Abstract
This article considers Trump as an example of “vile sovereignty,” a concept Michel Foucault put forward in the mid 1970s to describe “the exercise of power through the explicit disqualification of the person who wields it” (2003b: 35)—a “childish discourse” that disqualifies the speaker at the very moment that they are being appealed to as a figure of authority (36). We argue that this concept helps illuminate contemporary US politics, where Trump’s carnivalesque flaunting of political decorum and morality paradoxically seem to buttress the power of his Republican Party. Building upon our theorization of the role vile sovereignty has played in recent Canadian politics (Orpana & Mauro 2013/14), our contribution considers Trumpist popular representations, focusing on Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019). The film speaks directly to the cultural and racial politics of an exhausted progressive neoliberalism, and offers a neo-populist vision in response—both markers, we argue, of contemporary vile sovereignty. From there we turn to the conjuncture and consider vile sovereignty as a Jamesonian “vanishing mediator” to a new legitimation of power: an authoritarian populism interested primarily in maintaining and extending planetary extractivism and in staving off attempts at the democratic socialization of energy production.
Highlights
Though initially presented as an idiosyncratic psychological tick, Fleck’s insuppressible laughter is revealed as the trace of hidden structures of privilege and social domination, indignities that Fleck is initially given to suffer subconsciously, as he is their very product
Fleck’s gradual awakening to these realities transform him into the Joker, after he becomes disillusioned by the two surrogate father figures that sustain his hopes for recognition, in the form of T.V. talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) and Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), who are symbolic of media and governing elites, respectively
If we recognize in the figure of the psychiatrist—both in her role, as the long arm of the carceral state in an age of austerity, and in her social position as a professional, authoritative black woman—echoes of the progressive neoliberal bloc that supported both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Fleck’s dispatching of this figure marks him as representative of sections of the white, masculinist precariat whose distrust of contemporary, liberal democratic politics has helped propel the rise to power of populist figures like Donald Trump
Summary
Throughout much of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, it was a driving ambition of Marvel comic book mogul Stan Lee for his company’s properties to find mass audiences on television and the silver screen (Howe 2012). The new confinement of (middle-class) women to the reproductive sphere, and the postwar racial formation of whiteness to include historically racialized groups from southern and Eastern Europe, but redouble the exclusion of Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous people, were all part of the postwar settlement to which Trump’s borrowed slogan refers.8 It is to this tower of cards, decimated by decades of neoliberal financialization, that Trump’s selective nostalgia refers; his political career depends on his projecting the fantasy of being a neo-feudal, biopolitical “strong man” who, through personal skill and unorthodox methods, can tame and rationalize the global forces that his supporters blame for the waning of the Fordist dream. That imaginary relation to power is seductive—it is the film’s ideological ruse, as we have argued—but by subscribing to it, as Fleck demonstrates, we become clowns, fighting ghosts from a badly-remembered past
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