Shame and Self-Abasement: Bernard Williams, Kant and J.M. Coetzee

This chapter, structured in three parts, traces a conceptual genealogy of the reaction of shame as a primary psychological phenomenon and further analyses two sublimated renderings of the basic emotion: in Kantian ethics and in J.M. Coetzee’s novelistic project. The first part of the chapter explores the so-called genealogical approach to shame, most profoundly shaped by Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity. After that, a conceptual bridge is drawn between some textual reflections from Kant on the notion of shame and a conception of its experience as an instrumental incentive to the moral law, following a reconstructive reading of the third chapter of the ‘Analytic’ in the second Critique. Finally, and countering Kant’s incitement to the rationality of action, the analysis shows how the true ethical disposition for J.M. Coetzee’s protagonists (which equally encompasses a moment of shame) corresponds to an abandonment of the last moral idea of oneself and a defenceless confrontation with the passivity of bodily experience as a true locus of pain.