The Importance of Making Ashamed: Regarding the Pain of (Animal) Others

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag broaches the subject of photography of atrocities, pondering how spectators would respond to images of suffering. While it is believed that people look askance at painful images because sympathy for others makes them refrain from looking, Sontag contends that sympathy can be “an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response” (102). What then is the “pertinent” response that Sontag has in mind? It seems that the emotion of shame, compared with sympathy, is not that impertinent a response as it enables us to reflect on “how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering” (103). What can be inferred from Sontag’s argument is that shame may anticipate the possibility of change. Nevertheless, she does not explain why exposure to distressing or appalling images would evoke shameful emotions, nor does she further investigate whether the affect of shame can create conditions under which moral action becomes possible. To fill the lacunae in Sontag’s discourse and accentuate the political dimension of shame to which it vaguely points, this paper seeks to analyze the mechanism of shame and its relation to the gaze from a Lacanian perspective. In the first two sections of this paper, I will elucidate why the emotion of shame arises when images of suffering are seen, or, to be more precise, are seeing us. Moreover, I will deal with Lacan’s proposal of “making ashamed” and discuss in what sense shame can become a blessing. While the distressing photographs Sontag addresses are mainly concerned with the pain of human others, the third section of this paper also ventures to explore whether the viewer will be made ashamed by the pain of animal others. I will examine how animal cruelty is represented in Taiwan’s media coverage, with a view to answering the following question: What kinds of images are able to make the spectator feel ashamed and call for a halt to cruelty?