A peculiar sensation

7 Black and Ashamed
Deconstructing Race in Ralph 
Ellison’s 
Invisible Man
Zlatan Filipovic

---

Black and Ashamed 
113
remains ixed in the strict binarism of the white gaze and powerlessly 
consigned to its normative regimes of subject constitution.
Having no ield for disclosure in the racialized metaphysics of power 
relations that dominates Ellison’s world, any slippage of identity over 
and beyond its hegemonic articulations carries an affective cost for the 
black subject, a “psychic uncertainty” in Ellison’s terms, that “he yearns 
to avoid.”
7
This cost, that I will argue acquires its most signiicant tenor 
when considered within the economy of racial shame, is what breaks 
open a third, heterotopic space characterized by invisibility in the novel. 
For Ellison, shame is irremissibly tied to the normative violence of the 
white disavowal and what he consequently calls “the pathologies of the 
democratic process”
8
that plot the painful narratives of black America. 
Emancipation that, like a stab of epiphany inally descends on the narra-
tor towards the end of the novel, represents not only a metaphoric escape 
of subjectivity from the tightening embrace of objective racial binaries 
that trace the limits of black lives, but it also constitutes an afirmation 
of fragmented social identities that slip through the totalizing assigna-
tions of their subject positions. The “cost of insight,” as Ellison observes 
when considering the politics of difference as the watershed of American 
experience, “is an uncertainty that threatens our already unstable sense 
of order and requires a constant questioning of accepted assumptions.”
9
In light of this, I intend to consider the implications of racial shame for 
the theoretical strategies that map out the underlying syntax of subject 
formation in its relation to power and further develop its signiicance 
for our reading of invisibility in Ellison’s novel. Although not explicitly 
concerned with shame, Foucault’s structuralist analytic of power and 
its normalizing regimes that participate in subject formation imply a 
coextensive terrain of affective structures through which the normative 
spatialities that regulate our social existence are maintained. Subject for-
mation, for Foucault, is an effect of disciplinary procedures tied to the 
“totalization of modern power structures”
10
and their individualizing 
strategies that reduce and subject our multiplicities to uniied regimes 
of identiication. It is a cornering of my differences and a binding of my 
attachments to an identity that I cannot and yet must assume, since it 
constitutes the sign and cipher of my social visibility. The word “subject” 
articulates subjection in two ways, according to Foucault: “subject to 
someone else by control or dependence, 
and tied to his own identity by 
a conscience or self-knowledge
. Both meanings suggest a form of power 
which subjugates and makes subject to.”
11
Although ostensibly exclusive 
in terms of heteronomy/autonomy of the subject formation, the expe-
rience of racial shame integrates both signiications of subjection in a 
temporal order where the white disavowal imposed as extrinsic to black 
identity is interiorized and exposed as intrinsic to its constitution. Racial 
shame could thus be seen as an affective hinge that enables the articula-
tion of the objective structures of power by the subjects themselves. As 

---

114
Zlatan Filipovic
the elision of outside and inside, the becoming of outside inside or the 
inside outside, the affective experience of shame makes the structures 
of disavowal immanent to the social terrain. Through racial shame, 
black lives are thus authored for from within, fatally “tied to [their] own 
identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.”
12
However, the process of subjectivization does not disable agency. As 
Aurelia Armstrong suggests, the possibility of resistance in Foucault “is 
grounded in an agency that precedes disciplinarity and can never be 
fully colonized by it.”
13
Power, as Foucault maintains, is founded on 
the irrepressibility of freedom and its continuous “refusal to submit,”
14
the fact that ‘“the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) be 
thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who 
acts.”
15
Power only emerges against the depths of the other’s resistance, 
in a relation of force that deines the vitalism of its oppression. “At the 
very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the 
recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.”
16
And yet, 
the “will” of the other, for Foucault, is considered