Shame and the Limits of the Subject - Behold the Black Caiman - page 136

Here, ajengome reemerged in another, subtler guise as a crucial energy of
the contradictory moral economies of life applied to Indigenous peoples in
the Chaco. Ajengome was the idiom by which violent marginalization and
bodily diminishment became linked to ontological sensibilities, moral sta-
tus, Christian spirituality, and culturalist disgust. Through it, such opposi-
tional standards were simultaneously reconciled and reproduced; a process
that lent renewed urgency to the project of self-transformation.
More precisely, ajengome articulated the tensions of subjectification
and desubjectification that so profoundly defined the contemporary
moral economies of indigeneity and Indigenous ontologies alike. For
the New People, humanity was a condition both obvious and unassum-
able. Becoming an Indian subject always meant becoming insufficient,
and for Totobiegosode-Ayoreo in 2004, becoming New meant becom-
ing ashamed. In the classic style of negative dialectics, this oppositional
framework created a new kind of disordered subjectivity. It was this ten-
sion between subjective immanence and the impossibility of subjectivity
that shame articulated. This was the stupendously tricky terrain of which
the New World was composed.
Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes a similar point in his
analysis of shame among the survivors of Auschwitz. For Agamben, the
shamed subject “has no other content than its own desubjectification; it
becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This
double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification,
is shame.” 11 This double movement means that “the human being is
the inhuman; the one whose humanity is completely destroyed is the
one who is truly human.” I suggest that the category of indigeneity re-
organizes this tension of subjective becoming and desubjectified life in
significant ways. The result may well be the creation of a New World, but
it is a world of constant inversions where shame is the primary ontologi-
cal sentiment and where the survivors of contact and of concentration
camps may resemble one another in unsettling ways.
Illness as Ontological Insufficiency
According to Totobiegosode, health was an indication of moral well-
being. Becoming ill was never a morally neutral event but a reflection of
an individual's capacity for resistance and position relative to metaphys-
ical forces. Health and moral sentiments were causally related. Being
afraid, sad, or ashamed was the same as being morally insufficient; each
state in turn made one vulnerable to bodily infection and death.