I Am Cringe, But I Am Free: Cringe on Its Way from Self-Identity to Liberation

The article proposes an aesthetic and political understanding of the phenomenon of cringe as a particular form of feeling. The thesis posits that cringe can be defined as an aesthetic regime that changes the coordinates of habitual affects — primarily shame. The article refers to the ideas of Jacques Rancière presented in The Aesthetic Unconscious. It helps to analyse cringe through the problem of overcoming hierarchies and self-identity and also to see cringe as an affect that arises at the boundaries of personal and collective experience, linked to the altered figure of the Other. As an aesthetic regime, cringe allows for the expansion of the field of questions and touches on epistemological issues. In this regard, the article refers to Donna Haraway’s concepts of “god trick” and “situatedness.” Based on the latter, the author defines the cringe state as a lack of situatedness, associated with a refusal of reflection and a reluctance to discover the limits of the foundations of thought.

To understand the political dimension of cringe, particular attention is focused on the ambivalence of the processes involved in the correlation of cringe and power relations. The author provides characteristics of two trajectories — alienation and liberation. This conceptual move allows cringe to be inserted into the tradition of counterculture and expands the understanding of the totality of its presence. The latter makes it possible to argue that the art of life and the art of the self is an art of being cringe, which enables seeing the cringe in a space of equality that cannot be normalised. It is concluded that cringe moves from a marginal affect to a mode of political feeling that involves psychoanalytic discourse and various bodily and emancipatory practices.