The Other Heading of America: Derrida and Emerson on the Future of an Illusion

Abstract

I. THE NEW AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Over past half-century, American Studies has departed from romantically inclined reception of its canonical authors, and moved towards ideologically entrenched rejection of American idealism. According to Richard Rorty's stark assessment of this situation in Achieving Our Country (1998), New Left, or what he calls School of Resentment, has become a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left, rather than Left which dreams of achieving our (35). He traces utopian aspirations in American letters from Walt Whitman to John Dewey, both of whom he describes as anti-absolutists who nevertheless managed to retain romantico-pragmatic faith in America. He claims they viewed the United States as opportunity to see ultimate in finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and nonhuman (17). He explains, wanted that utopian America to replace God as unconditional object of desire. They wanted struggle for social justice to be country's animating principle, nation's soul (18). Critics of New Left, however, at least according to Rorty's polemical account, have not only dispensed with utopian dreams of past, they have lost all hope for future of their country. He observes, associate American patriotism with endorsement of atrocities: importation of African slaves, slaughter of Native Americans, rape of ancient forests, and Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists (7). Donald Pease, founding figure and leading proponent of New American Studies, would seem to fit Rorty's bill. In his recent book, The New American Exceptionalism (2009), he even suggests, might be said to begin when country becomes patriotic fiction for its (166). (1) Such reduction of patriotism to bellicosity hardly does justice to twin phenomena in question, yet this does seem to be grand gesture of his magisterial case study of American fantasy life from Cold War to present. Offering Lacanian account of of real that was visited upon American people on September 11, 2001, Pease remarks, crises of magnitude of 9/11 are always accompanied by mythologies that attempt to reconfigure them within frames of reference that would generate imaginary resolutions to these crises.... [M]yths give closure to traumatizing historical events by endowing them with moral significance (156). The trauma of 9/11 figures as yet another instantiation of what he calls primal of American Exceptionalism: catastrophic site of interpretation so devastating for imagination that it not take place except through traumatizing displacement of all other representable spaces (17). This mythological moment produces surplus fantasy of an inaccessible place that could only be accessed retroactively, which symbolizes lost plenitude of that never existed. Pease explains that events like 9/11 trigger obsessive compulsion to retreat from scene of disaster and back into fantasized womb. The Bush administration simply borrowed tools of trade provided by Cold War romanticists--most notably myth of Virgin Soil, which effaced atrocities committed by early settlers, and thus secured for American people illusion of their radical innocence--in order to help institutionalize Homeland Security State. Pease provides brilliant genealogy of various permutations this national mythology has undergone over past four centuries, but he does so only to arrive at disheartening conclusion that by time of 9/11, America had already lost whatever moral higher ground it may have wished to recuperate from out of wreckage of its formerly glorious but always already fabricated virginity. The apparently Rortyian end result of his psychoanalysis of national state fantasy is that American dream is only ideological mystification of radical evil of human condition; American Exceptionalism is synonymous with history of genocide, slavery, and oppression; and American patriotism means little else besides love of war. …