by Diana George

Shame is "sexy" these days, as they like to say in the dreary parlance of academia. There is already a trickle of shame dissertations, shame monographs, and shame symposia, all dating back to City University of New York professor and queer-theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1995 Shame and Its Sisters. The trickle is about to become an embarrassing flood. It's fitting that just when we have so much to be ashamed of in this country, English departments should now start anatomizing shame.

The wave of shame studies, when it comes, will be a welcome relief, a bracing change from English departments' current main activity--laboring over irrelevant Foucauldian critiques. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it in her deftly argued Touching Feeling, "I daily encounter graduate students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these students' sentient years, unlike the formative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush America where 'liberal' is, if anything, a taboo category and where 'secular humanism' is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct discourse with multiple invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God."

Why deploy the subtleties of Foucault in our increasingly brutal situation? Or, as Sedgwick writes: "Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system?" The litterateur's subtle exposure of hidden violence is increasingly outdated by blatant spectacles of violence, whether it's the violence of incarcerating vast segments of the population, or the violence of bombing desert nations.

Shame's hour is nigh. Just listen to Ted Koppel, reporting from Iraq at the "beginning" of the war that has just recently "ended," and see if you don't shiver with shame: "This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life." He further added that his company had as yet made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep." His words--so bald, so cringe-worthy--demean us all.

In a similar gaffe, a Sergeant Sprague from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, while passing through the ruins of the city of Ur--the cradle of civilization--was interviewed in the Guardian. If you can't help but feel sorry for Sprague, unwittingly skewered in the pages of the Guardian, perhaps you're also helpless to prevent a slight blush from creeping up your neck as you hear your countryman say of Ur, "I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast-food restaurant.... These people got nothing."

According to Sedgwick, shame is not so much individual--my knowledge of my infractions--as interpersonal: Looking at you, I see you suddenly grow strange. (Or, in the case of Koppel and Sprague, it is my country that has grown strange.) You are suddenly distant, bizarre, unsympathetic. I drop my gaze; I blush. Shame is not so much in me as between us. An oddly quivering, stammering sociality comes into view in Sedgwick's work. If earlier imperialist eras fabulated for themselves a psychology of aggressions and drives, perhaps this one has the psychology it deserves in shame.

While Sedgwick's latest book is an excellent introduction to shame studies, you may have to go back to T. E. Lawrence to get at the origin of our current nexus of desert shame. Just as Lawrence of Arabia's adventuring seems to have shaped our current predicament--Feisal, the man Lawrence backed in the Arab Revolt, eventually became the first king of the newly created nation of Iraq--so his memoirs about those adventures are tightly wound about a knot of shame. Though his book is subtitled "a triumph," Lawrence is whipsawed from glory to shame at every turn. He ends one chapter at "the supreme moment of the war," only to begin the next with the words, "Shamefaced with triumph...."

Lawrence is hardly a Jeremiah, though. I would like to enlist him in the anti-imperialist cause, but he's an unlikely recruit. As good as he is on the bitter fruits of victory, he's even better when you give up and give over to the many shameful pleasures of his prose. There is no writer more acutely aware of the torment of embodiment, at once distancing and delectating: "The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum...." Lawrence's writing marches forward in "this virile heat, in a climate as racking as can be conceived," snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, wresting glory from shame.