‘I’m afraid of Americans’ 
David Bowie

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the grief that seizes upon us – including the manic turns around an object slipping away – as emanating from mortal and irretrievable entities other than human loss. The painfully divested homeland (or, closer to Celan, the circumscribed sphere of arid Unbelonging) as it spins away, craters our being. We mourn, Freud writes, a country, indicating a sense of bereavement that impounds one’s steadiness just as fiercely as a friend to whose vanishing destiny we remain bound. – Or, stricken and stalled, we suffer an inability to mourn, when not speed-barraging through denial. Loss of country, whether by violence or steady erosion, riding the winds of ‘something rotten’ on which Shakespeare trained his thought, has the destructuring effect of releasing the hold of a provisional identity and fragile point of anchorage. Fortinbras asks what attaches us to country, an inch of sectioned land over which mortals fight in tensed blindness. Nowadays, the largely illusory strings of attachment to what is still understood as bearing nation-state qualities, if under post-national realignments, make us question with renewed urgency how once powerful strongholds turn against themselves, blowing themselves up, and how they manage their autoimmune responses or revert to the suicidal temptation. Here we draw a lesson from Flaubert: some suicides are ugly, botched and nearly senseless, and of long duration. Neither stung by Empedocles nor maimed by Werther or Mishima, but closer to the ravaging of Sylvia Plath, they leave nothing to retrieve, not even a ritualistic flag of mortality.

With unhinged US-America in view, I try to understand how a robust if deeply flawed nation’s ideals (however distorted from the start-gate and mendaciously promulgated), have been beaten down, in part by avoidable forces and the flouted abandonment of basic principles of institutional structures, figures and controls, as well as by unconscious currency and religious zealotry, or whatever historical binds continue to hold the national subject despite discerning detachment. Forced to witness violence perpetrated upon neighboring bodies and institutions under the command of the miscreant horde of horror-clowns, America has become ‘unrecognizable’, yet perhaps reduced to its essence, swaggering under a dangerously accelerated self-understanding that only appeared to lay low in partial latency, as though it had cleared the table of White Supremacist ignominy on which the country was grown. To shift registers momentarily, America has modified the terms of its being-toward-death.

Under the convulsive revival of white supremacy, never entirely subdued, the ravenous power-holders rally around dulled fictions of renewal, a cluster of tribal impulses framed by a faltering sovereignty and levels of Kafkan greed that have created, with dialectical finesse, the emaciated figure of the Hunger Artist, starved by insatiable need. The way that America feeds itself should not be foreign to inquiry – on junk food, Germanic frankfurters and hamburgers, French fries superseded by ‘freedom fries’, narcotics, medial plug-in machines, overdoses of hatred, and large portions of ‘tiny countries’ about which Hannah Arendt writes. Donald Trump’s flaunted consumption of fast food, his raptorial collection of gilded trophies and even his television-binging expenditure should not be left out of the portrait of the narcissistic insatiate. He is the ever-bloating despot who cannot purge – or whom we have, in crucial blockage, failed to purge. Ever since the setting supplied by gastronome Nietzsche, with a little help from Plato and Freud, the culinary habit is on the table of politicized culture. In any case, it serves as a root of Trump’s populism, pumped on what he guzzles and snarfs, as well as on his phobic refusals, including the French-accented menu to which Nietzsche strategically switched when purging, for his part and preference, a Germanic cuisine. Let us push away from the table, however, understanding that it clues us into types of introjection and predatory assimilation.

In a recent book, devoted to what Lacan calls the symptax that characterizes ‘America’, my principal aim, in fact, is to probe, by psychoanalytic measure, the degree to which America has selected from philosophical prompts the peculiar shape of its crash and burn sites.¹ My analysis includes the chronic disavowal of European roots, African ancestry, and other defeats on which an egregiously destructive run is calibrated in this day. To the extent that I still have a grip on the internal urgencies of thinking through American turns and tropes, it has become necessary, among other critical considerations, to review the inescapable field of annoying aporias. Cast in the light of a speculative history, the work of mourning that has America as its object can align with a small but purposeful aerial view in this iteration, with the metonymic precision of Freud’s attaching the grammar of flirtation to the country, something I did not address in the book: at one point, America enacts the serious/non-serious grazing of an alterity that bears a new fold of desire, a self-cancelling relation to the world that merely flirts with essence and the traditional particulars of national solidity. To score the point of the rapid turnover of identities, Freud describes a moment in his treatment of obsessional neurosis by recalling trucks that commonly carry and displace entire houses on American highways. The figure of technological uprootedness earns a high grade, demonstrating a capacity to switch up identity and substance, disturbing a notion of groundedness connected to place and the mystique of Heimat, replete with homegrown tropologies. Americans can leave home on a dime, stashing a formerly worn identity. They surf on displacement, being surface dancers with a hankering for superficial if transitory attachment. Hence the overload playlists thematizing being-on-the-road-again and filmic archives that obsessively catalogue chases and getaway automobility – the mobile mark of autos, a self’s rollout of freedom and its cued up escape routes. At some points, Nietzsche hitches a ride with such a view of American breeziness in the face of historical burdening, the looming threat of tradition under which Europeans have been slowed down in the realization of breakout fantasies.

In addition to the inescapable psychoanalytic frame, my reflection was stimulated by Heidegger’s censure of America, the premises of which remained uninterrogated by the thinker and his commentators. Tracking his repudiation of America, and his ability to recruit Rilke’s hypercompliance in declaring America a monstrosity, Heidegger’s unrestrained hostility became part of a symptom-formation of the philosophical order that required careful analysis, sizing the standoff between German and American self-appropriation and a flair for overdetermination. At the time, I had been reading Musil’s essay, ‘The German as Symptom’, while looking at the USA as an extreme outpost of Western metaphysics, an intrusive blight on planetary articulations underscoring the precarity of global planning committees. Some of these thoughts emerged before the re-election of Donald Trump. The felt necessity for a study of this sort rolled out on the traumatic tremors of a nihilistic disclosure, not far from the corrosive edges of voided valuations that we Germanists associate with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). ‘America’ profiled for Heidegger the technological overdrive, a spirit-drained stronghold shunned by the gods. Marked by their withdrawal, Greek-infused ‘Europe’ had remembered the gods and their emissaries, had houses in which the deities still dwelled. America, by contrast, switched on enormous disposal machinery, creating vacant lots and dreary housing developments of soulless profusion. Here I follow Heidegger’s play of quotation marks, switching up the valence of ‘spirit’ tracked by Derrida. Whatever, Heidegger is hardly in a position to prescribe sacred remembrance, even if he more or less cajoled Hölderlin to co-sign the lease on god-soaked sanctuaries. Still, something about America calls out a stripped-bare money grind – at once godless and in excess of God’s replacement parts, playing out the exaggerated encroachment of a specific type of Christianity and the rapacity of its annexation of Judaity. In Freudian terms the overfocus on money exposed an excremental excess, a problem whose development I direct to urethral sadism. The MAGA people tend to dream in excrement currencies; they are diapered and incontinent, as was exhibited recently by S. Bannon peeing on himself – and everyone else...

1. America: The Troubled Continent of Thought, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2024. ‘The American as Symptom’ is a revised version of the Preface to the French edition (Editions Klincksieck, forthcoming) of the collection Critique de la politique, directed by Michèle Cohen-Halimi.