In what is perhaps the first period drama about the dangers of pornography addiction for women, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu warns us of what happens when fantasy contaminates reality. The film revolves around Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), an angelic young wife who harbors a terrible shame. Although she loves her husband, she cannot bear to tell him that ever since she was an adolescent girl, in her dreams she receives otherworldly sexual satisfaction from the malicious vampire Orlok—a dark and seductive fantasy which still haunts her many years later. The motivating paranoia, expressed through Ellen’s sincere but self-serving husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), is that a wife may be faithful in reality, yet may still be fantasizing about other men while her husband is asleep. As it turns out, Ellen is, and this bodes disaster for everyone around her. Nevertheless, when Orlok arrives in her hometown of Wisburg, bringing the plague in his wake, Ellen’s shame becomes the town’s salvation. By enticing the vampire to her bed, she distracts Orlok long enough for the sun to rise and thereby rid Wisburg of his malign influence. Of course, Ellen herself must also die shortly thereafter. By consummating her fantasy in a final shameful act, she assuages her guilt at the horror she has brought to her town and her family because of her perverse imagination—or perhaps an imagination that is pure yet too porous.

Ellen Hutter’s story echoes the tragedy of Lucretia, for whom, like Ellen, shame was inextricably entwined with her sacrifice. In his recent book A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion (Verso, 2025), Frédéric Gros reinterprets the myth of Lucretia as placing shame at the foundation of politics itself. In the myth, Lucretia is the paragon of Roman feminine virtue. While their husbands are away at war, the wives of Rome have affairs, idle away the day, or waste money on extravagances. But Lucretia is chaste, responsible, and industrious. She attracts the attention of the Etruscan prince Tarquin, who is incensed to have his glib pronouncement that all women have lax morals proven wrong, and grows insanely jealous of Lucretia’s husband. Tarquin travels to Rome to seduce Lucretia, but she steadfastly denies his advances. He tries to cajole, impress, and coerce Lucretia into bed, all to no avail. Finally, Tarquin threatens Lucretia with a fate worse than death: eternal shame. He will kill Lucretia and claim to have caught her in flagrante delicto with a slave. Under the threat of this shame upon her family, Lucretia finally relents. The next day, she commits suicide. But her death catalyzes a popular uprising that drives out the Etruscan princes and establishes the Roman republic.

In Gros’s reading, the myth of Lucretia makes shame the bedrock of society:

This myth therefore proposes a sexual genealogy for politics, but a very different one from that advanced by Freud in Totem and Taboo, where he argues that political obedience derives from the brothers’ guilt at killing the father of the clan. The genealogy proposed by the Lucretia myth is based on shame. Sexual perfection is embodied by the married couple, which, as Paul Veyne reminds us, was a Roman invention. The political meaning of the myth lies in the promise of complementarity, the public and private being two mutually supporting spaces. In order to exercise their public duties with the necessary serenity and vigour, men need the security of an impeccably run household. The myth is saying that it is ultimately women who hold together the republic. Their chastity and propriety underpin the virility of male Roman citizens when they are defending the public good in the Senate or Forum. If the wife allows sexual disorder to reign in the privacy of the home, then the whole system crumbles.

In Nosferatu, it isn’t the chastity but the imaginary life of wives which must be policed. The message is not so different from Gros’s reading of Lucretia: the public and private life of the mind are two mutually supporting spaces, and the bedrock of the bourgeois family is a clean mind—or at least, one that is tidy enough not to let its imagination interfere with business. As the film warns, when a businessman’s wife pleads with him to stay at home and make love to her instead of chasing a big real estate deal, he should listen. Otherwise, he may return to find her fantasizing about a mysterious Eastern European who is tall, dark, and uncircumcised.

When a businessman’s wife pleads with him to stay at home and make love to her instead of chasing a big real estate deal, he should listen. Otherwise, he may return to find her fantasizing about a mysterious Eastern European who is tall, dark, and uncircumcised.

Shame and Guilt

The myth of Lucretia is just one literary nugget among many buried in Gros’s book. At turns grandiose, funny, heartfelt, and moralizing, A Philosophy of Shame is a quick read which weaves together snippets from Rousseau and Balzac to John Cassavetes. The book is a collection of short essays, with each chapter standing on its own—and sometimes standing a little too alone, since some chapters directly contradict each other. For example, in an interesting reading of The Analects, Gros interprets Confucius as elevating shame to one of “the human virtues which, when cultivated, will result in a harmonious city.” “Shame prompts us to do things rather than boasting about them,” Gros continues, “It enables us to be genuinely fair, deferential and sincere, rather than wasting all our energies on parading such virtues.” Shame, that is, is a restraining influence which helps decent citizens live a quiet, moral life. However, a few chapters later, Gros reimagines shame as a “revolutionary” emotion which does just the opposite: through shame, Gros argues, our righteous anger emerges, and with it the demand for a better world. As Gros writes, “Shame can be revolutionary not only because it is associated with our anger against the world and ourselves but also because it is powered by the imagination. We need imagination to be ashamed.” The reader looking for a universal and consistent philosophy of shame may leave feeling disappointed, and perhaps a little ashamed.

Yet there is one persistent through-note mentioned in almost every chapter—in passing, often, but nevertheless emphasized—which is the distinction between shame and guilt. On first reading, it is curious why shame and guilt need to be differentiated, and this confusion is reflected in Gros’s writing, which, when attempting to distinguish the two, often blurs them even further. For example, Gros notes that “the opposite of guilty is innocent, but the opposite of shameful is indeed shameless—in the latter case, it is the first word that carries the positive ethical value.” Yet later he argues that “The opposite of innocence is not guilt but lucidity … [a]nd someone who is ashamed is lucid.” The definitions of shame and guilt, as well as their normative judgements, remain fluid throughout the book. It is not until the end that Gros makes the distinction most clearly: he argues that “we feel guilty about what we have done, but we are ashamed of our desires because they come across to us as monstrous or aberrant.” Guilt is the register of wrong action, but shame lives in the realm of imagination.

Things were not always this way, Gros contends: shame used to be real. The prioritization of imagination over reality is part of a larger history which A Philosophy of Shame lays out. The book begins by exploring the kind of shame grounded in feudal society—what Gros calls “clan shame”: “This type of shame is not so much a question of psychology as an erosion of symbolic social capital.” Shame involving clan dishonor has immediate social consequences: “It is perceived of as a ‘thing’ to such an extent that it has been used as a guarantee—in the Middle Ages, a person of good birth could offer his honour as security when lending or borrowing money.” In clan society, that is, shame is tangible, which gives it social weight but also makes it repairable through vengeance, courageous action, or sacrifice. In middle-age retellings of the story of Lucretia, for example, the threat of shame leads her to commit suicide to repair the social position of those who would have lost status because of her rape.

With the advent of bourgeois society, Gros continues, shame becomes less communal and more individual. In short, guilt takes the place of what was once called shame, and shame becomes less tangible and more personal. Shame “is no longer a binding and ritualised social mechanism that can be disastrous for families, but a minor personal drama whereby an individual has to contend with the negative judgement of others.” In bourgeois society, the prioritization of freedom in the form of individual autonomy means that guilt supplants shame as the marker of wrongdoing. Whereas shame reflects on the clan, the individual who abuses their freedom is guilty, and how they feel about it is immaterial in the eyes of the law. “Modernity constructs societies without honour,” Gros argues. “Communities are organised around a public body of laws (the state), commercial transactions (capitalism) and the interplay of individual freedoms (liberalism). In the process, shame gets a makeover, becoming less clan-based and more bourgeois, less dramatic and more transactional, less ritual and more psychological.” Just as the mind and body are split in the bourgeois individual, shame and guilt are separated with guilt taking priority: guilty individuals are adjudicated by the state, while shamed individuals retreat into themselves.

In large part, A Philosophy of Shame is an attempt to argue that shame is real again. Gros begins this project by focusing on the kind of shame made possible through the internet. Gros argues that,

social media functions through contagion: content that is rapidly relayed and endlessly shared, thereby going viral. Virtual = viral = real. It is in viral-eality that contemporary shame emerges: social media accounts saturated with insults, e-reputations ruined by e-bashing campaigns, an anonymous deluge of gratuitous, sarcastic barbs that completely knock the stuffing out of the internet user.

Because we identify ourselves with our virtual avatars, Gros argues, shame now has material consequences. This new “real” shame bears a similarity to the shame of the clan, Gros argues, in that it is objective (Gros gives follower counts as a marker of objectivity) and tangible in that a bad e-reputation can have material effects on one’s career. But this new old shame is different from clan shame in that our shameful acts are preserved forever on the internet, where there is no atonement. “There is no such thing as digital redemption,” Gros concludes, “In the cloud, our shame is out of reach and inextinguishable.” Despite this, Gros goes on to argue that the reality of shame opens the opportunity for a postmodern politics of shame. Shame can spur us into righteous anger, for instance, when we witness the injustice of contemporary society. Shame, Gros continues, “can have two outcomes: It can lead us down a cold and dark path that disfigures us and ends in solitary resignation, or a fiery and luminous path that transfigures us and fuels collective anger.”

Just as the mind and body are split in the bourgeois individual, shame and guilt are separated with guilt taking priority: guilty individuals are adjudicated by the state, while the shamed retreat into themselves.

Inviting the Vampire

This sounds inspiring, but Gros never explains why shame would lead us down the second path instead of simply isolating us even further. Indeed, this ground has been trod before: the focus on shame and away from guilt appears in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. As Lasch argues, in the neoliberal era, “Economic man himself has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism. The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety [here we might easily substitute shame]. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life.” Shame might seem like it can provide this “meaning,” but as Lasch might counter, this does not necessarily entail political progress.

In the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, shame and guilt indeed have a very important difference. Guilt is foundational to what Klein calls the “depressive” position of thinking—it is a necessary emotion in the process of repair. Acknowledging our guilt enables us to take responsibility for the damage we have (intentionally or unintentionally) caused, and in so doing begin to make amends. Shame, on the other hand, belongs to the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid state. By retreating into shame, we disavow responsibility and instead cling to an imagined perfection while mentally annihilating the damaged or damaging other. In paranoid-schizoid thinking, the bad must be split off from the good (schizoid) to keep the good from being destroyed (paranoid). In depressive thinking, one must be able to tolerate the good and bad mixing in order to accept the loved object even though it is imperfect.

In paranoid-schizoid thinking, the bad must be split off from the good (schizoid) to keep the good from being destroyed (paranoid). In depressive thinking, one must be able to tolerate the good and bad mixing in order to accept the loved object even though it is imperfect.

As has been argued in the pages of Damage before, contemporary society militates against healthy depressive thinking (in the Kleinian sense) and compels a kind of paranoid-schizoid engagement with the world. On the internet, for example, nothing is a whole object and nobody is portrayed in their entirety—as flawed but well-meaning and cohesive humans. Authentic human connection is difficult, foreclosing the possibility of repair in damaged relationships. Instead, everything we see is presented as perfect or perfectly hateful. Our enemies are inhuman monsters and must be annihilated, and our friends are beautiful, brilliant, and never age. By advocating a politics of shame, Gros attempts to argue that politics are still possible in such a paranoid-schizoid environment. I am not convinced.

A return to Freud might help illustrate this disconnect. In the primal horde myth, the brothers band together to kill and eat the father, who has cast them out of the tribe and monopolized all sexual activity for himself. Gros argues that, in the end, “political obedience derives from the brothers’ guilt at killing the father of the clan.” But in Freud’s telling, the guilt at killing the father was not the source of their political obedience; it was rather an obstacle to their continued political unity. The guilt at killing the father was the reason behind sacrificial rituals, which were necessary so that the brothers could work through their remorse in order to live responsibly in society. Political unity came not by killing the father, but in the religious ceremonies which came afterwards. The guilt of the killing could not be borne by any one of the brothers alone, and must be borne equally by the entire community. Indeed, it is in this recognition that the community itself comes to be. 

Just as their feelings for their father were split—into hatred and admiration—their remorse for the killing was also split—guilt made its first appearance, but so did responsibility. With this newfound responsibility for the killing also came a responsibility towards each other. As Freud writes, “The totemic system was, as it were, a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father—protection, care and indulgence—while on their side they undertook to respect his life, that is to say, not to repeat the deed which had brought destruction on their real father.”

A guilty person can take responsibility for their actions. The shamed person retreats into themselves. As Freud well knew, the mission of psychoanalysis is not to rummage through the unconscious for its own sake. Instead, unconscious dynamics are more often an impediment to engaging with reality—an impediment which must be worked through in order to achieve autonomy. In this mission, shame is a poor foundation. Instead, the necessary emotion is a less exciting but more practical responsibility. Our post-political era of perpetual crisis and stasis, embodied most fully in the internet, thrives on our emotions. This includes fear, anger, and perhaps especially shame. It lives by sucking dry our imaginations and, vampire-like, lives the more, the more it sucks. To advocate a politics of shame is to invite the proverbial vampire into the house.

Taylor Hines reads books, but does not understand them, and is ashamed of his non-understanding.