What do we mean when we say ’shame’? :  ‘Have you no shame’? ‘You’re shameless’! ‘I’m ashamed’. ‘Don’t be’!

Should we or should we not have shame? This course explores the concept of shame from the ‘fall’, one version of the onset of humanity, until the contemporary, when the difference between shaming and being ashamed also seems to be without difference. We’ll explore the concept of ’shame’ through Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, paying mind to Freud’s drive theory and Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis to interpret Sophocles’s Antigone and Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi. Among others, we’ll read Alenka Zupančič’s new book on Antigone (Let them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax) and Joan Copjec’s foundational feminist analysis of the play (Imagine There’s No Woman), as well as Gayatri Spivak’s inspired interpretation of Devi’s Draupadi. We’ll try to chart a new feminism today, outside the claustrophobic parameters of identity politics.