E Pluribus Unum

Abstract

E PLURIBUS UNUM On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in New World, by Jonathan Elmer. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pp. 256. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.Violence, Slavo) Zizek contended in 2008, is tricky thing indeed. It assumes multiple forms but can be grasped only through singular motion: lingering. Ours, he argues, is time of urgency wherein Western media disseminate select images of select atrocities to point where their ubiquity threatens to forestall critical thought. The rhythm of broadcast pressures viewers to respond to these happenings as breaks in placid surface of everyday life, to be solved singularly and quickly so that normalcy can return. But violence is not just an event; it is also structure that holds both remarkable and unmarked, few and many, in firm embrace. Scholars thus need to pause over torsions of present, to 'wait and see' by means of patient, critical analysis why some acts and their actors become icons while others fade away or are never documented.1 Jonathan Elmer's On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in New World does just this, joining political scientists, religious scholars, and historians in lingering over an old riddle: sovereignty. What he finds through unfolding history of sovereignty from antiquity to bizarre incident in 1997 involving man, an old tree, and chainsaw is that much like Zizek's sense of violence, sovereignty pivots between one and many. How does single case, unique text or figure, ever attain through pressure of interpretation status of exemplary? (192), Elmer asks at end of book. It is question unasked and unanswerable by Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty, which accounts only for intense singularity of its twinned figures, exceptional sovereign and lonely homo sacer. Elmer's answer - violence in New World - is of interest to all with stake in sovereignty (which, as he shows, is everyone), but scholars working in American Studies, American Indian Studies, CoIonial/Postcolonial Studies, Literary Studies, and Trauma Studies will take particular note. Throughout an introduction and six chapters Elmer patiently details to dazzling effect how violence works in combination of Anglophone literature, race, and space to give e pluribus unum its jagged shape.On Lingering and Being Last is important not just because it moves Agamben to Americas, though it does that. Elmer harnesses Agamben's insight into sovereign singularity to make case for approaching politics through literary critical methods and, in emphasizing literature, brings history of writers and readers into showdown that, according to Agamben, involves only two: sovereign and sacred man. The foundational intervention of Elmer's book is that trope (6) - that singular image of captive king or of losing and lost Indian - points to and passes on to others that which constitutes the deepest strata of political imagination of Atlantic modernity (3), fascination with sovereignty. Endurance, not erasure, pattern, not break - these are temporal postures of sovereignty that Elmer traces from Greek-derived word word that bridges political and individual sovereignty. What he finds is an original use that reverses direction of personification that Hobbes gave us. The horror of Leviathan is its memorable frontispiece wherein is transmogrified into an individual, but [t]he idea of personal autonomy, it turns out, is derived from political community; individual is personified, we might say, as state (9). Etymology was easily forgotten, however. What stayed with people instead was notion of autonomy personified by solitary living death of Sophocles's Antigone, who becomes autonomous by assuming inhuman characteristics of state: radical exceptionality and a kind of deathlessness (10). …