Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 182 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  However, while one doesn’t have to become a penitent as well after becoming a monk, some elements of the penitential rites are utilized in the monastic life. Cassian’s texts, and especially the Institutes which refer to the practices of the cenobium, are very clear on this point: forms specific to public penance are described in that work, and the expression publice paenitere reappears several times, without it being a matter of assuming the status of penitent, of course. Thus Pafnutius, who accepts, in a spirit of humility, being wrongfully accused of a serious sin, is subjected to a treatment just like one that could be evoked by Tertullian, Ambrose, or Jerome in regard to public penances: “And when he had immediately left the Church […] he continually shed tears at his prayers, and fasted thrice as often as before, and prostrated himself in the sight of men […] with all humility of mind. But when he had thus submitted himself with all contrition of flesh and spirit for almost a fortnight, so that he came early on the morning of Saturday and Sunday not to receive the Holy Communion but to prostrate himself on the threshold of the Church and humbly ask for pardon.”3 But short of these great manifestations meant to atone for serious sins, one finds a record of other practices, intermediate between the confession of temptation and the solemn and long-lasting exomologesis. Moreover, Cassian lists a series of transgressions that call for a precise penitential act, determined in advance: accidentally breaking an earthenware jar; hesitating even slightly in chanting a psalm; replying roughly, unnecessarily, impertinently; obeying carelessly; preferring reading to working; lingering after the service instead of going back to one’s cell; talking with someone from the world outside the presence of the elder, and so on.4 Cassian employs the expression “public penance” to designate the prescribed sanction, although it seems that this involves only a certain number of elements borrowed from the great dramaturgy of canonical penance: separation from the community, gesture of supplication, attitude of humility5 (“when all the brethren are assembled for service he must lie on the ground and ask for absolution until the service of the prayers is finished; and will obtain it when by the Abbot’s command he is bidden to rise from the ground”6). There we have a sketch of a whole monastic discipline combining the ostentatious manifestations of penitential rites and the control of gestures and thoughts in a continual and unconditional relation of obedience. The importance of this juxtaposition is twofold.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The practice of penance and the exercises of the ascetic life organize relations between “wrong-doing” and “truth-telling”; they bundle together relations to oneself, to evil and to truth, in a way that is doubtless much more innovative and much more determinant than this or that degree of severity added or subtracted from the code. What is at issue, in fact, is the form of subjectivity: the exercise of oneself upon oneself, knowledge of oneself, the constitution of oneself as an object of investigation and discourse, the liberation or purification of oneself and salvation by means of operations that carry light to one’s innermost being, and drive one’s deepest secrets up to the light of redemptive exposure. It is a form of experience—understood both as a mode of presence to oneself and a program for self-transformation—that was developed in that period. And it is this form that gradually placed the problem of the “flesh” at the center of its apparatus (dispositif). And instead of having a regimen of sexual relations, or aphrodisia, that blends into the general rule of a righteous life, one will have a fundamental relationship with the flesh that runs through one’s whole life and serves as a ground for the rules that are imposed on it. The “flesh” should be understood as a mode of experience—that is, as a mode of knowledge and transformation of oneself by oneself, depending on a certain relationship between a nullification of evil and a manifestation of truth. With Christianity, one didn’t go from a code that was tolerant of sexual acts to a code that was severe, restrictive, and repressive. We need to think differently about the processes and their articulations: the construction of a sexual code, organized around marriage and procreation, was largely begun before Christianity: outside it, then alongside it. Christianity essentially took charge of it. And during the course of its later developments and through the formation of certain technologies of the individual—penitential discipline, monastic asceticism—a form of experience was constituted that activated a new modality of the code and caused it to be embodied, in a totally different way, in the behavior of individuals.*5 And in order to write the history of this formation, it’s necessary to analyze the practices that established it. Not that the aim here is to retrace the genesis of these extremely complex institutions. It’s a matter of attempting to bring out the relations that developed between the forgiveness of wrongdoing, the manifestation of truth, and the “discovery” of the self. Skip Notes *1 Typescript: childbirth as desire’s reason for being. *2 Translator’s note: To clarify, Clement was not himself a gnostic, but apparently that brand of dualism was popular in his day and he used some of its vocabulary to appeal to its adherents.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  • The direction consists in an obedience training, understood as a renunciation of one’s own wishes through submission to another’s will: “And his concern and the chief part of his instruction [referring to the teacher of the novices]—through which the juniors brought to him may be able, in due course, to mount to the greatest heights of perfection—will be to teach them first to conquer their own wishes; and, anxiously and diligently practicing them in this, he will of set purpose contrive to give them such orders as he knows to be contrary to their liking.”48 • And to achieve this perfect and exhaustive obedience, so that this game of nullification-replacement (nullification of one’s own will, substitution of another’s will) can take place, an exercise is essential: constant examination of oneself and perpetual confession. “And, that they may easily arrive at this [perfect obedience and humility of the heart], they are next taught not to conceal by a false shame any itching thoughts in their hearts, but, as soon as ever such arise, to lay them bare to the senior, and, in forming a judgment about them, not to trust anything to their own discretion, but to take it on trust that that is good or bad which is considered and pronounced so by the examination of the senior.”49 II. The Rule of ObedienceThat direction presupposes the disciple’s exact obedience to the master is obviously not a principle peculiar to Christian monasticism. In the philosophical life of antiquity, the master had to be listened to faithfully. But that obedience was instrumental, targeted, and limited. It had a definite object: it was meant to help one break free of a passion, overcome a mourning or a sorrow, escape a phase of uncertainty (this was the case with Serenus consulting Seneca), or attain a certain state (of tranquility, of self-control, of independence with respect to external events). To achieve this end, the director would utilize tailored means, and the obedience required of the disciple was limited to those necessary forms. Moreover, it was a temporary submission that would cease as soon as the goal was reached. It was just one of the tools employed by the direction, according to a strict economy that limited it solely to the moment and the objectives for which it could be useful. Monastic obedience is of a different type altogether.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  • The axis of the objective and the subjective. On one side one finds the designation of the sin, at least in its essential elements; on the other, what the major practices of exomologesis have to manifest is not so much the sin itself in its particularity as the state of the sinner himself, or rather the states that in him are superimposed, intertwined, and in competition. He does have to display himself as a sinner, symbolically covered with filth and the defilement of sin, sunk into this life of sin that is the way of death. But the visible intensity of penitential acts also has the goal of certifying that he is already freeing himself from that life and that he renounces it; the tears he sheds onto his breast are washing it away; he purifies himself by means of the filth he covers himself with; by humiliating himself he shows that he is raising himself back up and is worthy of being raised.68 The manifestations of exomologesis don’t aim to make [the sin] appear in the form that it was truly committed: their purpose is to make the penitent himself emerge into the light and just as he is: at once truly a sinner and already no longer truly one. We can say, then, that truth procedures in the ecclesiastical penance of the first centuries are grouped around two poles: one is that of the verbal and private formulation, which has the role of defining the sin with the characteristics by which it can be assessed, making it possible to determine how its forgiveness can be granted; the other, which is that of general and public expression, has the role of manifesting, as dramatically as possible, both the sinfulness of the sinner and the movement that delivers him from his sin. Of course, these are the two poles between which the different ways, in penance, of manifesting the truth of the sinner and of his sin are distributed. They are not two independent institutions, or two practices utterly foreign to each other; they coexist, interfere with each other, and sometimes merge together: it’s clear that there were extreme fasts and exomologesis conducted in private;69 and we also have accounts of public and verbal declarations of wrongs committed by this or that member of the community.70 But nevertheless, one can recognize the existence of [two] types of practice, two ways of making the truth appear: telling the truth about the sin and manifesting the being-true of the sinner.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  This is the meaning that seems to emerge from a passage in Saint Ambrose’s De sacramentis: “When you gave your name [to be baptized], the priest took mud and smeared it over your eyes. What does this signify? That you confessed your sin (fatereris), that you examined your conscience (conscientiam recognoscere), that you performed penance for your sins, that is, that you recognized (agnoscere) the lot of human generation. For, even if he who comes to baptism does not confess sin, nevertheless by this very fact he fulfills the confession of all sins, in that he seeks to be baptized so as to be justified, that is, so as to pass from fault to grace […] No man is without sin. He who takes refuge in the baptism of Christ recognizes himself as human.”58 An important text. First, because it allows us to see the breadth of meaning that the word confession conveys: from the act by which one actually confesses a specific sin to the recognition of the fact that as a human being one cannot help but be a sinner. But also in its pointing out that the passage from sinfulness to grace—which is the purpose of baptism—cannot be accomplished without a certain “truth act.” A “deliberate” act in the sense that the catechumen is urged to explicitly manifest, in the form of an avowal, his recognition of being a sinner. There is no remission, no saving access to the light, without an act in which he affirms the truth of his sinning soul, an act that also serves as a veridical mark of his determination to stop being a sinner. Telling-the-truth-about-oneself is essential in this game of purification and salvation. In a general way, from the end of the second century onward one sees the growing place occupied, in the economy of every soul’s salvation, by the manifestation of one’s own truth: in the form of an “investigation” where the individual is the respondent of a questionnaire or the object of testimony; in the form of a purificatory trial where he is the target of an exorcism; in the form, finally, of a “confession,” where he is both the subject who speaks and the object of which he speaks, but where it’s a matter of attesting that one knows oneself to be a sinner rather than drawing up an exact list of sins to be forgiven. But it is clear that the form and evolution of baptismal confession can be understood only in relation to the extremely important development of the “second penance”—starting in this same close of the second century.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The historians who contested the existence of a defined ritual of exomologesis, between the acts of penance and the reconciliation, were mistaken, no doubt, in light of testimonies such as those of Saint Cyprian. But they were not wrong when they emphasized that the entire life of the penitent—through the different obligations they were under—must have played a confessional role. The penitent must “profess” his repentance. No penance without acts that had the dual function of constituting punishments that one inflicts on oneself and of manifesting the truth of this repentance. Tertullian employed a meaningful expression to designate this exomologesis that was inherent in the penitential process: publicatio sui.67 One sees, then, that forgiveness of serious sins committed after baptism and the return to communion of those who fell away cannot be obtained without the implementation of a whole set of truth procedures. Procedures more numerous and more complex than those prescribed in connection with baptism. Their range is wide, since they go from declarations the sinner may make when soliciting penance to great expressions of humility and supplication that take place at the threshold of the church, before the final reconciliation. All these procedures can be distributed along different axes. • The axis of the public and the private. On the private side we must place the secret things the sinner confides to the bishop or the priest when he asks to be granted the status of penitent; on the public side, all the acts by which the penitent must show himself to others in sackcloth and ashes, prostrate in tears begging their intercession on his behalf, and calling the faithful to weep and moan with him. Thus understood, penance is a public and collective rite. • The axis of the verbal and the non-verbal. On one side there is the necessarily oral disclosure which the penitent must make to the one who will admit him into penance; and on the other the series of gestures, attitudes, tears, garments, and cries by which the one who has sinned shows his repentance. Perhaps he proclaims the nature of his sin—but this utterance itself belongs to a whole ensemble of expressions in which the entire body is the main element. • The axis of the juridical and the dramatic. On one side, the penance must begin with an account, albeit brief, of the wrong committed—of what characterizes it and of the circumstances that may alter its seriousness; in this way it can be determined whether penance is called for, and how long it should last before the reconciliation. But at the other pole there are dramatic and intense manifestations that don’t obey any calculation of economy and don’t seek an adjustment, made in the strictest possible way, to the gravity of the sin committed; they obey on the contrary a principle of emphasis; they must be as vigorous as possible.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  But what is more enigmatic—from the standpoint of the history of the experience of the self—is the way one thought of and justified the sinner’s obligation to speak the truth—or rather to manifest himself in his truth—in order to obtain forgiveness for his sins. This obligation is affirmed, in fact, over and over again. No pardon if there was no exomologesis, no recognition by the sinner of his sin, no outward, explicit, visible manifestation of that recognition: “He that confesses his sin is released from servitude […] not only free but also just, for justice is in liberty and liberty in confession. As soon as a man shall confess he is absolved.”71 And Saint John Chrysostom, in short: “Declare your sin: you will destroy your sin.”72 This is the general principle underlying the exegeses that Saint Ambrose and Saint John Chrysostom make of the curse of Cain. His sin, as grave as it was, was not unpardonable. When God [asked him] what he had done with his brother, it was not that God didn’t know, of course; it was to give him the possibility of confessing. And what made it unpardonable was that he replied: I don’t know. This is the principle of eternal damnation. Graver than the fratricide was this lie, which Saint Ambrose calls a “sacrilege.”73 The “I don’t know” of the criminal, the refusal of truth is, on the part of the sinner, the gravest possible offense: it cannot be atoned for. In contrast to Cain, David confesses his sins spontaneously; he-who-was-just is the image of the penitent: the truth he professes saves him.74 And if Adam and Eve are not damned for Eternity, it’s because they, too, confessed; according to Chrysostom, they even confessed to their crimes twice: verbally, by replying to God; and in their gestures and their bodies, by hiding their nakedness.75 Long before the institution of sacramental penance and the organization of auricular confession, the Christian Church posited the fundamental character of the truth obligation for anyone who has sinned and as a precondition for possible redemption. Speaking the truth about one’s sin—or rather manifesting in its truth one’s state as a sinner—is indispensable if the sin is to be forgiven. Manifestation of what is true is a necessary condition for what is true to be erased. To think this relation through and to explain this necessity, ancient Christianity had recourse to several models. —

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  First, there’s shame. If one has trouble disclosing a thought, if the thought refuses to be told, if it tries to remain secret, this is the sign that it is bad. “The devil, subtle as he is, cannot ruin or destroy a junior unless he has enticed him either through pride or through shame to conceal his thoughts. For the elders lay it down as a universal and clear proof that a thought is from the devil if we are ashamed to disclose it to the elder.”100 The more a thought resists, the more it tends to elude the words that try to capture it, the harder, consequently, one must strive to chase it down and disclose it exactly. Shame, which should act as a brake when one commits an act, must be defied when it’s a matter of manifesting in words that which lies hidden in the recesses of the heart: such shame is a clear indication of evil. If the idea that comes from the evil spirit always wants to remain buried in consciousness, this is for a cosmo-theological reason. An angel of light, Satan was condemned to darkness; the light of day was forbidden him, and he could no longer leave the folds of the heart where he hid himself. The confession, exposing him to the light, tears him away from his kingdom and makes him powerless. He can reign only in the dark of night. “For a wrong thought is enfeebled the moment it is discovered: and even before the sentence of discretion has been given, the foul serpent is by the power of confession dragged out, so to speak, from his dark underground cavern, and in some sense shown up and sent away in disgrace.”101 The bad idea loses its seductive force and its power of deception from the mere fact that it is said, that it is spoken out loud, and in this way it leaves the secret interiority of consciousness.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  3. The last section of the text is much shorter than the others. It opens with the final recommendations concerning temperate marriage: the more tenuous, more demanding ones that surround the major prohibitions. No obscene remarks, refrain from licentious gestures, no relations with prostitutes, and also remember—here Clement repeats almost verbatim an aphorism already found in the philosophers—that one commits an adultery when one acts with one’s wife as if she were a courtesan. With these prescriptions, one enters the domain of transgressions that elude the gaze of others and that are committed above all in the eyes of one’s conscience. Sins of the shadows. It should be noted that here it’s not a matter of wrongs of intention, of bad thoughts, or of lusts and temptations that will be, in a slightly later Christianity, the key component of the sins of the flesh. Clement speaks only of sins that don’t have a public character. Darkness and silence envelop them; they apparently have no other witness or judge than the conscience of the one committing them—here the partner’s conscience seems to have no importance. The problem of the sin without any witness other than the conscience is again a very frequent theme in the philosophical literature, and Clement treats it using an argumentation that was also very classic. By trying to conceal a sin in shadows and solitude, one doesn’t lessen its gravity—one shows how conscious one is of its importance. Secrecy reveals the shame, which constitutes a judgment that conscience itself renders. And if a sin of this kind does no harm to anyone, conscience is still there as an accuser and a judge: it is oneself that one has wronged, and it’s for one’s own good that one must condemn oneself. One finds the same reasoning in Musonius90 and in Seneca.91 Clement goes over it again briefly. And yet his analysis—or rather the themes that he varies, quite freely—will have a different focus concerning the question of the secret transgression. He first evokes the theme of darkness and light. However deep the shadows surrounding the transgression may be, there is always a light that dwells there, illuminating what they hide. The gaze of God from which nothing escapes, a spiritual light, always present in the world? Yes, undoubtedly, and the pagan philosophers recognized the self-evidence of this.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Augustine gives the name libido to that movement which traverses and sweeps along every sexual act, that makes them both visible and shameful, that ties them to spiritual death as to their cause, to physical death as to their accompaniment—that movement or, more exactly, its involuntary form and force. Libido is what specifically marks the sexual acts of fallen man; or, using the words of another vocabulary, libido is not an intrinsic aspect of the sexual act that would be tied to it analytically. It is an element which the transgression, the fall, and the principle of “reciprocity of disobedience” tied to the act synthetically. By identifying and defining this element, by locating its point of emergence in metahistory, Augustine establishes the basic condition for separating that “convulsive bloc,” in terms of which the sexual act was thought, from its intrinsic danger. He opens up a field of analysis while sketching out the possibility of a “government” of behaviors on a completely different basis than the alternative between abstinence and a more or less willing acceptance of sexual relations. IISo the fall provoked what could be called the libidinization of the sexual act: either one supposes that the latter would have been able, without the transgression, to unfold without any libido; or that it would have strictly obeyed the will. The libido, in any case, is manifested today in the form of the involuntary. It appears in that supplement that emerges beyond volition, but is only the correlative of a defect, and the effect of a fall from grace. This stigma of the involuntary in the sexual act subsequent to the transgression has two main aspects. First, there are all the disappointments by which the sex organ can frustrate the intentions of the subject. In Adam, the rebellious member had announced itself by an abrupt springing forth; among the men of his line, it is manifested by inopportune failures as well as by unseemly movements. The involuntary of the fallen sex organ is the erection, but it is also impotence. A passage of The City of God says it plainly. While the other organs, in their respective functions, are in the service of the mind and can be “moved by the sign of the will,” the same is not true of the sex organ: “Even those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to unlawful pleasures; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves, and sometimes fails them when they desire to feel it, so that though lust rages in the mind, it stirs not in the body. Thus, strangely enough, this emotion not only fails to obey the legitimate desire to beget offspring, but also refuses to serve the passion to climax.”32 Which Augustine translates with a remarkable expression: the libido is sui juris.33

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  To help us guard against temptation, Paul encourages Christians to put on the “full armor of God”—the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (see Ephesians 6:13-17). We are so fortunate that the Holy Spirit gives us complete access to all of these things since truth, righteousness, peace, and faith are key ingredients to maintaining sexual and emotional integrity. However, as we put on this full armor of God, women often fail to check for weak links that leave us open and vulnerable to temptation. Three of the most common weak links are: • compromising clothing • compromising company • compromising actions We’ll look at each of these weak links, and as we do, try to discern if your armor may be leaving you vulnerable to temptation or jeopardizing your integrity. WEAK LINK 1: COMPROMISING CLOTHING You have probably heard gourmet chefs on the cooking channel say that when it comes to food, presentation is everything. Presentation is everything, not just with food, but also with your body. One of the concepts that I impress upon women is that we teach people how to treat us. We either teach them to treat us with respect or we teach them to treat us with disrespect. How? By our modest dress or our immodest attire. After hearing me speak on the radio about the importance of modesty, Christi (in her early twenties) wrote me the following letter. When I first began working as a Christian summer camp counselor, I decided that I would refuse to hook up with a guy at camp so that I could focus wholeheartedly on the girls in my cabin. I wanted so much for them to like me and to think I was cool, so I dressed in the latest young fashions—snug-fitting, hip-hugging jeans, short shorts, and spaghetti-strap tank tops, or tops that were short and clingy but long enough that standing still I couldn’t be accused of dressing inappropriately. I also taught the girls how to do several of the latest dance moves each night in the cabin, something we all looked forward to and had a lot of fun with. Many of the girls at camp hung around me all week instead of the other counselors. They told me how they would rather learn new dances in our cabin at night than participate in the Bible studies with their other counselors. I enjoyed thinking that I could have a big influence on these girls’ lives because I had their attention and admiration.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  But for Basil these different procedures of separation—of the senses with respect to sensible things, of the body with respect to the world, and of the soul with respect to the body—are only one side of the art of virginity. A whole other aspect concerns the soul itself and the work it must do on itself. That the purity of the body is nothing without that of the soul is a very traditional theme to which Basil gives several forms. That of the dual purity: one must bring as much attention to bear on the movements of the soul as on those of the body: “if through fasting we cut off the passions of the body, but leave the soul agitated by its own weaknesses, by envy, hypocrisy, and the movements of the other passions, we will not make the body’s abstinence useful to virtue. And if we cleanse the soul of its passions, but we give the body over to the passions of the belly and other raptures, even without the disorder of indecency, we cannot make our life perfect in virtue.”14 That of the fundamental purity of the soul, which constitutes the primary and determining element compared to the integrity of the body: “For if the soul is free of corruption, the body also is preserved without corruption; but if the soul has been corrupted by bad thoughts, even if the body still appears to be without corruption, no purity will be found in its absence of corruption, since it is corrupted by impure thoughts.”15 Finally, regarding physical castration, Basil puts forward the principle of the sinful intention. Not only is there no merit in physically making oneself a voluntary eunuch, but such a one is to be considered a sinner because he refuses to ensure the virginity of his own soul and hence he consents to the desire without allowing himself the act: “the removal of parts denounces the adultery of the one who mutilates himself,” “therefore, if he has disarmed himself by cutting off the instrument of adultery, so that people think he doesn’t fornicate with his body, but he fornicates in his intention.”16

• From Real Life (2020)

  Et les yeux un peu roses. Il sentait le sapin et l’alcool. À un moment donné, ils étaient tous les deux sortis de la partie éclairée et, dans l’ombre, ils avaient voulu attraper la même chaise ; leurs doigts s’étaient frôlés près du dossier. Henrik avait poussé un petit grognement et Wallace retiré sa main vivement. Henrik avait soulevé la chaise d’un geste fluide et montré du menton le mur du fond, dans l’obscurité encore plus dense, sous l’escalier, où une fissure presque invisible se devinait dans le béton. Ces vieilles maisons, avait-il dit. Elles ont des fondations de merde. Ce qui à l’époque avait paru absurde à Wallace, car comment une maison aux fondations de merde aurait-elle pu devenir vieille ? Il y avait réfléchi tandis qu’ils remontaient l’escalier ensemble, portant les chaises deux à deux et, à chaque voyage, les marches grinçaient ou menaçaient de céder sous leur poids ; il y avait réfléchi si fort que ces mots étaient presque devenus une chanson. Ces vieilles maisons. La dernière soirée d’Henrik. La dernière année d’Henrik. Ces vieilles maisons. Wallace se lève pour aller pisser, la couverture en flanelle de Miller sur les épaules. Il y fait froid, dans ces vieilles maisons, se dit-il. Sur le palier, il s’approche de la rambarde et attend. La cuisine est plongée dans le noir. Mais le silence n’est pas total. Il devine le doux grattement de murmures étouffés. Il ne distingue pas les mots, mais perçoit comme un son résistant à l’air. Il n’est pas seul. C’est logique, après tout, que Miller se trouve encore dans la maison. Et Yngve. Des gens habitent ici. Leurs vies continuent. Il n’a pas été laissé entièrement seul. Cet abandon partiel lui donne un peu envie de rire, mais il éprouve aussi l’élan inverse, curieux, d’un vertige. La honte de s’être trop dévoilé, et à Miller, en plus. Le désir réflexe de chercher un abri, de se cacher, le traverse subitement. Il fut un temps – jusqu’à vendredi, même – où révéler tant de lui-même aurait été une erreur fatale. Il lui aurait fallu vivre le reste de ses études dans la crainte de représailles, dans la peur de tout se reprendre dans la figure au tournant, au moment le plus inattendu, il aurait dû se méfier sans cesse de ce qui l’attendait. Il fut un temps où Wallace se serait fié à cette tendance soupçonneuse invétérée, où il l’aurait tenue garante de sa sécurité, mais voilà qu’il a commis une erreur stupide, qu’il vient de commettre une erreur stupide, en dévoilant tout à Miller ; donc tout ce qui lui reste, c’est l’espoir. Or il n’a jamais été quelqu’un qui pouvait compter sur l’espoir.

• From Push (1996)

  And it's 9:05 a.m. not 9:00 a.m. Oh well teacher nigger too. Don't care if she teacher, don't no niggers start on time. The elevator goes Bing! I step out. My class last door on left. My teacher Miz Rain. I'm walking across the lobby room real real slow. Full of chicken, bread; usually that make me not want to cry remember, but I feel like crying now. My head is like the swimming pool at the Y on one-three-five. Summer full of bodies splashing, most in shallow end; one, two in deep end. Thas how all the time years is swimming in my head. First grade boy say, Pick up your lips Claireece 'fore you trip over them. Call me shoe shine shinola. Second grade I is fat. Thas when fart sounds and pig grunt sounds start. No boyfriend no girlfriends. I stare at the blackboard pretending. I don't know what I'm pretending— that trains ain' riding through my head sometime and that yes, I'm reading along with the class on page 55 of the reader. Early on I realize no one hear the TV set voices growing out blackboard but me, so I try not to answer them. Over in deepest end of the pool (where you could drown if not for fine lifeguard look like Bobby Brown) is me sitting in my chair at my desk and the world turn to whirring sound, everything is noise, teacher's voice white static. My pee pee open hot stinky down my thighs sssssss splatter splatter. I wanna die I hate myself HATE myself. Giggles giggles but I don't move I barely breathe I just sit. They giggle. I stare straight ahead. They talk me. I don't say nuffin'. Seven, he on me almost every night. First it's just in my mouth. Then it's more more. He is intercoursing me. Say I can take it. Look you don't even bleed, virgin girls bleed. You not virgin. I'm seven. I don't realize I've gone from walking real real slow to standing perfectly still. I'm in the lobby of first day of school Higher Education Alternative/ Each One Teach One just standing there. I realize this 'cause Miz Rain done peeked her head out last door on the left and said, "You alright?" I know who she is 'cause Miss Cornrow with the glasses had done pointed her out to me after I finish testing and show me my teacher and classroom. I make my feet move. I don't say anything. Nothing in my mouth to say. I move my feet some more. Miz Rain ask me if I'm in the A.B.E. class. I say yes. She say this is it and go back inside door. The first thing I see when I step through door is the windows, where we is is high up, no other buildings in the way.

• From Push (1996)

  The nurse is saying something I don't hear. I hear kids at school. Boy say Fm laffing ugly. He say, "Claireece is so ugly she laffing ugly." His fren' say, "No, that fat bitch is crying ugly." Laff laff. Why Fm thinking about those stupid boys now I don't know. "Mother," she say. "What's your mother's name?" I say, "Mary L Johnston" (L for Lee but my mother don't like Lee, soun' too country). "Where your mother born," she say. I say, "Greenwood, Mississippi." Nurse say, "You ever been there?" I say, "Naw, I never been nowhere." She say, "Reason I ask is Fm from Greenwood, Mississippi, myself." I say, "Oh," 'cause I know Iʼm spozed to say something. "Father," she say. "What's your daddy's name?" "Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the Bronx." • She say, "What's the baby's father's name?" I say, "Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the same Bronx." She quiet quiet. Say, "Shame, thas a shame. Twelve years old, twelve years old," she say over 'n over like she crazy (or in some shock or something). She look at me, butter skin, light eyes—I know boyz love her. She say, "Was you ever, I mean did you ever get to be a chile?" Thas a stupid question, did I ever get to be a chile? I am a chile. I'm confuse, tired. I tell her I want to sleep. She put the bed down, I do go to sleep. Somebody else there when I wake up. It's like the police or something. Wanna ax me some questions. I axes, "Where's my baby? I know I had one. I know that." New somebody in nurse cap sweet-smile me and say, "Yes, you did Miss Jones, you surely did." She moves the men in uniform suits back from my bed. Say my baby is in special intense care and I will get to see her soon and won't I please answer the nice men's questions. But they ain' nice men. They pigs. I ain' crazy. I don't tell them nothing. "Precious! Precious!" my muver hollering but my head not here it in four years when I had the first baby. I was standing at this sink when the pain hit me, and she hit me. "Precious!" My hand slip down in the dishwater, grab the butcher knife. She bedda not hit me, I ain' lyin'! If she hit me I will stab her ass to def, you hear me! "Precious! You done lost your mind? Just standing up there staring into spaces. I'm talkin' to you!" Like thas something. "I was thinkin'," I say. "You thinkin' while I'm talkin' to you?" She say this like I'm burnin' hunnert dollar bills. The buzzer ring. I wonder who it could be. Don't nobody ring our bell 'less it's crack addicts trying to get in the building. I hate crack addicts. They give the race a bad name. "Go tell them assholes to stop ringing the bell," she say.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  And between these two modalities the distribution is not even: the verbal enunciation of the sin is seldom required except when it’s a matter of determining the penance, examining whether the sinner can be admitted into it and merits being reconciled. “Telling the sin”—bringing into play, in the verbal dimension, the confession and the examination, demanding of the sinner a “veridiction” of his sins—is necessary only prior to the penitential procedure and so, in a way, is outside it. On the other hand, the ostentatious, gestural, corporeal demonstration of what the sinner is in his being forms an intrinsic part of penance. It forms an essential and constant dimension of it. The penitent is expected not so much to “tell the truth” [“dire le vrai”] concerning what he did as to “do the truth” [“faire vrai”] by manifesting what he is. This necessity of penitential practice—that it be carried out only through manifestations designed to bring the penitent’s truth to light—raises a problem: when one has sinned, why must one not only repent—imposing rigors and macerations upon himself—but also show these acts and show oneself as one is? Why does the manifestation of the truth constitute an intrinsic part of the procedure that enables one to redeem the sin? When one has “done wrong,” why is it necessary to make the truth shine forth, not only the truth about what one did, but about what one is? The answer is obvious: once the Christian religion was formed into a Church endowed with a strong communitarian structure and a hierarchical organization, no serious infraction could be pardoned without a certain number of proofs and guarantees. Just as a candidate for baptism couldn’t be accepted without having been tested beforehand through the catechumenate—probatio animae—the Church couldn’t reconcile those who hadn’t clearly manifested their repentance through discipline and exercises that stood for punishment in relation to the past and showed commitment to the future. They had to practice the publicatio sui.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  At that point, one will find the mark of the original transgression and the fall—or more exactly, of a restructuring of the relations of obedience and control between self and self that hinge on it. The obligation that God had placed men under by forbidding them the fruit was slight. All the more serious, therefore, was their rebellion. And in his beneficence, God didn’t want the consequences of this disobedience to be a definitive punishment, or an abandonment of man to spiritual or material forces that would dominate him forever. He meant it to be exactly fitted to the sin, to man’s powers, and to the possibility of salvation. He made sure that it would be the reproduction in man of the disobedience that caused him to rebel against God. The punishment-consequence of the fault is not placed between the soul and the body, between matter and mind, but in the subject itself, henceforth in rebellion against itself (body and soul included). Fallen man did not fall under a law or a force that subjugates him entirely; a scission marks his own will that divides, turns back against itself, and escapes from what it may itself will. This is the principle, fundamental in Augustine, of inoboedentia reciproca, of disobedience in return. The rebellion in man reproduces the rebellion against God. Can the change brought into the sexual act be understood on the basis of this principle? One might refer to the exegesis that Augustine proposes in the passage in Genesis where it is a question of sex after the act of disobedience and God’s punishment, since shortly after the sin was committed, the first humans made a gesture of modesty. “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”19 A comparison of the successive interpretations that Augustine offered of this passage is revealing. In Genesi contra Manichaeos,20 the awakening of this modesty is defined as the passage from a “simplicity” which is the same as innocence to a perversity that affects the gaze itself and is conveyed by it. On their nudity, the man and the woman focus “perverse eyes” because, being already and henceforth inhabited by evil, they recognize what now perverts human nature and shames their pride—their “cunning pride”—which is to say, the very principle of the sin into which they have fallen.21 In the relation of the eyes that have just opened to the sex that must be covered, the latter appears as a general perversion of human nature.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Little did I know that these kinds of thoughts made me more vulnerable to emotional and sexual temptations. My self-esteem was in the gutter, so I continually sought affirmation from outside sources, especially older men. I felt exactly the way Mindy did—I hated what I saw in the mirror each day—and I hoped that if men thought that I was attractive, then maybe I could believe it too. But even finding a husband didn’t solve my problem. It wasn’t enough to have a man who thought the world of me. Even with a wedding band on my finger, my antenna was still up to see who was noticing me. And when my radar went off and I knew that someone had me in his range, I was too often a sitting duck. I’d say to myself, You may as well give in. You know how you are when you are tempted. What’s one more time? One day as I was beating myself up for yet another emotional affair, my best friend interrupted me with these sobering words: “Do you know what you are saying about the blood that Jesus shed for you when you refuse to forgive yourself for your past? You are saying that His blood wasn’t good enough for you. It didn’t have enough power to cleanse you.” She was right. Underlying all of my self-pity was the belief that what Jesus did for me couldn’t possibly be enough to rid me of my stain. I needed some special miracle to set me free, and until I got that miracle, I had to beat myself up as an act of penance. If this rings true for you as well, then guess what? The Holy Spirit is telling you the same thing He told me back then: Jesus opened your prison door. It’s up to you to walk out! How do you do this? By forgiving every person who has ever brought you pain, including yourself. If God does not despise you for the ways you have tried to fill the void in your heart, neither should you despise yourself. Paul preached, “Righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:22-24). In other words: • Righteousness does not come from perfect living, but as a gift from God. • We receive this gift not by our worthiness, but simply by faith in Jesus Christ (and in the blood He shed for the redemption of our sins). • We are justified freely by God’s grace—no strings attached.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He wondered why she should look like that, what her memories or experience could be. She could only look at him this way because she knew things he had never imagined a girl like Cass could know. “How is Leona?” she asked. “Where is she now?” and did not take her eyes from his face. He did not want to answer. He did not want to talk about Leona—and yet there was nothing else that he could possibly talk about. For a moment he almost hated Cass; and then he said: “She’s in a home—down South somewhere. They come and took her out of Bellevue. I don’t even know where she is.” She said nothing. She offered him a cigarette, lit it, and lit one for herself. “I saw her brother once. I had to see him, I made him see me. He spit in my face, he said he would have killed me had we been down home.” He wiped his face now with the handkerchief Vivaldo had lent him. “But I felt like I was already dead. They wouldn’t let me see her. I wasn’t a relative, I didn’t have no right to see her.” There was silence. He remembered the walls of the hospital: white; and the uniforms and the faces of the doctors and nurses, white on white. And the face of Leona’s brother, white, with the blood beneath it rushing thickly, bitterly, to the skin’s surface, summoned by his mortal enemy. Had they been down home, his blood and the blood of his enemy would have rushed out to mingle together over the uncaring earth, under the uncaring sky. “At least,” Cass said, finally, “you didn’t have any children. Thank God for that.” “She did,” he said, “down South. They took the kid away from her.” He added, “That’s why she come North.” And he thought of the night they had met. “She was a nice girl,” Cass said. “I liked her.” He said nothing. He heard Vivaldo say, “—but I never know what to do when I’m not working.” “You know what to do, all right. You just don’t have anybody to do it with.” He listened to their laughter, which seemed to shake him as though it were a drill. “Just the same,” said Richard, in a preoccupied tone, “nobody can work all the time.” Out of the corner of his eye, Rufus watched him stabbing the table with his stir-stick. “I hope,” Cass said, “that you won’t sit around blaming yourself too much. Or too long. That won’t undo anything.” She put her hand on his. He stared at her. She smiled. “When you’re older you’ll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes.