Instituting the Intolerable: Shame, Ignorance and Schema of Monohumanist Man

For Deleuze and Guattari, shame is what induces belief in a world, enabling a seeing of the intolerable as an exit from schemas of ignorance that institute sensorial and cognitive complicity with oppressive conditions. Distinct from guilt that can be localised upon a specific agent for something, shame compels accountability before the intolerable. As an impersonal sensitivity, shame unsettles clichéd frameworks as it both recognises complicity and bears witness to what it was hitherto insensitive to. Drawing from Primo Levi’s ‘shame in being Man’, Deleuze’s affective shame is yoked to the epistemological through Sylvia Wynter’s elaboration of the autoinstituting recursion of Monohumanist Man, wherein guilt becomes an obstacle of (normative) ignorance. Deleuze warned that purely axiomatic concepts cleaved from experience may naturalise a concealment of injustice, and this warning has been parsed through contemporary conditions of Germany following 7 October 2023, and its entrenchment of ‘Staatsräson’ both abroad and domestically.