Arendt Studies: A Journal for Research on the Life, Work, and Legacy of Hannah Arendt

Review of Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action, by Manu Samnotra. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2020. xv + 134 pp. $95/ £73 hardback. ISBN: 978-1-7936-1301-1.

Review by Christopher Peys

Hannah Arendt’s concerns about the uses and abuses of emotions in politics are well-known to readers of her work. For Manu Samnotra to develop a political theory of shame in Arendtian terms – as he does in his recent book, Worldly Shame – is thus to enter into an exceedingly bold reassessment of emotions in Arendt’s distinctive approach to politics. It is also to entertain daringly the idea that a properly-tuned, “worldly” valence of shame can be productively put to use (re)establishing the boundaries of ‘the political,’ preserving plurality, and creating a more thoroughly democratic, just world.

Neither offering another study of the “phenomenon” that Jill Locke describes as the “lament that shame is dead” (2016, 18), nor an account that simply delineates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ forms of shame, Samnotra’s book challenges readers to consider how “shame can make us worldly” (Samnotra 2020, 1, 9, and 118). In particular, it outlines how “worldly shame” – an emotion he develops and theorizes in terms of what it means to be shame “averse” and shame “prone” – can be said to engender a politics-affirming experience of affectivity needed to “attune” us to life in the public realm. According to Samnotra, ‘worldly shame’ is an emotion capable of affectively (re)drawing the boundaries of ‘the political,’ by causing us to feel our individual powerlessness, to recognize our vulnerabilities and dependence on other people and, consequently, to (re)affirm our relationship to the world we share with others. Presenting the argument that ‘worldly shame’ can help us counteract narcissism and alienation prevalent in our current stage of late modernity, Samnotra’s book demonstrates how we might begin to feel our way through the “darkness” of life in contemporary “society,”[1] and to recover a shared world when it is seemingly impossible to do so.

Based on a thorough reading of Arendt’s work, most especially her writings on Jewish and world politics, Samnotra’s book first explores the affectivity of shame, before investigating how a ‘worldly shame’ can be developed in Arendtian terms. The first chapter of Samnotra’s book outlines both his understanding of the ‘world’ – what Arendt once referred to as the “space for politics” (1994, 17) – and how shame can be ‘worldly,’ a discussion which he elaborates upon in his second chapter’s study of Arendt’s biographical account of Rahel Varnhagen (1974 [1957]). It is in terms of his reading of Arendt’s interpretation of Varnhagen’s life that Samnotra demonstrates how being “prone” to shame – as opposed to being “averse” to shame – is the key to understanding our individual powerlessness, which is a recognition of vulnerability that he contends should ultimately jettison us back into the ‘world,’ where a “We” can assemble and a plurality of people can act powerfully together. In the third and fourth chapters of Worldly Shame, Samnotra investigates the ways in which a ‘worldly shame’ transforms our relationship to ourselves and other people. It is in these chapters that Samnotra argues that Arendt, in her various journalistic writings from the Second World War, effectively seeks to shame her readers into action; he illustrates how the “elemental shame” described by Arendt in her reflections on organized guilt and universal responsibility (1994: 131) can and should ‘make us worldly’. Consequently, Samnotra shows how a ‘worldly shame’ can become the very grounds upon which a new form of political solidarity might begin to take shape. In this way, shame affectively (re)engenders ‘worldly’ spaces for politics – or becomes the foundation for ‘the political’ – and is thus centrally significant in the process of (re)establishing the “normative zones” of public, political action where questions of justice can arise and be given their due attention (Samnotra 2020, 89). In short, Samnotra contends that an emotional experience directly informs politics, acting as an ‘elemental’ ingredient in the (re)formation of the ‘world’.    

Worldly Shame is in alignment with the recent scholarship devoted to thinking anew about the role played by both sense and sensibility in Arendt’s body of thought (see, for example: Degerman 2019; Heins 2007; Nelson 2004; Nelson 2006; Newcomb 2007; Swift 2010), and yet Samnotra’s approach is distinctive in its fundamental prioritization of shame within his thoroughly Arendtian theory of ‘the political’. That is, his contention that ‘worldly shame’ is a “prerequisite for, and integral to, a democratic political ethos” (iiv and x) – or a feeling “anterior to other modes of relating to the world” (9) – is unique in its implication that an ‘elemental’ sense of shame is needed for us to think, move, and act as political beings. While there is perhaps a need to proceed cautiously from the conclusions that Samnotra draws from his reading of Arendt’s work, in the sense that he has found in her writings the intimations of an affectively-oriented political ontology that she herself might arguably not fully endorse (given her reservations about sentimentality and the presence of emotions in politics), Worldly Shame is an important, innovative text: it convincingly demonstrates how a certain form of emotion can be said to ‘attune’ us to the ‘world’ and how we might study the politicality of affect in thoroughly Arendtian terms. Samnotra’s book, in sum, makes a noteworthy, Arendtian contribution to the study of the relationship between what human beings feel and a politics that might emerge from such sentiment.

 [1] Here, I write in reference to Arendt’s well-known critique of the so-called “rise of society” (1958, 38 – 49).

 References

 Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. New York: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1974 Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Arendt, Hannah. 1994. Essays in Understanding, 1930 – 1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books.

Degerman, Dan. 2019. “Within the heart’s darkness: The role of emotions in Arendt’s political thought.” European Journal of Political Theory 18.2: 153–73.

Heins, Volker. 2007. “Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics.” The European Legacy 12.6: 715–28.

Locke, Jill. 2016. Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nelson, Deborah. 2004. “Suffering and thinking: The scandal of tone in Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In: Berlant, Lauran (ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York: Routledge, 219–244.

Nelson, Deborah. 2006. “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy.” American Literary History 18.1: 86–101.

Newcomb, Matthew J. 2007. “Totalized Compassion: The (Im)Possibilities for Acting out of Compassion in the Rhetoric of Hannah Arendt.” JAC 27.1/2: 105–133.

Swift, Simon, 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Tactlessness: Reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem". New Formations 71: 79-94.