feelings.
Interestingly, in the final section of her argument Berlant
does talk about another feeling, quite different in kind from
the generalized sentimentality she has ascribed to a privileged
American public. Berlant focuses on a self-help book on preg-
nancy.9 Berlant claims that the book "releases women from
shame about the ambivalence they feel toward the fetus and
the theft of ordinary life the fetus engenders."10 I have some
reservations about whether shame can be unlearned, or what
it would mean to "deshame" oneself. Against attempts to do

7
Doing Shame

away with shame, I want us to embrace the sometimes painful

ways shame makes us reflect on who we are—individually and
collectively.

A FEMINIST DISCIPLINE OF THE EMOTIONS?

What is it about feelings that causes critics to flee? I am es-

pecially interested in the ways feminists grapple with making
sense of emotions, because as women we have been historically
associated with the realm of feeling. As an initial exploration,
I turn to an argument about emotion in feminist epistemology.
To my knowledge, Alison Jaggar's article in the canonical
feminist text GenderIBody/Knowledge was one of the first in
the contemporary period to discuss what emotion might mean
to feminism. Jaggar, a philosopher, proceeds from the now
overused maxim that women and the emotions are associated
via an alignment of "the irrational, the physical, the natu-
ral, the particular and the private" with the female.11 More
intriguingly, she cites Plato's model of emotions "as horses
needing control by character." Jaggar then clearly outlines
different views on the emotions: as intentional, as social con-
structs, as active engagements, and in terms of evaluation and
observation. She then develops an argument against "the myth
of dispassionate investment," characterized by positivist tradi-
tions, and argues that contra "an emotional hegemony," there
may also be potential for emotional subversion.
In the main, Jaggar's description is straightforward. She
sets out what she sees as a dominant positivist view that
emotions get in the way of rational methods of research and
argument. Against this argument for objectivity and verifica-
tion, she argues that emotions are involved "at a deep level in
all observation"12—a point with which it is hard to disagree.
The thrust of her argument, however, is aimed at sketching
out the difference between hegemonic emotions—those that
serve dominant interests—and feminist ones.13 To begin, she
defines "mature human emotions [as] neither instinctive nor

8
 Doing Shame

biologically determined, although they may have developed

out of presocial, instinctive responses." Imbued with norms,
emotions become dangerous: our "emotional constitution" is
likely to be "racist, homophobic, ambitious and contemptuous
of women."14 Whether the inclusion of ambition seems strange
or merely a product of the time in which the article was writ-
ten, what hegemonic emotions do is even more worrisome:
These conservative responses hamper and disrupt our at-
tempts to live in or prefigure alternative social forms, but
also, insofar as we take them to be natural responses, they
blinker us theoretically. . . . They blind us to the possibility
of alternative ways of living.15

The force of this feminist suspicion of emotion is quite

shocking. Emotions are presented as a vehicle for voicing rac-
ism, homophobia, and sexism. In an interesting turning of the
tables, this argument implicitly portrays sexist men as overly
emotional. Against these bad hegemonic feelings, Jaggar
argues for "feminist emotions." "Emotions become feminist
when they incorporate feminist perceptions and values." So
"anger becomes feminist anger, pride becomes feminist pride."
If this sounds a little wacky, it is followed by an argument
about "how the increasing sophistication of feminist theory
can contribute to the reeducation, refinement, and eventual
reconstruction of our emotional constitution."16
Predictably, perhaps, Jaggar finds problematic the domi-
nant distrust of emotion as evidenced in positivist arguments
about disinterested observation. She then mounts an argument
as to why we should distrust dominant emotions: we live in
a racist society, so our emotions are bound to be racist. This
depicts emotion as a conduit for the bad feelings that have
been shaped by society. Emotions are to be distrusted because,
Tourette's-like, they will cause us to spout sentiments that are
racist, sexist, and so on. However, using feminist theory as a
therapeutic tool, we can retrain our emotions, the goal being

9
Doing Shame

to replicate the emotions of the oppressed. Except for the ex-

ample of "good feminist anger and pride," we're left to wonder
which emotions of the oppressed she has in mind.
An article by Margaret Olivia Little in 1992, published in
the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, argues that emotion,
properly used, allows us "to see" different aspects of social
life. "In order to 'see' the moral landscape clearly, in order to
discern it fully and properly, one must have certain desires and
emotions."17 Like Jaggar, she argues that "the ideal epistemic
agent herself would have appropriate affect." The good femi-
nist subject would have the "right" emotions, and she would
engender "good" emotions in others.
It's a wildly Utopian vision, filled with automatons perfectly
programmed with the correct emotional vocabulary.18 These
two examples encapsulate enduring ideas and preconceptions
about emotion. For instance, in Martha Nussbaum's recent
book on the emotions, there is a clear indication that some
emotions are better than others and ought to be encouraged
by public policy.19 More generally, of course we can admit
that some emotions are nicer than others. However, the very
vagueness with which emotion is discussed raises the question
of who is to judge which emotions society should promote.
Because emotions are not distinguished, distrust of them
becomes pervasive. In Susan Oyama's apt phrase, there is a lot
of "definitional Tumping'" going on. Lumping allows "all sorts
of behavior, feelings, intentions, and effects of actions [to be]
grouped together as aggressive."20
In much of the work on feelings, emotion, and affect, there
is a lot of lumping, for example, of "the emotions" or of "af-
fect." This frames emotions as inevitably and already captured
by political definitions. The articulation of emotions places
them as either conservative, as in Jaggar's fear of racist and
sexist emotions, or futile excuses in the face of real problems;
for instance, Berlant's argument is squarely against "the sense
that changes in feeling . . . can amount to substantial social

10
 Doing Shame

change."21 Their accounts are based in different arguments but

share a general distrust about what the public might be feeling.
All this suspicion of feelings can make one paranoid.
Certainly, I have encountered unease when giving papers
about my interest in shame. The responses to them may have
occurred for any number of reasons, ranging from simple lack
of interest to a visceral reaction against the very idea of shame.
As we would all attest, sometimes it is hard to distinguish the
emotional expressions of others. I do, however, clearly remem-
ber a moment when I was giving a paper on shame at a confer-
ence. The paper has long since vanished, as have the notes I
took afterward on the audience's reaction and my response.
I was talking about shame and anorexia, disgust and fat bod-
ies,22 and I remember quaking as I put overheads on the pro-
jector. I'd probably given something like a hundred conference
papers by that time, so the shaking was unusual. I looked at
my audience. My voice caught as my gaze encountered blank-
ness in return. All I could feel was unease, even contempt. In
the question period afterward, there was an absolute absence, a
void of interest and engagement. I felt undone; I felt ashamed
of my display, which seemed highly emotional in the vacuum
of the conference room. I went home and had a good cry and
then phoned one of the women on the panel, Jennifer Biddle,
whose work on shame precedes mine and has shaped my inter-
est.23 We agreed it was a thoroughly strange session.

INTERESTING DESCRIPTIONS

In the face of an undifferentiated lumping together of emotion

and affect, I want to try to clarify the difference between the
two terms. A basic distinction is that emotion refers to cultural
and social expression, whereas affects are of a biological and
physiological nature. As will be clear, I am interested in very
different descriptions of shame, from different branches of
psychology (clinical, evolutionary, and theoretical), anthro-
pology, and sociology. While hardly a Pauline conversion, my

11
Doing Shame

earlier suspicion of some aspects of these disciplines seems to

have vanished under the weight of this new interest. Because
of the context in which I trained as a graduate student, when
essentialism was a bad word, I have tended to veer away from
both psychology and psychoanalysis. In those heady years
of battle during the mid- to late 19805, which characterized
the rise of cultural "theory" in North America, it sometimes
seemed you were either on the side of Foucault and Deleuze or
"into" Lacanian psychoanalysis. The connotation of solidarity
as blind following—being on the side of Foucault compared
with being sucked into psychoanalysis—hints at some of the
hostility and silliness of the time. It seemed that we, my fel-
low students and I, became adept at vigilance. If you let one
psychologizing remark through, that'd be it. You'd be called
a humanist—at the time, an epithet of considerable abuse.
The passion of such boundary marking is, for me, now hard-
er to sustain. In my reading on shame, it's hard to conclude that
any one discipline has the "right" approach. Shame is "owned"
very differently by different disciplines, so the question arises
of what to do with the claims to truth of the different research
I draw upon. Or, in another language, what are the conditions
of possibility? What assumptions have to be in place for various
statements to be made? In this project I'm not so concerned
with such preoccupations. This is not to say that anything goes.
I am interested in different descriptions, not for their underlying
truth, but for what they reveal about aspects of shame.
Instead of the term conditions of possibility, I now tend to
overuse interest. It is a reaction to reading: "Hmmn, isn't that
interesting?" It's neither a studied expression of wonderment
nor a naive deployment of ignorance. It is an attitude guided
by the question: what would shame do if we were to think
about it like this, or like this, or like that? That is, how does
shame make us think differently? What do radically differ-
ent ideas about shame do to our understanding of it? What
do they do to our deeply held assumptions and prejudices? If

12
 Domg Shame

someone says that all humans blush (as Darwin did and many
others following him), what does it do to our sense of shame?
What does it do to our ideas about the body? What does it
do to ideas about being wired as human? Do animals blush?
According to Darwin, and as any pet owner would concur,
they certainly seem to express shame. As I watch my cat turn
away after I've chastised him, I wonder at his feeling of shame.
All these very different ideas are interesting. But I also use
interest in a more specific way. Interest constitutes lines of con-
nection between people and ideas. It describes a kind of affec-
tive investment we have in others. When, for different reasons,
that investment is questioned and interest is interrupted, we
feel deprived. Crucially, that's when we feel shame. That little
moment of disappointment—"oh, but I was interested"—is
amplified into shame or a deep disappointment in ourselves.
Shame marks the break in connection. We have to care about
something or someone to feel ashamed when that care and
connection—our interest—is not reciprocated.
I take these ideas from the psychologist Silvan Tomkins.
As we'll see, Tomkins bases his theory of shame on clini-
cal studies of what the body does when it feels. His research,
conducted during the 19508 and 19605, was largely ignored or
unheard of in the humanities. However, several years ago the
well-known literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick edited a collection
of Tomkins's writing, with the help of Adam Frank, then a
PhD student. Sedgwick and Frank describe the joy they felt
when they first encountered Tomkins's work:
We got our first taste of Silvan Tomkins when we were look-
ing for some usable ideas on the topic of shame. In a sodden
landscape of moralistic or maudlin idees regues about what is,
to the contrary, the most mercurial of emotions, Tomkins'
formulations startle: for their sharpness and daring, their
amplitude, and a descriptive levelheadedness that in the
dispiriting context sounds almost surreal.24

13
Doing Shame

As they go on to describe, Tomkins "places shame, in fact, at

one end of the affect polarity shame-interest? It was the next
clause that caught me and has held me in its sway ever since:
suggesting that the pulsations of cathexis around shame, of
all things, are what either enable or disenable so basic a func-
tion as the ability to be interested in the world.25

The idea is extraordinary. It is totally counterintuitive

to link shame (such a debased feeling) with interest: shame
"only operates after interest and enjoyment has been activated,
and inhibits one or the other or both. The innate activator of
shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy."26 This
frames shame in a different light. The pairing of shame with
interest or, even more extraordinary, with joy prompts all sorts
of questions. Shame illuminates our intense attachment to the
world, our desire to be connected with others, and the knowl-
edge that, as merely human, we will sometimes fail in our
attempts to maintain those connections.
In Sedgwick and Frank's account, interest operates on a
number of levels. Substantially, as in the above quotation,
without interest there can be no shame; conversely, shame
alerts us to things, people, and ideas that we didn't even
realize we wanted. It highlights unknown or unappreci-
ated investments. Viewing shame in this way must disabuse
us of shame's reputation as a miserabilist condition. It is, in
Sedgwick and Frank's words, anything but maudlin. This isn't
to say that shame is easy. As Tomkins clearly sets out again
and again, the major reason for an intellectual and political
interest in shame is that "shame strikes deepest into the heart
of man. . . . Shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of
the soul."27 It is the affect—for Tomkins, shame is innate and
biological in its inception—that shows most clearly the human
organism in its frailty. This portrays shame as a kind of flash-
ing light indicating the onset of the breakdown of humanity.
But shame also comes in different hues of intensity.28

14
 Doing Shame

So shame is not always white-hot; sometimes it's felt in

warm pink shyness, embarrassment, or in any of the variations
along the continuum of shame-humiliation. To paraphrase
Tomkins's description, shame can be activated only in situa-
tions where interest and/or enjoyment are not completely re-
duced. If shame and interest are intimately intertwined, what
constitutes interest is large. In allying interest with enjoyment,
Tomkins leads us to think that interest will be agreeable. And
in terms of his insistence on the physiology of the affects, we
can say that interest feels good. However, it may be at a level of
feeling for which we have no words. He also pairs interest and
excitement, which again the body may feel in different ways:
from a response of eyes wide open and pulse elevated to a more
generalized feeling of expectation, overstimulation, or even
irritation. At one level it may be the result of a lot of stimuli
hitting parts of the brain; at another this may be translated
into particular reactions or attitudes.
The breadth with which we need to understand interest
is important, and I am not making the claim that shame is
"good" because it is tied to a positive, as in "good," feeling.
Rather, interest is positive in its sense of being opposed to a
negative or substrative state: it adds rather than takes away. In
line with what Foucault would call positivity, shame is always
productive. In this sense, it produces effects—more shame,
more interest—which may be felt at a physiological, social,
or cultural level. When we feel shame it is because our inter-
est has been interfered with but not canceled out. The body
wants to continue being interested, but something happens
to "incompletely reduce" that interest.
The interest in play will take many forms: the interest the
body displays in proximity to another body, or face, or eyes; the
excitement of desire; the intellectual interest of why; the interest
registered on the skin in relation to natural beauty; and so on.
These different permutations make shame both a specific and a
general optic through which to engage with a number of issues.

15
Doing Shame

This is exciting, but also bewildering. Is shame one feeling or

many? Is it felt the same way the world over, or does it have very
particular cultural meanings? I'll be arguing that shame strad-
dles the particular and the universal. And it makes us question
again the relation between what we understand by the particu-
lar and the specific, the universal and the general. The choice is
not between one or the other: the trick is to bring the two levels
together, for the question of what is considered specific will af-
fect greatly how the general is constituted and vice versa. Theory
is, by definition, generalizing; it abstracts from the minutiae
of concrete experience. My strategy is to bring both—theory
and local context—to bear on each other.29 It doesn't always
work, but it was with a jolt of recognition that I read Tomkins's
description of his analytical approach:
The key to both Science (and Psychology especially) and
Art is the union of specificity and generality—and this is
extremely difficult since the individual tends to backslide
either in one direction or the other—becoming overly con-
crete or overly abstract. I know this is a major problem of my
own—but I think it may be a more general one.30

As Sedgwick and Frank point out, with sometimes brutal

clarity, current cultural theory seems uninterested and un-
interesting. Everyone seems to know the answers, because the
questions are so narrow. But if, say, "poststructuralism" is the
answer to everything, how interesting can the questions be?
What is missed in the easy rejection of anything that doesn't
fit into these narrow confines? Denunciation is easier than
invention. As Sedgwick and Frank put it, "The moralistic
hygiene . . . is available to anyone who masters the application
of two or three discrediting questions." They continue:
How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct
and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in

16
 Domg Shame

any given case would allow one to ask, What was it possible
to think or do in any given moment of the past, that it no
longer is?31

Like Tomkins, I've been a backslider between the overly

concrete and the overly abstract—more often than not in the
same article or book. But I'm increasingly cranky with theo-
retical descriptions that are so abstract as to be meaningless.
For instance, the other day my young colleague Fiona Probyn
and I were discussing the question of privilege. At a conference
she had been called on her uncritical presumption of privilege
as a white feminist. This sent her into a tailspin of angst and
self-doubt. She is embarking on an ambitious and important
project analyzing the silence in Australia about white fathers
who sired the mixed-race children taken from their fami-
lies (the issue at the heart of the Stolen Generations). Fiona
interpreted the question as relating to the idea that unless she
"undid" her privilege as a white woman, she would remain
complicit in this history of oppression.
Never one to remain idle, Fiona wrote a paper in which she
investigated the question of how to give up power and privilege.
It was a well-written explanation, citing the wide literature by
both black and white feminists on the subject. My response—
as her cranky older colleague—was rude: "Write five hundred
words on how your privilege will detract or add to your project,
and why you are interested in the case of white fathers."
Even for me this outburst was a bit much. But we had a
laugh about exposing "Probyn privilege," and she went off and
did precisely that. Thankfully she got back on track with her
project and through detail reworked the emptiness of "white
privilege" into a moving and motivated account of why it's
important for white feminists to engage with a history of white
abuse. The general and the particular melded into a compel-
ling account.32

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Doing Shame

TOMKINS S AFFECTS
It's hard not to dwell on Tomkins's fascinating life and career.
According to Irving Alexander's 1995 account, Tomkins gradu-
ated in 1930 from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in
playwriting. He then went on to do graduate work in psy-
chology, and, after a brief stint at working for a horse-racing
syndicate, he did postgraduate studies in philosophy, where
he explored value theory and personality theory. He made his
name by 1943 through his research in psychopathology, but it
wasn't until 1951 that he presented his ideas on affect, which
he thought could not be derived "from an analysis of psycho -
pathology but rather from a general theory of human function-
ing."33 His first paper on affect was published in French in 1956
in a collection edited by Jacques Lacan. This didn't have much
of an impact on his American colleagues, and it wasn't until
1962 that the first two volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness
were published. Later, volume three was published a few weeks
before his death in 1991, and volume four posthumously.
He was apparently a great teacher and a warm colleague
who encouraged many of the now leading names in psy-
chology, among them Paul Ekman, whose work in the emo-
tions took up Tomkins's ideas, especially about the centrali-
ty of the face in emotion. There is a lovely photograph of
Tomkins in the opening front page of Shame and Its Sisters.
He has one of those marvelously expressive, nearly plastic faces
and a gorgeous smile. Strangely enough, the dominant lines
on his face mirror the result of one of Ekman's experiments
on the role of the eyebrows in emotion.34 If lines and wrinkles
indicate a particular recurring and predominant type of af-
fect, Tomkins's face reveals a habitual expression of surprise-
interest, with some sadness. Reading about all the little things
the body does makes one strangely attuned to the previously
unnoticed. Perhaps this explains why Tomkins claimed he
suffered at different times of his life from esoteric physical con-

18
 Doing Shame

editions. From reading Tomkins, I now seem to have developed

a kind of hypochondria of the face—on Ekman's scale my
wrinkles attest to a life of surprise-interest and fear-terror.
Affects give us wrinkles because they are often expressed
on the face. They are in a way much more external than
"drives." Tomkins argues that the two systems are very dif-
ferent, although complementary. The drives concern the basic
urges necessary for the human organism, for instance, the sex
drive. They are normally thought of as the biological and psy-
chological imperative to perform a function the body needs to
survive. Sedgwick and Frank characterize the drives as digital
in their on/off function; for example, the sex drive ceases once
orgasm has taken place, and the hunger drive ceases once we
have eaten our fill. Each is discrete in its object, and usually
a particular drive will not concern itself with another object.
In contrast, Tomkins argues that "any affect can have any
object." You can feel anger at an object that normally causes
joy; you can be startled by any number of objects; you can feel
shame in the strangest of circumstances. Tomkins postulates
that the affect system works to amplify the drives. In the stead
of the on/off function of the drives, the affects provide a wide
range of differentiation—what Sedgwick and Frank call their
analogical operations.
The notion that any affect can have any object and that the
affect will come in different hues of intensity struck Tomkins as
a stunning idea. He came upon it in Carl Weiner's pioneering
work on cybernetics in the late 19408 and early 19505. Tomkins
was trying to figure out whether "one could design a truly hu-
manoid machine."35 As he puts it:
I almost fell out of my chair in surprise and excitement when
I suddenly realized that the panic of one who experiences the
suffocation of interruption of his vital air supply has nothing
to do with the anoxic drive signal per se [since gradual loss
of oxygen, even when fatal, produces no panic]. A human

19
Doing Shame

being could be, and often is, terrified about anything under
the sun. It was a short step to see that excitement has nothing
to do per se with sexuality or with hunger, and that the ap-
parent urgency of the drive system was borrowed from its co-
assembly with appropriate affects as necessary amplifiers.36

As I followed Tomkins in his excitement, the idea of the

affects as amplification began to sink in. It makes sense, or
opens a little window into a different way of thinking. How
would Tomkins's theory be applied to seemingly intractable
conditions such as anorexia nervosa? According to Tomkins's
view, it seems ludicrous to think about anorexia in terms of the
drives of either hunger or sexuality. And as I read Tomkins's
passage, I had a flash of memory. Transported by shame, I was
suddenly back in a room with a psychologist during the time
I was hospitalized at a young age for quite severe anorexia. I
think my parents were in the background. The male psycholo-
gist banged on about my sexuality—did I have boyfriends?
was I abnormal? I felt utter shame.37 It was shame upon shame:
the shame of being singled out and put in a hospital ward
where I stood out among the really sick; the shame at my
constant failure to gain the necessary weight to get out. At the
time, to lose any weight that they had force-fed upon me was a
victory; however, it was tarnished by the shame of being forced
back into the hospital and horribly amplified by my parents'
shame, disappointment, and desperation. Shame is catching,
and it must have been both painful and deeply shaming to
have your daughter proudly wasting away. In that little room
with the psychologist, my parents, and me, the atmosphere
burned hot with shame.
I also recall thinking that the psychologist was totally loony
and had it all wrong. How much more profitable would it have
been had he been interested in affect theory? Had he read my
shame, might he have acted differently? Tomkins's insights
would have alerted the doctor that the common form of treat-

20
 Doing Shame

ment, behavior modification, was not the best suited for an

anorexic consumed by shame, self-loathing, and tragic pride.
To my knowledge, affect theory is still not used in the therapy
of anorexics. I don't know if it would cure anorexia, but it would
certainly help clarify the affective complex in which the an-
orexic is imprisoned. It would also illuminate the dynamics of
affects within her family and close circles and maybe bring some
help and understanding to those who stand by helplessly as
their loved one tries to kill herself slowly. In my own situation,
I might say that I was shamed into recovery. After I was released
from the hospital, I would spend time with my best friend's
family in town. Her father was my GP, and her mother an artist
whom I greatly admired. Years later when I thanked them for
helping me get better, my friend's mother smiled sadly and said,
"I wish I could have told your mother before she died that it was
only because she had brought you up so well." I was too polite to
be bad in front of them, so I started eating again. The dynamics
of "being good," the fear of disappointing others, and the inter-
play between shame and the desire for connection, then, are not
just a matter of theory.
But how do affects work? Drawing on Anthony Wilden's
work on analog and digital communication,38 Sedgwick and
Frank explain the importance of understanding the affect
system as analog and the drive system as digital. The two exist
in a relationship, one that Wilden says "undoubtedly involves
constant switching." The two important points are: unlike
drives, affects do not have a predetermined object—"a human
can be terrified by anything under the sun"; and affects enable
a "finite and concrete multiplication . . . of different possibili-
ties." This yields a model that encompasses the binary motiva-
tion of the drives (on/off) and the qualitatively different possi-
bilities of the affects. If the drives operate in a "stop/start" way,
the affects are more "and/and/and/and." Visually put, drives
are black and white, affects are all the grays. In Sedgwick and
Frank's terms, this model allows us to understand "how things

21
Doing Shame

differentiate: how quantitative differences turn into qualita-

tive ones, how digital and analog representations leap-frog or
interleave with one another."39
How things differentiate—how simply they frame one of
the more pressing questions of our times. The dominant mind-
set has so obsessively focused on sameness and difference that
we may have overlooked the point. Instead of posing sameness
and difference as opposing and static blocks, we might find it
refreshing to think about the varying degrees and hues of simi-
larity and difference that constantly inform human life. This
immediately applies to those areas such as gender, sexuality,
and ethnicity, which seem to have become frozen in opposi-
tions: men versus women, gays versus straights, white versus
nonwhite. In some ways we all share more than we don't,
although of course—and often with good cause—we tend to
fixate on what separates us. It has been demonstrated that we
all blush, but beyond that common element, how, where, and
why we experience shame and with what effects are all highly
differentiated.
Tomkins's model is situated at the intersection of the
element that he calls "neural firing," which is the same for
all humans (the wiring of our affects), and those aspects that
differ and are constantly differentiated (the social, cultural,
and individual experience of affects). The differential experi-
ence of the affects is also an important basis for understanding
how we are different (culturally, socially, and individually).
Tomkins identifies nine affects, which, apart from an excep-
tion, are paired in a polar continuum: disgust-contempt,
shame-humiliation, fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage,
surprise-startlement, enjoyment-joy, interest-excitement. The
strangely though descriptively named "dismell" was added
later. According to Donald Nathanson, a follower of Tomkins
and a practicing psychologist, "each affect has its own address
in the brain."40 Depending on the density of the neural firing,
the affect appears in variation. As Tomkins puts it, "The gen-

22
 Doing Shame

eral advantage of affective arousal to such a broad spectrum of

levels is to make the individual care about quite different states
of affairs in quite different ways."41
This then raises another key point: affect amplification
makes us care about things. This brings us back to my earlier
discussion of interest. Our interest can be aroused by so many
very different things that we need a way of being alerted to
what is important. Or to put it another way, so much is going
on at any one moment that we need a system to make us dis-
cretely aware. This is why Nathanson calls Tomkins's a "theory
of minding," or as Andrew Strathern puts it in a different con-
text, a theory of "the mindful body."42 When the body minds,
and the mind is bodied, this produces a
complex interleaving of endogenous and exogenous, per-
ceptual, proprioceptive, and interpretative—causes, effects,
feedbacks, motives, long-term states such as moods and theo-
ries, along with distinct transitory physical or verbal effects.43

It's an amazing tableau, especially if you think about the

interrelationship among these diverse entities as one of constant
movement—what could be called propriocentrism—whereby
each feeling contains an awareness of its relation to other feel-
ings.44 This is very much a description of "innate affect [as] the
link between physiology and psychology."45 The innateness also
includes what Tomkins calls affect scripts or theory, whereby the
human organism incorporates in an intimate way early affective
scenes. Disparate bits of information become script or theory,
which interact with the work of parts of the brain and the ner-
vous system. Tomkins explains what happens when the mind is
bodied; or is it that the body minds? It is, of course, both, and it
changes our image of the distinctions among mind, brain, body,
stimulus, memory, and thoughts.
When any stimulus is perceived, that is, interpreted within
the central assembly and simultaneously transmuted into

23
Doing Shame

a conscious report, it may activate amplifying affect on an

innate basis by virtue of the gradient and level of density
of the neurological stimulation of the stimulus which it
reported . . . [and] may also recruit from memory informa-
tion about past experiences and amplify it further.46

But what of the shame-humiliation affect? Let's start by taking

a description that Alexander gives of Tomkins's own shame
theory (again, understood as an individual's bodily summa-
tion of his or her own trajectory of affective experiences).

He was clearly adored by [his mother] all of her life. That

rather idyllic picture was disrupted by negative-affect-
producing scenes that led to important scripts in his life. The
first ones depict him as a ravenously hungry child for whom
a wet nurse was needed to supplement the mother's supply
of milk. The resultant affect was shame for demanding more
than his due.47

This scene is taken directly from Tomkins's own descrip-

tion and self-analysis, conducted under the pseudonym "the
Sculptor." He clearly highlights the interrelation of positive
affects (he was adored) and negative ones (he was greedy and
ashamed of his need). He recalls his childhood as "the mag-
nification of paradise lost and which must be escaped, fought
for, and recovered." This is defined as a nuclear script. And as
Tomkins wrote of his own scripts: "I was able to trace their
continuation and elaboration over many years."48

AFFECT OR EMOTION?
Tomkins describes an intricate model of affect as central to
human functioning. In Marcel Mauss's term, which I discuss
in the next chapter, Tomkins sought to comprehend "the
total man"—the site where, for want of better categories,
the biological and the social continually charge each other.
Tomkins argues strongly that "the biopsychological mecha-

24
 Doing Shame

nisms and the social products be integrated into a science of

man and not polarized."49 He elaborates that this science of
man "must focus not only on the casual mechanisms under-
lying cognition, affect and action, but on the cultural products
of man . . . language, art, science, as well as cerebrum, nervous
system and genes." While he pursues with fervor exactly how
affects work in the body, he is equally passionate about what
affects do to the self and society. This can be heard over and
again in statements such as this: "The nature of the experience
of shame guarantees a perpetual sensitivity to any violation of
the dignity of man."50
Just hearing a "hard scientist" (which he was, at times)
speak of human dignity gives pause to the silly splits between
science and humanities. In terms of other divisions, Tomkins
rarely, if ever, talks about emotions. His commitment to the
language of affect ties him to a scientific tradition and also
frames his understanding that affects are innate to organ-
isms. More generally, however, there is a lot of confusion
about whether shame is an affect or an emotion or both. Some
speak of emotion and never mention affect, just as some speak
vaguely of affect, using it as the current buzzword of cultural
theory. For some, disciplinary loyalty tethers them to one term
or the other. The term emotion tends to be used by those who
insist that emotion is social and cultural in genesis. They tend
not to include in their discussion the work of clinical psy-
chologists such as Tomkins. For instance, in his overview of
theories of emotion, the sociologist Jack Barbalet refers only in
passing to Tomkins and is dismissive of his "aggressive" tone.51
Despite Tomkins's plea that the study of affect not become
polarized, Barbalet begins his book stating that "emotion is
a social thing" and requires a sociological investigation.52
It could be convenient to say that emotion refers to the
social expression of affect, and affect in turn is the biological
and physiological experience of it. To an extent, this is an apt
description. But it also seems that disciplinary pride keeps

25
Doing Shame

the camps separate when what is needed is a radical cross-

fertilization of ideas. For example, Dylan Evans, a philosopher,
blithely remarks on how computer science became interested
in the emotions only in the 19905, clearly ignoring Tomkins
and his inspiration in the work of Weiner.53 In heroic terms,
Nathanson introduces a book on shame, psychoanalysis, and
writing in this manner:

Historians of the future will see our generation as that within

which ongoing sober, sensible discussion of shame became
possible and all areas of scholarship infused both with new
courage and new language for human emotion.54

Well, maybe. Or maybe not if we can't figure out which

thing we're talking about and refuse to engage with those
who use another vocabulary. The evolutionary and theoretical
psychologist Nicholas Humphrey gives insight into the com-
plexity of such distinctions. He is inspired by Thomas Reid,
who in 1785 tried to clarify the difference between what we
experience inwardly and how we talk about the experience:
Thus, I feel a pain; I see a tree: the first denoteth a sensation,
the last a perception. The grammatical analysis of both ex-
pressions is the same. . . . In the first, the distinction between
the act and the object is not real but grammatical; in the sec-
ond, the distinction is not only grammatical but real.55

Humphrey expands on this to say that "sensory awareness is

an activity. We do not have pains, we get to be pained."56 It is
tempting to make the analogous point about being affected
and having an emotion.57
Using Humphrey's point, "being affected" tends to refer to
a privileging of the body in some form. How that body is de-
fined varies widely, and, as we'll see, Gilles Deleuze has made
affect fashionable in a whole other set of debates. "Having
emotion" implicitly privileges how emotions are inculcated in
different cultural contexts. This is true of the descriptions of

26
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 begat children of Azubah his wife, and of Jerioth] the Hebrew
seems to be corrupt. Read perhaps begat children of Azubah, his
wife, daughter of Jerioth; or took Azubah the wife of Jerioth. The
name Azubah = forsaken is significant: see the note on verse 42,
Caleb, ad fin.

²⁰And Hur begat Uri, and Uri begat Bezalel.

20. Bezalel] the Chronicler is naturally pleased to give
prominence in his list to Bezalel, who in Exodus xxx. (P) is
mentioned as the artificer of the Tabernacle.

²¹And afterward Hezron went in to the

daughter of Machir the father of Gilead; whom
he took to wife when he was threescore years
old; and she bare him Segub.
21. The table of Caleb is broken off at this point to introduce
verses 21‒23 a statement of further descendants of Hezron (verse
9) by another wife, the daughter of Machir. The interruption is not
unnatural, for it is convenient to refer to Hezron’s “son of old age”
immediately before the notice of his death (verse 24).

Machir] the most important clan of Manasseh (compare Numbers

xxvi. 29; Judges v. 14). The affinity of Judean Hezronites with
members of the tribe of Manasseh, implied by this verse, is
surprising. Whether the tradition has a basis in fact, or arose through
some genealogical confusion, cannot as yet be determined. There is
however considerable evidence in favour of the view that the
relationship between Machir and Caleb is at least “no isolated detail,
still less is it the invention of the Chronicler’s age,” and there may be
real historical ground for a tradition that besides the northern
movement of the Hezronites upwards to Judah there was also at
some time a movement across the northern end of Edom into the
lands east of Jordan, ending in the settlements of Machir and Jair in
Gilead here recorded; compare Numbers xxxii. 39, and for
discussion of the problem see Cook, Notes on Old Testament
History, pp. 92, 93, etc.

²²And Segub begat Jair, who had three and

twenty cities in the land of Gilead.
22. Jair] one of the Judges (Judges x. 3, 4 where thirty cities, not
twenty-three, are assigned him).

the land of Gilead] This name is sometimes restricted to that part

of the land east of Jordan which lies south of the wady Yarmuk.
Here, as often, it is applied to all the land east of Jordan occupied by
Israel.

²³And Geshur and Aram took the towns ¹ of Jair

from them, with Kenath, and the villages ²
thereof, even threescore cities. All these were
the sons of Machir the father of Gilead.
¹ Or, Havvoth-jair. ² Hebrew daughters.

23. And Geshur and Aram] Geshur was an Aramean kingdom

east of Jordan on the north-east border of Manasseh. Aram,
commonly translated “Syria” or “the Syrians,” probably here signifies
the kingdom of which Damascus was the capital. The conquest of
Manassite territory by the Arameans (“Syrians”) here described
probably took place before the days of Ahab, for in his reign they
were already established as far south as Ramoth-gilead (1 Kings
xxii. 3).

the towns of Jair] note margin Havvoth-jair, compare

Deuteronomy iii. 14; Judges x. 4. The name perhaps means “the
tent-villages of Jair” (Arabic Ḥĭvâ = “a collection of tents near
together”).
 ²⁴And after that Hezron was dead in Caleb-
ephrathah, then Abijah Hezron’s wife bare him
Ashhur the father of Tekoa.
24. And after that Hezron was dead in Caleb-ephrathah] The
Hebrew is certainly corrupt, but can easily be emended with the help
of the LXX. Read And after Hezron was dead Caleb went in to
Ephrath (verse 19) his father Hezron’s wife and she bare him,
etc. Ephrath (= Ephrathah, verse 50, iv. 4) is a name of Bethlehem
(Ruth iv. 11; Micah v. 2). “The taking of a father’s wife signified a
claim to inherit the father’s possessions (compare 2 Samuel xvi. 22),
and the phrase here expresses the legitimacy of Caleb’s residence
in northern Judea” (see note on verse 42).

Ashhur] compare iv. 4, 5. Ashhur might be a younger brother of

Hur (verses 19, 50); but quite possibly they are one and the same
(compare the contraction of Jehoahaz into Ahaz); see also iv. 5.

the father of Tekoa] i.e. the founder of the town or the eponymous
ancestor of its inhabitants. For Tekoa see 2 Chronicles xx. 20, note.

25‒41.
The Genealogy of the Jerahmeelites.

²⁵And the sons of Jerahmeel the firstborn of

Hezron were Ram the firstborn, and Bunah,
and Oren, and Ozem, Ahijah.
25. Jerahmeel] In David’s time they were, like Caleb, a semi-
nomadic clan in the south of Judah; compare 1 Samuel xxvii. 10;
xxx. 29. They shared in the northern movements of Caleb (see note
on verse 42), and eventually formed part of the post-exilic Jewish
community; hence their records do not appear in earlier parts of the
Old Testament, but are known to the Chronicler.
 Ozem, Ahijah] By a slight change in the Hebrew we get Ozem
his brother (so LXX.); compare xxvi. 20 for a similar confusion of
reading.

²⁶And Jerahmeel had another wife, whose

name was Atarah; she was the mother of
Onam. ²⁷And the sons of Ram the firstborn of
Jerahmeel were Maaz, and Jamin, and Eker.
²⁸And the sons of Onam were Shammai, and
Jada: and the sons of Shammai; Nadab, and
Abishur. ²⁹And the name of the wife of Abishur
was Abihail; and she bare him Ahban, and
Molid. ³⁰And the sons of Nadab; Seled, and
Appaim: but Seled died without children ¹.
¹ Or, sons.

26. Atarah] see note on Hezron, verse 5.

³¹And the sons of Appaim; Ishi. And the sons

of Ishi; Sheshan. And the sons of Sheshan;
Ahlai. ³²And the sons of Jada the brother of
Shammai; Jether, and Jonathan: and Jether
died without children ¹. ³³And the sons of
Jonathan; Peleth, and Zaza. These were the
sons of Jerahmeel.
¹ Or, sons.
 31. the sons of Sheshan; Ahlai] Ahlai is perhaps a gentilic name,
not the name of an individual, since in verse 34 Sheshan is said to
have had “no sons, but daughters.” More probably however the
Chronicler is using a different source for verses 34‒41.

³⁴Now Sheshan had no sons, but daughters.

And Sheshan had a servant, an Egyptian,
whose name was Jarha.
34. an Egyptian] Hebrew Miṣri. Render probably a Muṣrite, i.e.
inhabitant of the north Arabian district to the south of Palestine,
known as Muṣri and apparently confused at times with Miṣraim
(Egypt). For some suggestive conjectures regarding this table of
Jarha’s descendants see S. A. Cook, Encyclopedia Biblica ii. 2364.

³⁵And Sheshan gave his daughter to Jarha his

servant to wife; and she bare him Attai. ³⁶And
Attai begat Nathan, and Nathan begat Zabad;
³⁷and Zabad begat Ephlal, and Ephlal begat
Obed; ³⁸and Obed begat Jehu, and Jehu
begat Azariah; ³⁹and Azariah begat Helez, and
Helez begat Eleasah; ⁴⁰and Eleasah begat
Sismai, and Sismai begat Shallum; ⁴¹and
Shallum begat Jekamiah, and Jekamiah begat
Elishama.
35. Sheshan gave his daughter to Jarha] This was equivalent to
making his servant his heir. Thus Abraham at first (Genesis xv. 2, 3)
regarded Eliezer his steward as his heir. The list of thirteen
descendants of Jarha ending with Elishama (verse 41) is perhaps a
proper genealogy: at least the names may be those of individuals,
although it is impossible to say why this pedigree of Elishama should
have been so carefully preserved (so Curtis). On the other hand
Cook (see previous note) regards Jarha as perhaps an eponym of
Jerahmeel, and, connecting Sheshan with the Hebronite Sheshai,
thinks the genealogy may signify a northward movement of
Jerahmeel from Muṣri to the district of Hebron.

42‒49 (compare verses 18‒24).

The Descendants of Caleb.

⁴²And the sons of Caleb the brother of

Jerahmeel were Mesha his firstborn, which
was the father of Ziph; and the sons of
Mareshah the father of Hebron. ⁴³And the
sons of Hebron; Korah, and Tappuah, and
Rekem, and Shema. ⁴⁴And Shema begat
Raham, the father of Jorkeam; and Rekem
begat Shammai.
42. Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel] Called Chelubai (verse 9)
and Caleb the son of Hezron (verse 18). As eponym of the tribe
Caleb is described as “son” of Hezron “son” of Judah, and of course
is not to be distinguished from the Caleb son of Jephunneh who is
classed as a Kenizzite in various passages (iv. 15; Numbers xiii. 6;
Joshua xiv. 6).

Important features of the fortunes of the Caleb clan can be

discerned from the lists in this chapter, verses 18‒24, 42‒50. It
appears that at first their seats were in the southern parts of Judah—
witness verses 42‒49, in which several of the names, viz. Ziph
(Joshua xv. 24 or 25), Mareshah (2 Chronicles xi. 8), Hebron,
Tappuah (Joshua xv. 34), Maon (Joshua xv. 55), and Beth-zur
(Joshua xv. 58) are names of towns in the south or south-west of
Judah. From these, their pre-exilic homes, they were driven
northwards, and during the exilic period and afterwards they
occupied many of the townships not far from Jerusalem, e.g.
Bethlehem (see verses 50‒55). Apart from the names in verses 50‒
55, we have a testimony to this northward movement in verse 24
(where see note), and probably also in verse 18, where the names
Jerioth (tents) and Azubah (forsaken) hint at the abandonment first
of nomadic life and then of the south Judean settlements. This
movement was largely no doubt compulsory, under pressure from
the Edomites to the south (compare above i. 43, note) who in their
turn were being forced north by a strong and fairly constant
encroachment of Arab tribes (see Wellhausen, De Gentibus, and
more recently Hölscher, Palästina, pp. 22, 30, on the importance of
such evidence as this notice in Chronicles for determining the
composition and conditions of Palestine in the post-exilic period).

Mesha] The Moabite king whose deeds are recorded on the

Moabite Stone bore this name. LXX. reads Mareshah (Μαρεισά) as
in the latter part of the verse.

⁴⁵And the son of Shammai was Maon; and

Maon was the father of Beth-zur. ⁴⁶And Ephah,
Caleb’s concubine, bare Haran, and Moza,
and Gazez: and Haran begat Gazez. ⁴⁷And
the sons of Jahdai; Regem, and Jotham, and
Geshan, and Pelet, and Ephah, and Shaaph.
⁴⁸Maacah, Caleb’s concubine, bare Sheber
and Tirhanah.
45. Maon] Nabal who was a Calebite lived at the town of Maon (1
Samuel xxv. 2, 3). It is improbable that Maon was ever used as the
name of a person; compare Buchanan Gray, Hebrew Proper Names,
pp. 127 f. See note on verse 42.

⁴⁹She bare also Shaaph the father of

Madmannah, Sheva the father of Machbena,
 and the father of Gibea; and the daughter of
Caleb was Achsah.
49. the daughter of Caleb was Achsah] Compare Judges i. 12.

50‒55. These verses give the post-exilic settlements of the

Calebites in the townships of northern Judea, not far from
Jerusalem: see verse 42, note.

⁵⁰These were the sons of Caleb; the son ¹ of

Hur, the firstborn of Ephrathah, Shobal the
father of Kiriath-jearim; ⁵¹Salma the father of
Beth-lehem, Hareph the father of Beth-gader.
¹ The Septuagint has, sons.

50. the son of Hur] Read with the LXX., the sons of Hur. Hur
was the son of Caleb (verse 19).

the firstborn of Ephrathah] see note verse 24.

⁵²And Shobal the father of Kiriath-jearim had

sons; Haroeh, half of the Menuhoth.
52. Haroeh, half of the Menuhoth] The Hebrew is quite obscure,
but may perhaps be rendered, who provided for half the resting-
places, the description applying to Shobal, i.e. his work was to
supervise some of the halting stations of the caravans which passed
through the territory of Judah. Compare similar details in iv. 21‒23,
and the title Prince of the resting-places (margin quarter-master)
given to Seraiah in Jeremiah li. 59. Almost certainly, however, the
text in the present passage is corrupt, and, following iv. 2 and verse
54, we may read Reaiah and half of the Manahathites. For the
latter see below, verse 54.
 ⁵³And the families of Kiriath-jearim; the Ithrites,
and the Puthites, and the Shumathites, and
the Mishraites; of them came the Zorathites
and the Eshtaolites.
53. Zorathites, Eshtaolites] for Zorah (modern Surah) and Eshtaol
(modern Eshua), compare Judges xiii. 25.

⁵⁴The sons of Salma; Beth-lehem, and the

Netophathites, Atrothbeth-Joab, and half of
the Manahathites, the Zorites.
54. Manahathites, the Zorites] The Manahathites of Zorah must
be associated with Manoah, the father of Samson, according to the
tradition of Judges xiii. 2, 25, and an inhabitant of Zorah (see Cooke,
Judges, pp. 131, 138, in this series).

⁵⁵And the families of scribes which dwelt at

Jabez; the Tirathites, the Shimeathites, the
Sucathites. These are the Kenites that came
of Hammath, the father of the house of
Rechab.
55. families of scribes] an indication of post-exilic date.

the Kenites that came of Hammath] or perhaps, the Kenites who

came in (i.e. who attached themselves to Israel), who were from
Hammath.

father of the house of Rechab] The verse is somewhat obscure,

but it is most probable that the Chronicler preserves a correct
tradition in the connection here alleged between the Rechabites and
the Kenites. On the ancient zeal for Jehovah displayed by the
Rechabites, see 2 Kings x. 15 ff.; and for their distinctive standpoint,
Jeremiah xxxv.

Chapter III.
1‒24.
The Genealogy of the House of David.

1‒4 (= 2 Samuel iii. 2‒5).

The Sons born to David in Hebron.

¹Now these were the sons of David, which

were born unto him in Hebron: the firstborn,
Amnon, of Ahinoam the Jezreelitess; the
second, Daniel, of Abigail the Carmelitess;
1. Daniel] LXX. (B) Δαμνιήλ, (A) Δαλουιά. In 2 Samuel iii. 3
Chileab, but LXX. Δαλουιά. The real name of David’s second son
remains therefore uncertain.

²the third, Absalom the son of Maacah the

daughter of Talmai king of Geshur; the fourth,
Adonijah the son of Haggith;
2. Geshur] Compare ii. 23, note.

³the fifth, Shephatiah of Abital; the sixth,

Ithream by Eglah his wife. ⁴Six were born unto
him in Hebron; and there he reigned seven
 years and six months: and in Jerusalem he
reigned thirty and three years.
3. Eglah his wife] In 2 Samuel iii. 5 “Eglah David’s wife,” where
however David is probably a wrong reading for the name of a
previous husband of Eglah.

5‒9 (= chapter xiv. 4‒7 and 2 Samuel v. 14‒16).

The Sons born to David in Jerusalem.

⁵And these were born unto him in

Jerusalem: Shimea, and Shobab, and Nathan,
and Solomon, four, of Bath-shua the daughter
of Ammiel:
5. Shimea] in xiv. 4 and 2 Samuel v. 14 (Revised Version)
Shammua.

Nathan] Through him our Lord’s descent is traced in Luke iii. 31.

Solomon] Only here are other sons besides Solomon attributed to

Bath-sheba.

Bath-shua] is a slight variation in pronunciation of Bath-sheba.

the daughter of Ammiel] of Eliam (perhaps a by-form of Ammiel)

in 2 Samuel xi. 3. An Eliam son of Ahithophel, David’s counsellor, is
mentioned in 2 Samuel xxiii. 34; Bath-sheba may therefore have
been grand-daughter to Ahithophel. Notice that the Chronicler does
not call Bath-sheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite; he nowhere refers to
David’s great sin; compare xx. 1‒3, where the silence of Chronicles
on this matter is specially to be noted.

⁶and Ibhar, and Elishama, and Eliphelet; ⁷and

Nogah, and Nepheg, and Japhia;
 6. Elishama] in xiv. 5 and 2 Samuel v. 15 Elishua, no doubt the
right reading, for otherwise (compare verse 8) we have two sons of
David named Elishama.

Eliphelet] in xiv. 5 Elpelet. Eliphelet cannot be right, for it occurs

again as the name of the thirteenth son in verse 8. Elpelet may be
right here and Eliphelet in verse 8, for according to Hebrew custom
two brothers might bear names of similar sound and significance.
But both Eliphelet and Nogah, the following word, are lacking in 2
Samuel v. 15; and are probably only textual errors due to
dittography.

⁸and Elishama, and Eliada, and Eliphelet,

nine. ⁹All these were the sons of David, beside
the sons of the concubines; and Tamar was
their sister.
8. Eliada] so in 2 Samuel v. 16, but in 1 Chronicles xiv. 7 Beeliada
(i.e. Baaliada, “The Lord—the Baal—knows”). This seems to have
been changed to Eliada (i.e. God knows), when the title Baal had
come to have only heathen associations, and was accordingly
repudiated by the Jews: see the note on viii. 33.

10‒16.
The Line of Davidic Kings.

¹⁰And Solomon’s son was Rehoboam,

Abijah his son, Asa his son, Jehoshaphat his
son; ¹¹Joram his son, Ahaziah his son, Joash
his son;
Two things are to be noted in this list: (1) Johanan’s name is
given in verse 15, though he was never king, (2) Zedekiah’s name
appears to be twice given, once among the sons of Josiah (verse 15)
and again in his place according to the succession (verse 16).
 10. Abijah] called Abijam in 1 Kings xiv. 31, xv. 1 ff. Abia is the
Greek form of the name; Matthew i. 7 (Authorized Version).

¹²Amaziah his son, Azariah his son, Jotham

his son; ¹³Ahaz his son, Hezekiah his son,
Manasseh his son; ¹⁴Amon his son, Josiah his
son.
12. Azariah] This king is usually called Uzziah, compare Isaiah vi.
1; see note on 2 Chronicles xxvi. 1.

¹⁵And the sons of Josiah; the firstborn

Johanan, the second Jehoiakim, the third
Zedekiah, the fourth Shallum.
15. the firstborn Johanan] This son of Josiah never came to the
throne, nor is anything known of him except from this passage.

Zedekiah] Though reckoned third here, he was younger than

Shallum (= Jehoahaz); compare 2 Chronicles xxxvi. 2 (= 2 Kings
xxiii. 31) with 2 Chronicles xxxvi. 11 (= 2 Kings xxiv. 18).

Shallum] To be identified with Jehoahaz; compare 2 Chronicles

xxxvi. 1 with Jeremiah xxii. 11.

¹⁶And the sons of Jehoiakim: Jeconiah his

son, Zedekiah his son.
16. Jeconiah] This name is sometimes shortened to Coniah
(Jeremiah xxii. 24) and written (with a slight change of meaning)
Jehoiachin (2 Chronicles xxxvi. 8, 9; 2 Kings xxiv. 6 ff.).

Zedekiah his son] Zedekiah was heir, not son, to Jeconiah, whom
he succeeded in the kingdom. His relationship to Jeconiah was that
of uncle.
 17‒19a.
The Davidic Line from Jeconiah to Zerubbabel.

Note that whereas Zerubbabel is here represented apparently as

the son of Pedaiah and consequently nephew of Shealtiel (=
Salathiel), he is elsewhere called the son of Shealtiel (Ezra iii. 2;
Haggai i. 1, ii. 2; compare Luke iii. 27‒31). The LXX. solves the
difficulty by reading Salathiel (= Shealtiel) in verse 19. The view that
the names given in verse 18 (including Pedaiah) are the names of
the sons of Shealtiel is not probable. Another suggestion is that
Zerubbabel was grand-son both to Shealtiel and Pedaiah, according
to such a scheme as the following:

Pedaiah Shealtiel
| |
a daughter = a son
|
Zerubbabel.

A minor difficulty that Shealtiel (= Salathiel) is here connected

with David through Solomon, whereas in Luke iii. 27‒31 his descent
is traced through Solomon’s brother Nathan, could be explained by
an intermarriage at some point in the genealogy between the two
Davidic families.

¹⁷And the sons of Jeconiah, the captive ¹;

Shealtiel his son, ¹⁸and Malchiram, and
Pedaiah, and Shenazzar, Jekamiah,
Hoshama, and Nedabiah.
¹ Or, Assir.

17. the sons of Jeconiah] That Jeconiah had sons is not at

variance with Jeremiah’s denunciation of him (Jeremiah xxii. 30).
That passage gives the answer to Jeconiah’s expectation of a
speedy return to his kingdom (Jeremiah xxii. verse 27); Jeremiah
says that neither he nor any of his seed shall recover the lost throne:
“Reckon him childless, for no son of his shall succeed him on his
throne.”

the captive] Hebrew assir, which the Revised Version margin (=

Authorized Version), following the ancient Versions, has wrongly
taken to be a proper name. The Revised Version margin is here only
a survival of Authorized Version. The rendering of the text (the
captive) no doubt expresses the real judgment of the Revisers.

Shealtiel] the Greek form Salathiel (Authorized Version) occurs in

Luke iii. 27 (Authorized Version).

¹⁹And the sons of Pedaiah; Zerubbabel, and

Shimei: and the sons ¹ of Zerubbabel;
¹ Hebrew son.

19. the sons of Zerubbabel] so the LXX. The Hebrew has son, as
Revised Version margin.

19b‒24.
The Davidic Line from Zerubbabel.

The text of these verses is very uncertain. In verse 20 the names

of five sons are given, but their father’s name (perhaps Meshullam)
is wanting. In verses 21, 22 the LXX. differs from the Hebrew in such
a way as to affect the number of steps in the genealogy; the Hebrew
seems to reckon but one generation between Hananiah and
Shemaiah, the LXX. on the contrary reckons six; the result on the
whole genealogy being that the LXX. counts eleven generations after
Zerubbabel as against six in the Hebrew In verse 22 again the sons
of Shemaiah are reckoned to be six, but only five names are given in
both Hebrew and LXX. For the bearing of these verses upon the
date of Chronicles, see the Introduction § 3.
 Meshullam, and Hananiah; and Shelomith was
their sister: ²⁰and Hashubah, and Ohel, and
Berechiah, and Hasadiah, Jushab-hesed, five.
20. and Hashubah] Perhaps we should read “The sons of
Meshullam: Hashubah.” See above.

Jushab-hesed] The name means “Mercy is restored.” Many such

significant names are found in the present list, and, in general, are
characteristic of the exilic and later periods.

²¹And the sons ¹ of Hananiah; Pelatiah, and

Jeshaiah: the sons of Rephaiah, the sons of
Arnan, the sons of Obadiah, the sons of
Shecaniah. ²²And the sons of Shecaniah;
Shemaiah: and the sons of Shemaiah;
Hattush, and Igal, and Bariah, and Neariah,
and Shaphat, six.
¹ Hebrew son.

21. and Jeshaiah ... Shecaniah] The LXX. reads (with some
blunders in reproducing the names), “and Jeshaiah his son,
Rephaiah his son, Arnan his son, Obadiah his son, Shecaniah his
son,” thus adding five steps to the genealogy. The difference of
reading in the Hebrew text thus suggested is very slight. It is quite
uncertain whether the Hebrew or the reading of the LXX. is to be
preferred: see the Introduction § 3, A 2.

²³And the sons ¹ of Neariah; Elioenai, and

Hizkiah, and Azrikam, three. ²⁴And the sons of
Elioenai; Hodaviah, and Eliashib, and Pelaiah,
 and Akkub, and Johanan, and Delaiah, and
Anani, seven.
¹ Hebrew son.

23. Elioenai] A name meaning, “Mine eyes are towards Jehovah,”

compare Psalms xxv. 15; compare Jushab-hesed (verse 20) and
Hodaviah (“Give thanks to Jehovah” = Hoduiah), verse 24.
 Chapter IV.
1‒23 (compare ii. 3 ff.)
Genealogies of the Tribes of Judah.

The material contained in these verses gives rise to no little

perplexity, not only in itself but also when considered along with the
genealogies of Judah in ii. 3 ff. Whether the Chronicler himself could
have thrown any light on the points which puzzle us may well be
doubted: he was more concerned to preserve all available
genealogical matter than to consider or attempt to reconcile
conflicting elements. Both the date and relationship of these notices
must be confessed to be as yet uncertain, opinion being divided
even on the question whether the list represents pre-exilic or post-
exilic conditions. Remark that the list is essentially a Calebite one.

¹The sons of Judah; Perez, Hezron, and

Carmi, and Hur, and Shobal.
1. As Hezron was the son of Perez (chapter ii. 5) and (if the LXX.
be right) Shobal was the son of Hur (ii. 50, note), we have in this
verse five, if not six, generations.

Carmi] for the name, compare ii. 7, and v. 3. Here, however,

Carmi is certainly an error for Caleb: see ii. 4, 5, 9, 50 and also the
structure of the present chapter. Thus in accord with the usual
practice of the Chronicler the chief ancestors are first named (verse
1), and then, in reverse order, their descendants—sons of Shobal
and Hur (verses 2‒10), and sons of Chelub (= Caleb) (verses 11‒
15).
 ²And Reaiah the son of Shobal begat Jahath;
and Jahath begat Ahumai and Lahad. These
are the families of the Zorathites.
2. Reaiah] Compare note on ii. 52.

the Zorathites] Compare note on ii. 53.

³And these were the sons of the father of

Etam; Jezreel, and Ishma, and Idbash: and
the name of their sister was Hazzelelponi:
3. these were the sons of the father of Etam] The Hebrew has not
got the words the sons of, and is certainly corrupt. The LXX. reads,
These were the sons of Etam. Correction is difficult, largely owing to
the obscurity of Etam. If Etam had been named as a son of Shobal in
verse 2, we might follow the LXX. It is perhaps best to suppose that
Etam begins the list of descendants of Hur, and to read “these were
the sons of Hur the father of Etam.” Etam was a place, but whether
near Bethlehem (the Etam of 2 Chronicles xi. 6) or in southern Judah
(the Simeonite Etam of verse 32) is uncertain.

⁴and Penuel the father of Gedor, and Ezer the

father of Hushah. These are the sons of Hur,
the firstborn of Ephrathah, the father of Beth-
lehem.
4. Hur] the first born of Ephrathah (= Ephrath) one of the wives of
Caleb (ii. 19). Hur was father of Bethlehem through his son Salma (ii.
50, 51, LXX.). For the name of the city compare Genesis xxxv. 19
(Ephrath the same is Bethlehem) and Micah v. 2 (Revised Version
Thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah).
 ⁵And Ashhur the father of Tekoa had two
wives, Helah and Naarah. ⁶And Naarah bare
him Ahuzzam, and Hepher, and Temeni, and
Haahashtari. These were the sons of Naarah.
⁷And the sons of Helah were Zereth, Izhar ¹,
and Ethnan.
¹ Another reading is, and Zohar.

5. Ashhur the father of Tekoa] Ashhur is probably only a variant

of Hur (see note ii. 24). Hur then is the exilic or post-exilic “father”
(founder) of the Calebite population of Tekoa (5 miles from
Bethlehem), and of Bethlehem, etc., through his sons (ii. 50‒52).

Helah and Naarah] Neither the names of the wives nor those of
the children yield any certain information.

⁸And Hakkoz begat Anub, and Zobebah, and

the families of Aharhel the son of Harum.
8. And Hakkoz] But Hebrew Koz. The absence of connection with
the preceding verse is striking. Perhaps Koz was properly one of the
sons of Helah (verse 7), and a motive for the severance of his name
may be found in the wish to make less obvious his Calebite (i.e. non-
Levitical) origin, in case he were identified with the priestly Hakkoz of
xxiv. 10; Ezekiel ii. 61, a family who were unable to prove an
untainted pedigree.

⁹And Jabez was more honourable than his

brethren: and his mother called his name
Jabez, saying. Because I bare him with
sorrow.