From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature's Ethical Response to Politics

Just, Daniel

doi:10.1353/mln.2010.0007

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Adrienne intentionally embraces shame as a reflective mode that spurs improvement. She does so for “the next case:” not for solipsistic ends 62 but to serve others better. Adrienne's improvised version of reflexive and responsive ethics 63,64 remakes shame‐like feelings into her own philosophy of practice.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shame as a moral mood in medicine

Bromley

2022

Evaluation Clinical Practice

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Background & Aims: The emotional underpinnings that facilitate and complicate the practice of ethical principles like respect warrant sustained interdisciplinary attention. In this article, I suggest that shame is a requisite component of the emotional repertoire than makes respect for persons possible. Materials & Methods: I use person‐centered interview data from a sample of 54 physicians (including 35 surgeons), 60% of whom are women, to examine the emergence and endurance of shame as a mood with moral significance. Drawing on anthropologist Throop's concept of a moral mood, I explore physicians’ first‐person narratives of the endurance of shame experiences. Results: Narratives demonstrate that shame inheres in biomedical contexts that reinforce the physician's responsibilization and culpability for events beyond their control. As a persistent cognitive and affective state, mooded shame is a recursive and compulsory motive force for a physician's dynamic evolution as a moral actor. Discussion: Variably distressing, looming and commonplace, mooded shame becomes an atmospheric and imaginative mode through which physicians contemplate their responsibilities and connections to patients. Sometimes in a hypercognized manner that conceals its emotional roots, physicians link the mood of shame to their incessant efforts to fulfill responsibilities to each unique patient. Conclusion: I suggest that through reflection made possible within mooded shame, physicians develop a sense of being both accountable to and alongside patients, and I explore the ties between this position and philosophical concepts of respect.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shame as a moral mood in medicine

Bromley

2022

Evaluation Clinical Practice

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“…29 although the dispute between camus and sartre regarding engagement and action took the form of a political argument over history, justice, and rebellion, literature, as i detail elsewhere, became ever more essential as a platform in camus's continuing disagreement with sartre. 30 as had Blanchot and Barthes, camus remained involved politically throughout the algerian war. He brought low-profile interventionsmostly in defense of individual algerian rebels-even after his formal retreat from public involvement in matters regarding algeria.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exhausted Literature: Work, Action, and the Dilemmas of Literary Commitment

Just¹

2013

phl

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This article examines Jean-Paul sartre's concept of committed literature as a manifestation of the tendency in Western modernity of conceiving literature as a form of praxis anchored in work. Discussing an alternative idea of engagement formulated by maurice Blanchot, roland Barthes, and albert camus, the essay develops a notion of exhausted literature that questions the prioritization of work and action in predominant models of commitment. Exhaustion is proposed as a politically and ethically motivated literary strategy of suspending the group-forming morality which, as a product of modern valorization of work and action, has accompanied literature of verisimilitude, activity, and oriented time.

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“…These fictional reactions to Sartre presented a critique of direct literary representation and the self-involved discourse of action in favour of dialogue, empty memory and shifts in characters' perspectives. Looking for a principle that would neutralize violence − both the violence of self-assured action and the violence of direct, and hence one-sided, literary representation − in these stories Camus, as I have shown elsewhere (Just, 2010a;2010b), offered an argument for a political appropriation of the behavioural principle of shame, because shame, according to him, could deactivate violence and secure a provisional sense of commonality among war-stricken peoples. As an alternative to guilt, which Camus saw as a mechanism that perpetuated the violent logic of self-involvement, the inter-subjective principle of shame was inseparable from dialogue.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

The war of writing: French literary politics and the decolonization of Algeria

Just

2013

Journal of European Studies

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This article examines perceptions of the Algerian war among French intellectuals and in mainstream French culture. Against the background of France's social and political situation in the 1950s − declining international prominence, the loss of its colonies, rapid industrial modernization, and increasing moves toward individualism − the essay discusses the reactions of left-leaning writers and critics to the war and the way it was represented in popular culture after the escalating violence prompted more sharply defined political positions. Focusing on the issue of two types of engagements − political and literary − the author suggests that the redefined notion of commitment, as formulated by Albert Camus and Maurice Blanchot in response to Jean-Paul Sartre's emphasis on unconditional action, offered a conception of political, social and cultural transformation designed to undo the violence inherent in Sartre's promotion of self-assured values and insular ideas.

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From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature's Ethical Response to Politics

Cited by 10 publications

References 8 publications

Shame as a moral mood in medicine

Shame as a moral mood in medicine

Exhausted Literature: Work, Action, and the Dilemmas of Literary Commitment

The war of writing: French literary politics and the decolonization of Algeria

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