This essay is a response to four peer reviews of Unseen City, touching on the key ideas showcased in each: the move in community psychoanalysis from an authoritative scripting of the cure to elaborations of care; the role of the public clinic in the global city; the post colonial uncanny; the contribution of literature to the psy-disciplines.

A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.