Plátano's Pharmacy: The Republic's Taste of its Own Medicine

Abstract

Abstract On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, demanding the head of Vice-President Mike Pence while challenging the results of a fair presidential election. Amid the shock, US journalists—finding few words to describe the severity of the moment—dusted off the old term: “banana republic.” Banana republics are countries whose economy depends on the export of a finite natural resource, like bananas. By design, the ruling elites of banana republics work alongside foreign, multinational corporations to benefit from the republic's human labor. Banana republics are typically governed by a military dictator appointed by a foreign power and elected through illegitimate elections. Notably, dictators ascend to power through military and/or populist violence, like coups d’état and magnicide. Among the reckonings that US Americans encountered the days following the riots was the idea that their country had been relegated beside those so-called “banana republics.” Indeed, the public display of violence brought about by a populist insurrection indicated a failure of the highest rank. In this essay, I ask: “What are the implications of treating violence seriously as a rhetorical event?” I suggest that referring to the United States as a “banana republic” due to populist violence against sacrosanct, democratic institutions requires that US Americans open themselves to the possibility of unexceptionalism, a recognition that—like a medicine—few are willing to stomach. I offer the idea that Donald Trump is the first Latin American president of the United States, and, in turn, that the United States has opened itself to a vulnerability whose damage is unknowable. To do so, I revisit two works by Jacques Derrida: Autoimmunity (2003), an interview where he describes the paradox of post-9/11 counterterrorist violence as autoimmunity, or, how organisms attack themselves in a quasi-suicidal fashion; and Plato's Pharmacy (1968), where he demonstrates an approach to unveiling the unseen ideological traces that haunt particular words. I ask: what is the unseen, terroristic force concealed by the claim that the United States is a banana republic? I explore the Capitol riots as a new “major event” (a televised moment playing on loop and accompanied by specific phrases), where a new type of terrorist uses state-sanctioned freedoms to inflict violence upon itself. I then draw from Chilean poets to provide scholars a lesson on the role of violence in the forming of national identity.