Contempt

Contempt is the most corrosive of the emotions Vela reads, and the reading does not soften that. Anger can clear the air; contempt poisons it slowly, because it has already decided the other does not merit the effort of being addressed. The writers worth following have read contempt as a verdict, and verdicts are the things relationships least survive.

The reading is densest where contempt has been organized against a group or turned against the self. The literature of stigma reads how contempt does its social work — the look that places a person below the line of full regard, aimed at the poor, the sick, the foreign, the queer. Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life maps the small social machinery through which standing is granted and withdrawn, which is the stage contempt performs on. The memoir of family harm holds the particular wound of a parent's contempt — worse, often, than a parent's anger, because contempt withdraws the relationship rather than engaging it. Self-contempt, the gaze turned inward, is the form chronic shame takes once it has built a settled stance toward its own bearer.

Contempt is not the same as anger, disgust, or hatred. Anger engages; contempt dismisses. Disgust recoils from contamination; contempt looks down from a height. Hatred is hot and attentive; contempt is cold and inattentive, which is part of why it wounds. The four overlap and the reading keeps them separate, because contempt's coldness is precisely the thing that distinguishes it.