Shame is mostly understood as an unpleasant, individual feeling. Shame gives people the feeling that they are inferior and powerless. Someone who feels shame feels devalued, small and alone. Thus, many people’s lives consist to a considerable extent in dodging this unwelcome feeling.

Didier Eribon, one of the best-known French sociologists of our time, re-interprets shame and makes it available to an emancipatory discourse. In his books La société comme verdict (Society as Verdict) and Returning to Reims, distinguished by their combination of theory and autobiography and already describable as sociological classics, shame becomes intelligible as a product of the division and distribution of power and powerlessness. Eribon shifts shame to the sphere of the political, making it visible as a consequence of social distinctions.

In conversation with Boris Nikitin, Eribon dives once more into his own biography, providing, with reference to recent events, an account of how shame and its correlate, anger, can become the raw materials of political mobilization – whether as individual emancipation or collective uprising.

This talk with Didier Eribon is part seven of Boris Nikitin’s series, Propagandaconversations.