Few rational people would want to know what it feels like to be disgraced former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. But the universality of shame, disappointment and even the odd pleasure in another's disgrace provide fertile territory for poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum in this provocative study of humiliation.
There's ample material here to engage aficionados of pop culture, from a discussion of Alec Baldwin's ranting voice-mail message to his adolescent daughter, to television shows like The Swan, a Fox reality program featuring "disturbed women [who] ask to be humiliated on television so that they might end up beautiful." Through myriad examples, Koestenbaum raises the legitimate question whether our eagerness to exult in the humiliation of others defines contemporary American culture.
Koestenbaum doesn't confine himself to stories ripped from the pages of Us Weekly. It takes some patience to follow the thread of his argument when Humiliation veers off into discussions of relatively obscure artists like Antonin Artaud and Glenn Ligon, or discourses on terms like "abreaction" and "desubjectification."
But it isn't long before this academic author again startles with a bold argument, some elegant turn of phrase or a striking anecdote that steers his account back to more accessible, ground--as with his assertion that humiliation can be "a kiln through which the human soul passes, and where it receives burnishing, glazing, and consolidating."
Anthony Weiner is merely one more example, as Koestenbaum reminds us, that "there will always be another public figure falling, another man... to confess, in public, a shameful act, and to submit to the televised spanking." Even as we recognize the wearying inevitability of this behavior, it's fair to ask whether our near obsession with their debasement says as much about us as it does them. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer