In Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action Manu Samnotra traces appeals to shame in the work of Hannah Arendt who, he notes, “seriously considered” giving The Origins of Totalitarianism the title “Elements of Shame” (p. 20). Given Arendt’s nervousness about how affects can threaten the public and plural space of politics, this tracing of her appeals to shame is itself a contribution. Samnotra argues that the “worldliness” Arendt valorizes “needs the attunement that shame provides” (p. 8). Worldliness is an orientation to the “plurality of the world.” It “enables one to diagnose political reality and work toward changing that reality alongside others” (pp. 8, 31). Shame can help counteract the “wordlessness,” namely “the destruction of the structures that sustain the world’s plurality,” that Arendt identifies in late modernity (p. 23). Shame has the potential to orient us to the shared world because it “brings into focus at the moment of its activation the relationality that enabled its activation” (p. 9). It discloses our embeddedness within the world, understood “as a horizon of meaning that is hemmed in by the durable structures that are created and maintained by plural others” (p. 2). In shame, our immersion in relations, boundedness by obligations and expectations, and dependence on acceptance by others come (painfully) to the fore. The occasions for shame on which Samnotra focuses include the experience of social exclusion or the realization of falling short—either individually or as part of a historical collectivity—of important responsibilities. If we let it, Samnotra argues, shame can make us worldly (p. 53).

Of course, we might refuse shame and its insights. Hence Samnotra describes two approaches to shame: “shame-aversion” and “shame-proneness” (pp. 31–33). These labels suggest two opposing orientations to shame. However, Samnotra refers to these orientations as two “forms” of shame (p. x) because both shame-aversion and shame-proneness can be kinds of shame about shame. The terminology is slightly perplexing at the outset; a more systematic treatment of this recursive quality would be helpful. Shame-aversion is a shame of shame such that one tries to avoid the feeling of shame and any wrestling with shame altogether (p. 32). It thus inhibits shame’s possible disclosure of our dependent dwelling in the world and “seeks in unilateral action a salve against the risks that accompany political engagement with plurality” (p. 13). Shame-proneness is a readiness to feel shame in such a way as to grapple with what shame reveals about self and world. Again, there could be a recursiveness to shame-proneness. Shame at feeling shame—shame at being ashamed of who one is—is both a kind of shame and an orientation to shame that, say, could disclose one’s longing for the ever-withheld acceptance of a dominant group and open one to work with similarly excluded others to create other forms of belonging. Shame-proneness can allow shame to become worldly.

In Chapter 2, Samnotra reads Arendt’s biography of Rahel Varnhagen as an account of how “shame-proneness can emerge from shame-aversion” (pp. 33–34, 36). Shame-aversion appears in Varnhagen’s desire to assimilate into the social circles that excluded her because she was a Jewish woman. She exemplifies Samnotra’s important observation that the “shaming-practices” of oppressors “only ever work because by pressing their victim’s shame-aversion, the enforcers of shame compel their victims into accepting a diminished sense of belonging” (p. 32). Varnhagen’s late emerging shame-proneness allows her to see her “powerlessness” with regard to assimilation and its fragile sense of belonging (pp. 53–54). She comes to feel shame at being ashamed of the poorer Jewish community, toward which she had felt condescension (pp. 37, 42). Although her belated shame about her shame-aversion releases her to seek other forms of belonging, it never manifests in political action with others (p. 48).

Samnotra then explores, in Chapter 3, how shame-proneness might be transformed into political action. He argues against theorists who see shame’s main effects in politics as withdrawal and silencing (as paralyzing action) and who see it as so tied to the obligations of “discrete communities” that it prevents an openness to the plural world (pp. 59–62). Here Samnotra examines Arendt’s writings during World War II, in particular her columns in Aufbau, a periodical for German Jewish émigrés in the United States. He interprets Arendt as issuing a call to action against the Nazis by appealing to an “aristocratic” ethos of shame. She invokes the shame of inaction and docility. But Samnotra argues that Arendt also considers shame as a possible call to action beyond the audience of Jewish émigrés. She suggests, he says, that the shame of postwar ordinary democratic citizens regarding their nation’s military in/actions could be a provocation to look outward beyond the nation-state to a community with others who feel similar shame, thereby “bring[ing] about a new era in the development of human rights” (pp. 63–72). Samnotra imagines that a solidarity, emerging from national shame, could allow the particularity of the (national) experience of shame while supporting an outward turn to the global and a “thinking beyond the horizon of historically contingent identities” (pp. 78, 80).

Although Arendt’s hope that “each nation’s sense of its own shame” would force “it to practice justice” was not borne out—that shame was too fleeting—Samnotra insists in Chapter 4 on “the durability of shame as a remnant of an encounter with trauma” (pp. 88–89). He shows how, even as Arendt stressed the need to avoid mass attributions of guilt and so allow for individual accountability, she also stated that, post-Holocaust, there is “an elemental shame …of being human” and that this shame is “what finally is left of our sense of international solidarity; and it has not yet found an adequate political expression” (p. 95). This shame, Samnotra says, points to the need for “a political community within which we can address our shame” (p. 96).

Regarding past trauma, Samnotra further and insightfully argues that a sense of shame can also prevent the overindulgence of emotions in the face of horrors, from which a respectful distance must be maintained if we are to acknowledge their gravity, understand their causes, and think through how things might have gone otherwise (e.g., pp. 98–99, 102). He also makes the important point that shame is more future directed than guilt, inviting us “to look ahead to the world we share with others”; shame does not specify what ought to be done (or specifically undone), it leaves that to be worked out politically (pp. 104, 108). In all these ways, “shame helps create an ethical enclosure for politics after trauma” (p. 96).

Samnotra offers a searching and relentless exploration of how the shame-proneness of marginalized individuals, citizens of democratic nations, and human beings as human beings could lead to collective political action. Impressively, he manages to combine his optimism about shame’s possibilities with an honest and continuing acknowledgment that shame can be devastating in its capacity to demean, exclude, and pacify political others. He insists on shame’s “inherent undecidability”: it is impossible to say whether an experience of shame will be “world-destructive” or “world-generative” (p. 13). Accordingly, he never theorizes about how to minimize the devastating effects of shame. Samnotra thus tempers his hopes for “worldly shame.” Yet might even that tempered hope be too ambitious?

Samnotra’s argument that shame-proneness can encourage us to be thoughtful about our powerlessness and highlight the need for collective action is compelling and a key contribution of Worldly Shame to our understanding of political affects. But I wanted to hear more about how shame can support genuine creativity with regards to alternative forms of shared life and become more than a reaction to the past (that shame may help us confront). How exactly can shame help us reappropriate the materials of the past to create a positive vision of the future? I would venture that shame-proneness can inhibit the creation of new values, even as it invites action-in-concert. Shame-proneness keeps our gaze following the gaze of others even as it allows us to see ourselves more clearly and to acknowledge the need for others for change. Samnotra accepts that shame is not enough for worldly political action but insists that it is a/the “prerequisite” for it (pp. vii, x, 54), and “in that opening to the other, shame permits the creation of new values” (p. 16). Yet perhaps that “opening to the other,” rather than shame in and of itself, is what is essential. We might have other experiences and affects that could allow this opening and also take us beyond reaction. If shame is what most often opens us to political action, it may be one reason why genuine political change is so elusive.