Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame

Against a background of conflicting views on shame and its function(s), this project takes as its starting point the assumption that shame is not only essential to and unavoidable in the construction of human subjectivity and in the regulation of society, but that it also presents critical potentialities for challenging the very normative assumptions that constitute the subject and society. Shame is not something we can eliminate or prevent. This project argues that shame can be mobilized more effectively as a critical tool for calling into question the normative infrastructure regulating society. This is what we call the politics of shame: not shame as a means for individual transformation, but shame as a means for social transformation at the level of norms. The project aims therefore to develop a politics of shame that builds on the constructive models of shame elaborated in the past few decades but is specifically concerned with shame as a response to animal suffering. Whereas traditional accounts focus on the function of shame as a productive response to individuals transgressions of socially sanctioned norms, this project focuses on shame as a productive response to the norms themselves, in this case morally questionable norms surrounding the treatment of animals in our society and culture. Animal suffering constitutes the focus of the analysis because it exposes the moral fragility of the norms supporting human use and treatment of nonhuman animals, but also, more generally, of the environment and even of other fellow humans. The concept of a politics of shame entails and rests on two forms of critique: the critique of shaming as an instrument of power and control and as a tool of normalization; and the critique of a society in which shame is decreasingly able to define acceptable values, but also of a culture that deflects and denies shame for the horror it visits upon certain categories of beings. The original and innovative character of the politics of shame is that it is pitched against normalizing structures that lead both to shaming and shamelessness. Interrogating the norms themselves the project will finally reflect on what morality itself is about.