Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America

George Cotkin. Existential America. Johns Hopkins University Press 2003. 368. $63.50

Oh God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.'
Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on.'
God say, 'No.' Abe say, 'What?'
God say, 'You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run.'
Well Abe says, 'Where do you want this killin' done?'
God says, 'Out on Highway 61.'

Bob Dylan

A common error of intellectual generations is to think the world new because they are new in the world. This is especially likely to occur when a period that had been marked by several decades of harmony across generations – 'Comrades, let us pursue our common research projects!' – comes to its inevitable and Oedipal end. This is the time when T.S. Eliot's priest, grown old and feeble in the Sacred Wood, must be killed by a young challenger in order that this more vigorous priest may celebrate the Mysteries for new generational cohorts. And yet, one day, he will also enter the autumn of his body, be slain, and, like his predecessors, be forgotten. New generations will thrive for a time under a new priest and again find a new world all before them. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper. Et in saecula saeculorum.

In our day, for example, we have been living through a period of consensuality among generational cohorts in the humanities that began after old priests in different disciplines received their quietus in the early 1970s. 'No foundations! No absolutes!' contemporary placards shout, celebrating our postmodern alertness to 'contingency' or the 'construction' of all manner of phenomena. However, our favourite concepts may not quite be our gifts to the world. Contingency, non-existent foundations, and universal 'constructibility' have, in fact, preceded us, and not so very long ago. Fortunately, though, true scholarship is rarely caught up in the generational dramas occurring in sacred woods; and it is the scholar's job, when things have settled down, to jog our memories, as does George Cotkin in his account of existentialism in America, and to remind us of forgotten priests and the ways in which their preferred concerns may inform our own.

Unsatisfied, someone of post-1970 vintage may concede 'contingency,' for example, but still ask about 'absent presences' (or the reverse), those now-you-see-it-now-you-don't phenomena of the deconstructive cohort: were they not 'our gift to the world'? Only if one's concern is with texts rather than with a conception of consciousness or selfhood – Sartre's, for example, or Heidegger's – that flourished in the middle decades of the last century. An 'identity politics' critic may ask about her favourite bogeyman, 'essentialism.' Not so new, essentialism: dispatched long ago by existentialism. But the body, a busy supervisor of PhD dissertations asks, when so many students are writing about 'embodiment,' surely we have a new research area. Try again, paying attention to existentialism's kinship with the phenomenology of the body. Not even, feminists wonder, the terrible and constitutive 'gaze of the Other'? Especially not that!¹

What is new in the current employment of these classic concerns of existentialism is their subordination to the preference of contemporary academic criticism for texts and 'discourses' over consciousness and selfhood. Perhaps there is also a postmodern cheerfulness attaching to the new lives of those old terms, for existentialism was tremendously gloomy: Abraham and Isaac, and all that. Knowing that Abraham's anguish was textual, semiotic technologists now wish primarily to see how its 'meaning' was 'produced.'

For existentialism, 'texts' mattered less than individual persons, and thus everything turned on freedom, choice (usually in situations of extremity), death, and, of course, dread, that shadow cast by freedom. God was of little (direct) help, even when still around, and for many of the people Cotkin discusses he wasn't around. Nor could one rely...