Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Douglass, Autobiographies, 319. 2. Most famously, in the passage on slave songs reproduced from his 1845 narrative , Douglass designates no fewer than six positions from which the scene of slaves singing on allowance day might be viewed, ending with the impossible position of a spectator who, “in silence,” stands in the woods to “thoughtfully analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul” (My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 185). 3. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 185 (first quote), 319 (second quote). The beating of Douglass’s Aunt Esther is, as Saidiya Hartman notes, the most frequently cited and reproduced of these (see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3–4; see also Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther,” 141–65). 4. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Autobiographies, 18. 5. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 321–22. 6. Arendt, The Human Condition, 27–28. 7. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 82. 8. Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere”; Fliegelman, Declaring Independence ; Looby, Voicing America; Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality; Hill and Montag , Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere; Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; Warner, Letters of the Republic; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics; Castiglia, “Abolition’s Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth.” 9. See, in particular, Pease, Visionary Compacts; Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; and Castronovo, Necro Citizenship. 10. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 9 (Novak’s italics). 11. Ryan, Civic Wars, 8–9. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 14. 224 / notes 14. Ibid., 15. 15. Toqueville, Democracy in America, 60. 16. Ibid. 17. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 28. 18. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. Schmitt’s account of sovereignty is emphatically a defense of the power that decides upon exception and declares the emergency suspension of law. Written in the early 1920s, Political Theology has often been read through the lens of Schmitt’s later participation in the Nazi government after the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to Schmitt’s defense, Foucault, Agamben , and Derrida all write against the principle of a singular or unified sovereign power. As Foucault argues, “We should be looking for a new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 40). 19. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 20. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 48–49. Nancy Ruttenburg’s Democratic Personality effectively undercuts Schmitt’s characterization of democracy’s equation of the people’s voice with God’s as a simple “aftereffect” of European political theologies . Uncovering the roots of democracy’s invocation of invisible and divine power in Puritan theological debates and spectral evidence theory, Ruttenburg then traces its persistence in U.S. democratic discourse into the nineteenth century, in particular through the form and voice of the American novel (see Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality , esp. 180–89). 21. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 36–46. See also Foucault, Ethics, 59–61. 22. Ibid., 254. 23. Ibid., 259 24. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 142. 25. Ibid., 7–9. 26. Ibid., 9–10. Paul Downes characterizes the ambivalent place of “bare life” in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as “an ongoing confrontation between the discourse of the subject outside and before the law, the subject of the Bill of Rights, and the subject of the law’s structures and concealments” in the Constitution (see Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature, 10). 27. For examples of what Derrida terms the “autoimmune” response, ranging from the suspension of the 1992 elections in Algeria to the post–9/11 United States and the homeland security state, see Derrida, Rogues, 33–34; on the circularity of sovereignty, see ibid., 13. 28. See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 17. Lefort links this empty place to his assertion that power in Tocqueville’s account of U.S. democracy belongs to no one, and contrasts this model with the monarchic embodiment of power. 29. Tocqueville is rather insistent on this point, repeatedly adding “in America” and “there” to his account of the sovereignty of the people (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 58–60). 30. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, 184. 31. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 241–42. Novak follows historians like Morton Keller in considering Lincoln’s presidency as heralding the emergence of a larger, more [3.145.131.238...