Shame and the Revenge of the Re-Animated Partial Object

A recent discovery of a parasite at a London fish market is the embodiment of this particular conception of the lamella at its purest. The cymothoa exigua, a small parasitic crustacean, was found inside the mouth of a red snapper fish. The isopod had attached itself to the artery under the fish’s tongue and drained the blood until the organ atrophied, whereupon the tiny parasite effectively replaced the fish’s tongue. Remarkably, the cymothoa exigua does not cause any other damage to its host and, in addition to performing all the standard duties of a tongue, actually relieves strain on the host fish’s circulatory system. Although the BBC article which initially reported the incident is careful to reassure its readers that “the creature does not pose any threat to humans and only attaches itself to fish tongues” (par. 7), one cannot help but imagine a Cronenbergian future where such paradoxically ‘benign parasites’ become fashionably healthful accessories, and where a slightly improved circulatory system warrants offering one’s tongue as a Kafkian ‘undead wound’ to a disgusting parasitic crustacean. Indeed, the scenario bears a strong resemblance to an early sequence from David Cronenberg’s 1975 film Shivers (They Came from Within). In this sequence, two doctors discuss the creation of “imitative parasites” which, much like the red snapper’s isopod, act as an alternative to organ transplants, ultimately ‘improving’ the organ that they colonize. We again return to what may be termed ‘the cultural studies lamella’ par excellence: an organ that enlists the services of the subject only to supersede his false sense of autonomy, strip him of control, and essentially “find its way” (Žižek 1996 par. 34) at the expense of the unified, ‘total’ subject which it infects.

How disgusting!

...given that Levinas connects the subjective deadlock or “radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” experienced in shame as identical to the subject’s encounter with nausea. The means by which these analogous affections impact the subject and his self-conception are of particular interest to Žižek, whose primary interpretation of the lamella is dependent on the disorienting disgust and nausea which it inspires (the so-called “disgust with Life” or “disgusting substance of enjoyment”) (Žižek 2005: 142, 1995: 206). In other words, the disarming ‘closeness’ of our selves to our bodies which occurs at the moment of nausea (when we are compelled to expel the unbearable pain of our insides), ultimately reaffirms our “revolting and yet unsuppressible presence to ourselves” (Agamben 1999: 105). Nausea as such constitutes an intestinal overtaking (a literal ‘revolt(ing)’) or organic supremacy that renders us suddenly and traumatically aware of our bodily and psychic limitations. As Levinas emphasizes:

Nausea posits itself not only as something absolute, but as the very act of self-positing: it is the affirmation itself of being. It refers only to itself, is closed to all the rest, without windows onto other things. Nausea carries its centre of attraction within itself (Levinas 2003:68).

This definition of nausea, taken up and developed by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz:

The Witness and the Archive, should be read alongside of Agamben’s own description of shame: Shame] is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self- possession, servitude and sovereignty

Fundamentally, shame is “what is most intimate in us” (Agamben 1999: 105), revealing not “our nothingness but the totality of our existence” (Levinas 2003: 65), while simultaneously emptying us of the very subjectivity it forces us to recognize.

Christine Evans, "M. Hommelette’s Wild Ride: Lamella as a Category of Shame"