The Work of Trauma: Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson on the Border of Ridicule

Abstract

M[argaret Fuller] to C[aroline Sturgis]. could not but laugh at your catalogue of things you must not have--nothing striped, diamonded, or (above all things) square. That is driving me to close quarters, I think. Dualism. I see but one key to mysteries of human condition, but one solution to old knot of Fate, Freedom, & fore-knowledge;--the propounding, namely, of consciousness. --A page from Emerson's journal JACQUES DERRIDA VISITED VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY IN 1994 FOR A PLENARY discussion of his Specters of Marx. Redressing those celebrating death of Marxism, Derrida spoke about specters of to which we return in an effort to achieve of history, emancipation. (1) Cleverly comparing end of philosophy to this matter, Derrida suggested that his thinking had never been a celebration of end of philosophy or its close, as some have averred, but its turning. Thus any consideration of that he would undertake would not be a consideration of of history, or its close, but its turning. This nutshell description of Derrida's lecture is as ridiculously brief as it is designed to feature one of its most provocative aspects: alignment of Marx's desire (to wrest a realm of freedom from realm of fate) with work of mourning. Derrida's determination to keep word emancipation within realm of the event is striking and brings to mind an essay Emerson composed while he was mourning Margaret Fuller's death in 1850. (2) Believing Fuller's loss would have terrible consequences for a country endeavoring to wrest a realm of freedom from realm of fate, Emerson transformed that loss by endorsing Fuller's comparative analytic style. Emerson's famous invocation in Fate of double consciousness--where one shifts nimbly from one perspective to another like a circus performer--is figure for this important theoretical endorsement. (3) By associating work of with work of mourning in his scene before U. S. intellectuals, Derrida aptly conjured an essential line of American history already haunting Emerson. (4) Fuller's spectrality in Emerson's Fate tells a tale of surprising and sometimes overwhelming possibilities she came to represent for those attempting to match emancipatory rhetoric of U. S. culture with practice of everyday life. (5) For Fuller--one of our earliest and greatest comparativists--the task of translator became operative model for task of and interpretation throughout her career. Her model of is highly interactive, forming a strategy whereby one nimbly shifts between frames of reference. Fuller's interest in translation guided her thinking through many cultural issues because she saw that a hermeneutic maneuver deriving its authority from a struggle for mastery over meaning could have violent historical consequences. As she toured this country and prepared for her European visit, translation became less a conquest of meaning, a mastery that subdues and potentially annihilates an alien set of values, than proliferation of meaning, of everything that might be found when new values open to view within both languages. Because Fuller brought this philosophical focus to bear on issues as diverse as vanishing Americans and European socialism, her work provides an interesting precursor to that of Marx, a reading before Marx that is proleptic, far less systematic but also less restrictive because it is always attentive to prolific turns of translation in a bulky array of manifestations. (6) In her Tribune work, Fuller introduced work of and Engels in 1845 to a still larger audience by translating an article about them from an immigrant newspaper. Fuller's decision to translate from Deutsche Schnellpost is typical of her constant attempt to include a broad array of cultural and intellectual materials in her analysis and steady documentation of transforming social conditions. …