This is a course on shame and how it undergirds our experiences of visuality. Shame depends on the art of exposure. Shame, in contrast to guilt, presumes the knowledge of having been seen by another, of having been caught by, exposed by the other’s gaze; shame, also, exposes the other and the gaze. Addressing shame as a recurring motif, in art, film, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, we will ask how has shame informed or deformed what it means, what it feels, what it looks like to be exposed, to be rendered vulnerable, to be revealed. What are the arts of exposure, of nakedness and its fig leafs, of surveillance and its “confessions of the flesh”? How has shame been mobilized—as affect, as act, as ethics, as law—to explore the body and its limits? How has shame been deployed to (dis)figure a body politic and that which it seeks to exclude, via the vertigo of high and low, as the unruly, anarchic difference of “baseness”? The course will also address how artists, filmmakers, and writers have confronted the contradiction between the destabilizing, even shattering, unspeakablity of shame, and the ambition of its expression as art. The philosopher Georges Bataille describes this ambition as a “return to reality”: “one is seduced in a base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming, opening his eye wide: opening them wide, then, before a big toe.”