Shame as a geophilosophical force

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s famous trope about “an earth and a people that are lacking” in the Geophilosophy chapter of What Is Philosophy? must be examined through a specific assemblage: the necessity for shame—as a powerful, non-psychological, and nonhuman affect—to enter philosophy itself both to resist stupidity and to include all the disfranchised of classical Reason. I then turn to Isabelle Stengers’ work against stupidity to determine how this assemblage can help us give shape to new multispecies apparatuses in the face of the Anthropocene. As a conclusion, I show that, through such apparatuses, shame truly becomes a geophilosophical force.

Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth

“…Drawing on Stengers' reading of stupidity as a celebration of false problems, the argument details how a primary affect of shame reveals to the subject certain forms of stupidity and intolerable thought that limits what philosophy is able to think. As Wiame (2022) summarises in this issue: "Engaging oneself in the future form of philosophy, once shame has made the present one intolerable, is letting oneself be touched by the myriad of real but virtual possibilities of life that our clichés, our apparatuses of power -our very own stupidity -have made invisible".…”

“…Third is the sense that geophilosophy involves some degree of philosophical renewal and the production of alternative modes of existence (see Wiame 2022;Hickey-Moody, 2022). By participating in a renewal of philosophical thinking, geophilosophies present a certain refusal to the status quo or a modification of dominant belief systems: as Hickey-Moody and Laurie (2015, p. 1) note "geophilosophy could be a way of not doing philosophy while practising located, embodied thinking".…”