Who should be ashamed?

By Klementin Mile

Who should be ashamed?

“I am hurt, but I have no reason to be ashamed.”

Eli Fara did not deny the video, nor did she justify it. She refused only one thing: shame.

To understand it, one must ask where shame comes from.

According to Sartre, shame is born not from the thing we do, but from the thing we are seen doing.

When I see myself through the other’s eye, I cease to be only the person I am and become the person the other thinks he saw.

An intimate video takes this mechanism to the absurd: not one eye, but thousands of eyes, and each with its own imagined right.

But looking never remains only looking.

Foucault would say that it turns into judgment.

It is not that the public only sees; it classifies, comments, condemns.

And things are unjustly reversed: the violated person is asked to explain himself, while those who entered his room without permission explain nothing to anyone.

This does not happen by chance. Shame always goes to the person who finds it hardest to refuse it.

The term ‘spectacle’ comes from the Latin spectaculum, from spectare, ‘to watch’. The spectacle, then, is not the thing that happens, but the thing that is seen.

Hannah Arendt had understood that when the private sphere is turned into a public spectacle, then the fundamental distinction between what belongs to the person and what belongs to the world is lost.

Eli Fara restored this distinction with a single sentence.

Nevertheless, shame does not disappear when it is refused. It seeks an address.

And if it does not belong to the one who was filmed, then it must belong to those who opened it, who sought it and who sent it on.

Eli Fara did not erase the shame. She sent it back.