Humiliation

Starred review from May 23, 2011
The genre-busting poet and critic Koestenbaum (The Queen's Throat) riffs on humiliation, tracing its relationship with art, desire, the body, and in the construction of celebrities for public consumption. In fragments that recall Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, the author advances his provocative "paradoxes and juxtapositions" to trace humiliation's contours, the circumstances that make it possible ("Humiliation involves a triangle" of victim, abuser, and witness), and its centrality to certain kinds of pleasure (e.g., Koestenbaum's delight in Liza Minnelli's ability to repeatedly succumb toâand triumph overâhumiliation). He refreshes worn tropes such as the humiliation inherent in reality TV and such political scandals as Richard Nixon's resignation ("Watergate wasn't a sexual scandal, but it manifested as physical abhorrence") while also deepening our understanding of racism, lynching, and police brutality in the context of shame. It's a wide-ranging, allusive conversation that wears its erudition lightlyânot least because Koestenbaum is at his confiding, self-implicating best ("I am tired, as any human must be, after a life spent avoiding humiliation and yet standing near its flame, enjoying the sparks, the heat, the paradoxical illumination.")

April 15, 2011

A series of meditations on the concept of humiliation.

Poet and scholar Koestenbaum (English/City Univ. of New York Graduate Center; Hotel Theory, 2007, etc) offers a hybrid book. Personal confessions (humiliating in nature, naturally) sit alongside astute analysis of such cultural icons as Basquiat and the Marquis de Sade, and theoretical hypotheses mingle with observations about reality television and erotic Craigslist personal ads. Structured as a series of chapters or "fugues," each consisting of a series of numbered paragraphs varying in length from one sentence to several pages, the book is academic in tone and content but not necessarily in scope or format. What Koestenbaum sacrifices in depth, he makes up for in clarity. For example, in two sentences he dispatches with the distinction between shame and humiliation; excavating the full meaning of this distinction could easily require an entire chapter. Though this brief treatment is appropriate given the length of the book, other distinctions—like that between relatively minor humiliations, like being rejected romantically, and major ones, like being raped or tortured—are merely acknowledged in a sort of hand-wringing way. Yet the book cannot be characterized as shallow. Koestenbaum consistently offers enlightening, well-written insights into the process of abreaction; the way language can be humiliating to the artist, the writer or the illiterate; queer theory; and reality television and voyeurism. The author avoids mistaking unreadable prose for complexity, and though the book may be best suited for academics, general readers interested in the topic will not be lost or frustrated.

Insightful and blissfully free of jargon, Humiliation may not be the last word on the subject, but it's an accessible introduction.

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July 1, 2011
Poet, scholar, and distinguished professor at the CUNY graduate center, Koestenbaum in his eleventh book presents a series of fugues that constitute an aphoristic collage of humiliations, ordinary and extreme. He develops humiliation as something that defines us as individuals. We suffer at the hands of others, suffer the embarrassment of our own clumsiness, of bodily fallibility and failure, and thus become human. Humiliation may be execrable and unendurable, but it is also genuine. And in a world that seems increasingly filled with fakeness, . . . humiliation at least rings true. Koestenbaum extends the definition of humiliation to include what is understood more often as schadenfreude, the pleasure we take in others' misfortune, and he indulges his own prurience. Curiously, he compares petty humiliations and outrages that shock the conscience, which blurs the distinction between the observation of and the experience of suffering. At times pornographic, the book makes readers complicit. Reading it dirties us, and this is partly the point, for to the humiliated belong the spoils.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)