The Call to Intimacy and the Shame Effect Available to Purchase

This article discusses Dicle Koğacıoğlu's 2004 essay “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey.” It considers Koğacıoğlu's formulation of the “tradition effect” in the light of several other “effects” put forward by social theorists and philosophers: the “individual effect” (Foucault), the “society effect” (Althusser), the “knowledge effect” (Althusser), and the “state effect” (Mitchell). Through a reading of Georg Lukács's essay “The Moment and Form” and J. M. Coetzee's novel Diary of a Bad Year, the article introduces two further effects to be placed alongside these: the “subject effect” and the “shame effect.” What links these different effects, the author argues, is that in every case the effect is closely tied to a process of naming or stepping forth— what is here called “instantiation.” A theoretical account of instantiation is therefore necessary if we are to understand the logic that underlies these different effects. To this end, we need to pay special attention to shame; for shame, uniquely, comes into existence as a profound discordance with its own instantiation.