Let us be ashamed, be proud! praise shame as the engine of revolt

"what will they think of me?" Overcoming this issue of social shame can lead to healthy anger. And to be a source of affirmation and creation, according to the philosopher Frédéric Gros, author of "shame is a revolutionary feeling".

«shame is the major affect of our time, »says the philosopher Frédéric Gros in his last essay, shame is a revolutionary feeling. Today, people no longer cry out for injustice, they "shout to shame", as if to mark with moral iron the behaviour of one or the other. But this anathema is coupled with the exactly opposite aspiration, carried by the gurus of personal development and total letting go: "Don't be ashamed anymore"! "accept your faults, stop living in the fear of your self or the judgment of others," "be yourself". Close the ban? Not quite, proposes Frédéric Gros Sans: for there is a good use of shame, a revolutionary use in both the intimate and the societal plane, which we would be ill-advised to reject.

There are so many reasons and ways to be ashamed … First of all, the world often embarrasses us in the way in which it is deranged. Inequalities in wealth can be so abysmal that they become indecent. I think of the blunt smile of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, after his little tour in space in the midst of a health crisis, and his emotional statements about "the fragility of the Earth". This extreme obscenity forces us to be ashamed of him. For its part, neoliberalism has built itself as a formidable factory of shame, nourishing in each individual the idea that if he is poor, downgraded, unhappy, he is primarily responsible for it and must question his laziness or his lack of ambition. Third contemporary form: we see the resurgence of a number of major historical injustices, whose victims have long been kept in shame-male domination over women, the situation of colonized people, victims of systemic racism … Adele Haenel shouted "shame! The shame of leaving the ceremony at the presentation of a Caesar to Roman Polanski. Finally, a digital shame has arisen with social media: we exhibit our identity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., exposing ourselves to reactions, "shameful operations" with potentially destructive effects.