Humiliation

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum considers the meaning of humiliation in this eloquent work of cultural critique and personal reflection.

The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with scarlet-letter moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. In these moments we not only witness the reversibility of "success," of prominence, but also come to visceral terms with our own vulnerable selves. We can't stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it and absorbing its nearness, and relishing our imagined immunity from its stain, even as we acknowledge the universal, embarrassing predicament of living in our own bodies. With an unusual, disarming blend of autobiography and cultural commentary, noted poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum takes us through a spectrum of mortifying circumstances―in history, literature, art, current events, music, film, and his own life. His generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement. Inventive, poignant, erudite, and playful, Humiliation plunges into one of the most disquieting of human experiences, with reflections at once emboldening and humane.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Psychology, Queer, Sociology, Memoir

184 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2011

About the author

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

this was just awful... i'd give it negative stars if i could.

from a chat excerpt with a friend while i was about 20% into the book:

i find it hilarious that this is what i'm reading immediately after postman's "amusing ourselves to death"
this is written as individual paragraphs as their own "fugues" as he refers to them, without context or relation to the others, other than by the most tenuous of threads, and he keeps using obscure words unnecessarily (ex.: pilloried, traduced, sangfroid)

granted, towards the later chapters (but not the last) the paragraphs began to discover some level of connection to others - yet most of those were about how "humiliated" liza or michael jackson were.

the author keeps going on and on about how everything humiliates him, how writing humiliates him... artists are humiliated by their work. here's a novel idea: if you're so humiliated about writing, if it's so terrible and painful - stop doing it. basically, i'd describe it as a giant masturbatory pity party.

this is an author's name i'll remember - for no reason other than to ensure i never again mistakenly pick up one of his books.

and i close this review begging to the fates and the furies that the billy collins books i have "on deck" as my next reads can wash away the awfulness of this book...

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lance Cleland (Editorial Assistant, Tin House Magazine): Maybe the subject matter just found me at the right moment, but Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation stayed with me longer than any other nonfiction piece this year. Hardly a page went by without me taking pause to write something down in my notebook. Intimate without being self-serving, Koestenbaum has taken on a subject that is increasingly part of our cultural narrative and attacked it from both personal and historical vantage points, resulting in an addictive read. Not everyone will be on-board with his approach, but the results will have you thinking long after the book has been closed.

[r. fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

coarse at times, especially in its almost crass physical positioning of racial subjugation (lynchings, Jim Crowe, sideshows) next to, like, Liza Minelli diatribes, but could a book truly about humiliation do anything other than humiliate itself in the process of explicating its topic? fruity and decadent; wretched and gleeful; knows you're staring at it with a raised eyebrow and stares right back, smiling, poopy on its hands. as a constantly humiliated person, this was the perfect find at the perfect time. shout out durham county public library 🫡😘

[Panio Gianopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, intellectually playful, fearlessly self-incriminating meditation. Full of brilliant little asides and seductive meandering. And perhaps one of the best endings I've ever read.

"I'll hypothesize that, in general, identity germinates from humiliation's soil....Humiliation isn't merely the basement of a personality, or the scum pile on the stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for 'self' to know it exists." - Wayne Koestenbaum

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t have many, but the few humiliations that I went through in my life I have totally erased them, except I do remember, but it’s so deep into my consciousness, it’s like a ghost thought. On the other hand, Wayne Koestenbaum faces up to his humiliations as well as pointing out other artists and public figures who experienced the terribleness of being exposed to the most fearful humiliation possible. I’m a fan of Koestenbaum’s writing, which is everywhere on the map of literature. His shot Penguin biography on Andy Warhol, is one of the best books on that subject matter, and I also enjoyed his essays focusing on the 1980s. “Humiliation” maybe his best book, because it is something that we all can share with - that feeling or point of time, when the unmentionable happens and how we deal with it.

WIth the subject matter of Humiliation, Koestenbaum finds the perfect personalities to accompany that pain. Michael Jackson (great take on him), Jean Genet, Liza Minnelli, Alec Baldwin, and of course, himself. As I read this book, I feel a tinge of pain. That, comes with the territory. Superb book.

[Douglas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this style of writing is not for me. The author believes he is doing deep reflection when it reads as just typing whatever comes to mind.

After my reading other books of simple peasants in China being paraded through town on their way to public execution. Or horrible tales of Iranian teenagers being raped, tortured by having their legs rotated 360 degrees and then killed, it's hard to feel for the examples he belabors.

Most of his anecdotes seemed taken from transitory headlines - an embarrassed cuckolded spouse, a celebrity at an award. Way too trendy and superficial to maintain my interest.

[Dan]

this is an awful lot of fun for a book about things that aren't fun in the slightest. kind of a cross between roland barthes and john waters, veering back and forth from literature/philosophy to anecdotes about peeing your pants in elementary school. as you might imagine, some parts work better than others (i'm not sure a white guy needed to coin the phrase "jim crow gaze," for example), but there's something really approachable and forthcoming about it that evens out the rough edges.

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. I wish he'd erred on the side of his stylized prose, rather than on pop cultural references (Michael Jackson, American Idol, etc.) which will needlessly date what should've been a timeless book.

[Victoria Weinstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

First chapters start out promising, insightful and challenging. Later chapters devolve into self-indulgent crap. Oh, Koestenbaum, how you needed an editor who wasn't in love with every one of your sentences.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just brilliant in every way. One of my favorite writers. Highest recommendation.

[Ky]

Did I have a good time reading this? Yes. Did I find it particularly insightful? Ehhhhhhh.

The essence of what humiliation actually is (or what Kaustenbaum is trying to say about it) is couched in some pretty existential language, with what I would think of as a lack real focus. Is this a book about the politics of humiliation? The feeling of humiliation? The existential purpose of humiliation? Who’s to say. Kaustenbaum casts a pretty wide net.

Much of this book is Kaustenbaum exploring massive media moments and letting us know how he feels about them. Or rather, he uses Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli as examples from our cultural zeitgeist of constant degradation, interspersed with cruising blunders and electroshock.

I am also the queen of humiliation. I humiliated myself at least three times at work last week. I’m humiliating myself just by sharing my criticisms on goodreads. Life is a humiliation ritual and I am the high priestess.

Humiliation is just the perspective that your society hands you on being human. You will embarrass yourself, and then you will die. Be kind.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was humiliating reading HUMILIATION by Wayne Koestenbaum. He marches out not only a litany of famous humiliations but his own. Other titles for the book could have been TMI or Oversharing. But I’m not timid about taboo and have a conflicted relationship with humiliation myself that I hoped the book might clear up. The thing is, people are complicated and nothing is ever clear. Not that Koestenbaum doesn’t try. He airs dirty laundry and hangs it up to dry while contemplating its meaning, origins and results. Kosentenbaum is an interesting guy, you read it on the page, watching his mind jump from subject to subject like a trapezes artist who almost misses but never falls into the net. Hell, there is no net, which makes this book so fun. That and the fact, regardless of your interests, Koestenbaum will touch on a topic you care about in time. His book is that omnivorous. I’m not sure I share his definition of humiliation, but I did love hearing him dish.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite sure what to make of these surface musings on humiliation; I think I was hoping for something more analytical and less scattered.

[brietta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skimmed. This didn’t offer the analysis or wisdom I was hoping for. Disappointed because a book on humiliation, in my mind, has huge investigative potential.

“Past triumphs rise up to humiliate the present self.”

I selected this quote because, in other words, there’s no escaping humiliation.

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Koestenbaum's Humiliation is a reflection on shame and humiliation that takes the form of fragments (dedicated "to the daughter whose father kicked her ass at the airport on Easter Sunday" - pg. 184) divided into fugues ("I call these excursions 'fugues' not only because I want the rhetorical license offered by invoking counterpoint but because a 'fugue state' is a mentally unbalanced condition of dissociated wandering away from one's own identity" - pg. 4).
Koestenbaum's inspiration for writing about humiliation emerges from a desire for repetition, for it is through repetition that Koestenbaum finds solace. ("The word 'humiliation' gives me pleasure to repeat. It will function, in the fugues that follow, as an incantation. May its repetition, like a swaying thurible, diffuse an atmosphere of forgiveness and solace in the drafty sanctuary. Every time I use the word, I'm striking a bell; its ping announces the momentary cessation of suffering." - pg. 23)
Another source of inspiration is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who Koestenbaum describes as having "pioneered the field of 'shame studies'" - pg. 159

I'm more interested in humiliated men than humiliated women. When I see a humiliated woman (in literature, in life, on the screen, in a dream), I'm horrified and saddened - or indifferent. When I see a humiliated man (on trial, on the street, in jail, in a hospital), I'm horrified, too, but not necessarily saddened; I feel that his maleness has received a necessary puncture. And yet that collapse of maleness fills me with horror. Correction: I'm interested in humiliated women, too. But the spectacle of a man's humiliation has a special ripeness. I may always be wanting revenge on men. And I may, as a consequence, always feel on the precipice of meriting someone else's vengeful attack. A strip search, buttocks spread.

- 1.66 Strip Search, pg. 23

* * *

I call it "the Jim Crow Gaze." The eyes of a white person, a white supremacist, a bigot, living in a state of apartheid, looking at a black person (please remember that "white" and "black" aren't externally fixed terms): this intolerant gaze contains coldness, deadness, nonrecognition. This gaze doesn't see a person; it sees a scab, an offense, a spot of absence. Nothing in the face giving a Jim Crow gaze will acknowledge the humanity, likeability, or forgiveability of what it sees....

- 2.11 The Jim Crow Gaze, pg. 33

* * *

Anne Sexton felt differently about recuperation. She killed herself by turning on the car's gas and sitting in a closed garage. Her poem "The Death Baby" is a gripping statement of humiliation's seductiveness - its sticky allure. In this poem, she revisits a dream of being locked in a refrigerator. She remembers "the stink of the liverwurst. / How I was put on a platter and laid / between the mayonnaise and the bacon." This smell, this captivity, I can well imagine: I'd feel at home beside liverwurst on an icebox shelf. All of my grand aspirations, my longing for the trance state of a cherub oblivious among clouds in a Veronese or Tiepolo fresco - and look what becomes of me: lodged next to liverwurst. The self always ends up near head cheese, near compressed animal innards; the self must always recognize its likeness to offal, to offal-as-delicacy.

- 3.7 The Stink of the Liverwurst, pg. 44

* * *

Why do I spend time reading the Marquis de Sade and the postings of Craigslists humiliation-seekers? Why repeat the words of a guy who says, to the void, to anyone on Craigslist who happens to be listening, "I want to be your bitch?" "I'm looking," this ghostly figure asks, "to be the willing victim of anything a woman has to dish out. Whether you want someone to abuse, or someone to berate and humiliate, or someone to pamper you, or service you, or even just someone to do some chores you've got no interest in going for yourself, I'm up to it."...

- 4.3 I Want to be Your Bitch, pg. 57

* * *

...I remember a freakish kid in my neighbourhood when I was growing up: my brother and I referred to him as the Blob because he had a lumpy jaw - as if a gold ball had lodged between his lower lip and his chin. I sometimes saw the Blob at Safeway supermarket with his mother; I was afraid to look directly as him, afraid that I would somehow get infected by his deformity I acknowledged him....

- 5.1 The Blob, pg. 69-70

* * *

My primal scene of spying on someone else's surrender was watching Richard M. Nixon resign the presidency on TV. I remember my glee and shock at seeing the physically and morally unappealing head of the country give up his power. Maybe I took the resignation personally because of Nixon's five o'clock shadow, which reminded me of my father's face. Nixon resigning - the commander in chief humiliated - seemed a quintessential father-brought-low moment. I might have pitied Nixon, or pitied the man with the five o'clock shadow, but I also relished the punishment, his shame. This complicated surge - feeling horrified that the powerful man should lose his eminence, bu also feeling gleeful that he must display his downfall - lives in me still as a queasy avidity, connected with a man's beard, or the seeming incongruity of a shave-worthy man exposed to public shunning. Shun the man who shaves; humiliate the hirsute. That was my clarion call - rousing me to excitement but also to remorse and grief.

- 6.4 Five O'Clock Shadow, pg. 85-86

* * *

Many years ago, in the twentieth century, I found myself occasionally at a train station in the state of Massachusetts, during the great years when Edward Kennedy was senator; and the men's room at this train station, I noted, boasted a significant degree of erotic traffic. In that restroom, the most humiliating spectacle I confronted - and I confronted it repeatedly - was a guy in a wheelchair parked in front of a urinal for a long time. He never urinated. He had a catheter. He'd perch at the urinal, and if there were other guys jerking off at the other urinals, he'd watch, but never participated....

- 7.6 Catheter, pg. 103

* * *

My favourite humiliated artist and writer is Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who received an abusive abundance of electroshock treatment, and who experienced inspiration as impregnation and rape from demons. As Anne Carson put it, in her poem "TV Men: Artaud," "Some days he felt uterine. Mind screwed into him by a thrust of sky." And this invagination - Artaud, supposedly male, feeling himself uterine, penetrated by phallic sky - made him God's bride, God's prostitute: "He felt God pulling him out through his own cunt. Claque. Claque-dents." For years I've murmured that odd word "claque-dents" as a private mantra signifying humiliation's potential for being transformed (via aesthetics) into a chewable, repeatable morsel...

- 10.1 Shock Treatment Aesthetics, pg. 140

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was frustrating. lots of forced connections, a lot of grandstanding and a lot of unconvincing pop psych and pop phil assertions. read a lot like ARE YOU MY MOTHER -- i wanted to like it, there's a lot to like about it, but the queasily ponderous writing style ("funny fact:" there's a website called tinypenishumiliation.com -- gee whiz!) was obstructive, as was the lack of real wisdom. and omg so many assumptions about and projections onto unwitting bystanders.

all that said, the last fugue/chapter is pretty solid and the chapter on artaud and basquiat is particularly interesting.

probably the style and voice issues have to do with the author writing to a general audience. i think about humiliation and shame a lot, so many of these ideas were already familiar.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lengthy, snotty, loosely constructed (read: disorganized) diatribe on the topic of humiliation. I think the author was trying to go for an experimental style, but the net effect of the 'structure' of this book read to me like the work of a clueless undergraduate too lazy to put together a coherent, meaningful discussion on this subject.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Series of very short essays (that's probably not a good description of the form, but it's the closest I can come) about . . . well, you can probably figure that out from the title.

A bit dense and perhaps a little self-indulgent in spots, but interesting, especially in the last 25 pages or so.

[Anna Tatelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really gritty and frank, but simultaneously fascinating. I'm in awe of how honest this guy was able to be, and how well he managed to thread together so many different events, people, and ideas. Even when things didn't initially seem to be connecting, they always were.

[Cari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Consistently pretentious and often florid, while at the same time displaying a raw honesty that I found intriguing. I can't make up my mind whether I liked this or wanted to roll my eyes until they popped out of my head.

[Alejandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn.

Just.

Um . . .

. . . well, this just kicked me in the nuts over and over. Beautifully written fugues on the subject of shame and humiliation--personal and public and political. It's a testament to this book that I became anxious and nauseated while reading it.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this is insightful and moving, other parts seem pretentious and forced. A lot of it is uncomfortable, so I guess the point is made. I did not expect this type of writing. It's kind of a series of meditations.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very stream-of-consciousness style broken up into Fugues, but the Fugues didn't seem to have cohesion within. This seems like the kind of book that someone will dig with all their soul or simply will not like at all.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and nuanced investigation of humiliation in its numerous forms. The structure of the book really becomes addictive to read. Not for the faint of heart.

[Julesreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

docked it a star because I wanted to and for no other reason. dont wanna give this fella five stars. good. book. interesting book-length essay on humiliation by trying to tie its effect to us all -- an essential human experience that has three parts (perpetrator, victim, witness, per Koestenbaum). I enjoyed it and my favorite aspect is Kosetenbaum's immense humiliation in writing the book which comes out in many ways, including his inclusion of many of his own humiliations to close the book. in honor of the project, i will include one of my own:
i'm in a creative wriitng class taught by a professor I liked and followed throughout my college career (though this was freshman year and my first class with him), and it is a workshop and my story is up. he closes the class by asking if they think i respected them or their time with my poorly edited story; the problem was a tense issue, as my tenses were all messed up; i actually had problems with tense and knew it, but it hadn't clicked in my brain how to detect tense issues and rectify them; perhaps it was part of my mild dyslexia that my mother alerted me to (a doctor had told her when I was a child) only when I was in my early thirties; whatever the cause, it wasn't for lack of time spent editing my story. He was quite nice about it in our one-on-one after class, and I think he was humiliating me to make an example of me for the class; I wasn't allowed to speak during the workshop portion (if your story was being workshopped, you were not allowed to participate in the discussion), so i couldn't defend myself from his charge.

years later I'd learn that professor was, though married, having affairs based in humiliation as sexual gratification; he'd lock his lover up in a dog crate and treat her as such, and like, etc.

I hope this gives some insight into the exploration and exercises in Kostenbaum's book.

[Witoldzio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the title of this book in a book written by an internationally known piano virtuoso. Koestenbaum's writing is not for everybody, it boldly addresses the topic, particularly as it applies to show business, entertainment, politics, sexuality, psychology, education etc. The writing becomes a little repetitious after a while, always returning to the same main plots and motives, but the book is never boring or tiring. It is always stimulating, although, at times, the intellectualism touches on the pretentious and theatrical. A few parts of the book can certainly be shocking to some, discussing sexual topics very openly. There is much autobiography in this book, which does not necessarily make the book better, but at least we understand why the topic was so important to the author. The spectrum of humiliation as discussed in the book is very broad, perhaps too broad, but, in exchange, we never get bored. This book will stimulate many thoughts (both pleasant and unpleasant) at many levels. Most importantly, it also forces the reader to reexamine oneself. And, of course, the topic is sticky, intimate, unpleasant, awkward. The reader has to be ready for that. We might end up disliking the book for its directness and honesty.

[Jessica Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It might mean a mansion in Bel Air, but it might also mean imprisonment by the L.A. Police Department for forty-five minutes in a bathroom smeared with doo-doo. It might mean private planes and Harry Winston jewels, but it also might mean delirium tremens at the Betty Ford Center, and garish caricatures of yourself in the minds of others. Not always garish, in many hearts, there are genuine shrines to the fallen star, shrines tended without irony, and without unkindness."

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of the varying kinds of humiliation, both broadly and in tight focus. Some parts drag a bit and feel more like trying to shape stories and scenarios to fit. The best parts by far are Koestenbaum's personal experiences, especially the closing rundown of his own humiliations.

[Baylor Thornton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok, I don’t know who this guy is, but he sounds like an asshole. I get serious Louis C.K. vibes from this dude. I just read 180 pages of his self loathing and general creepiness. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s jerked off in front of people or something.

My advice: Go to therapy for a few years. I only give the book two stars for honesty. In overall value it’s a one.

[Jingyi Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unpleasant reading experience. I think that the point of the book is to humiliate the author, humiliate the reader, and then through those actions access a deeper understanding of humiliation, so maybe my discomfort with the novella actually means that Koestenbaum succeeded - but some of his 'fugues' feel gritty and disgusting just for shock factor.