Shame, guilt, and punishment

Abstract

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault states that there lies a certain shame in the act of open punishment that contributed to the disappearance of the spectacle of shaming and helped to give rise to discipline and control instead. To illuminate this thesis, the paper provides a Foucauldian reading of affects - namely of shame and guilt - as produced in affective arrangements that prove to be a necessary complement to Foucault's concept of dispositive. On this basis, it argues that the legal practices of punishment predominant in secular cultures rearrange affects of shame according to an economy of guilt. In a time, however, that is seeing a clear return of excessive shaming, both online and in recent debates in philosophy of law, Foucault's diagnosis needs to be reassessed. The paper offers a reading of this return to shame as a - somewhat problematic - form of resistance against the economy of guilt.