An Anatomy of Empire

The jacket of William V. Spanos’ America’s Shadow tells us that the Vietnam War—specifically the tremendous labor of repression of that war by the American political and culture industry—stands at the center of his book. Certainly so. But even more central to this work, I would argue, is what the failure to consider the full implications of that war influences: the very possibility of resistance in our current historical occasion. The outlook for real social change is grim, according to Spanos, who characterizes the present moment as an “interregnum.” In previous works, such as The Errant Art of Moby Dick—The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies, Heidegger and Criticism, and The End of Education, Spanos brought to bear his distinct mode of cultural criticism: a combination of Heideggerian de-structive Seinsgeschichte (history of being) and Foucauldian genealogy. This combination has been the hallmark of Spanos’s contribution to critical inquiry. More than a clever recombination of intellectual resources, this linking of ostensibly incompatible elements from the work of two of the century’s most pivotal thinkers enables Spanos to develop a perceptual apparatus that not only confronts the limits of these thinkers themselves, but also exposes overlooked patterns of thought that obscure the supposedly radical critical inquiry of the present. In America’s Shadow, Spanos’ genealogy of the idea of America—an onto-logical derivation, he argues, of Roman Imperialism—offers what Foucault would have called a “counter-memory” to the established version handed down by conservatives and liberal humanists alike.

Given the customary academic impulse to incorporate new works along disciplinary lines, it is important to stress the assiduous manner in which America’s Shadow actively defies categorization as “theoretical,” “literary,” or “postcolonial” in focus (or even as a fashionable “inter-disciplinary” combination of each of these). Its search through multiple registers—current American politics, the event of Vietnam, American foundations in Puritanism, the Enlightenment’s reorganization of reality, the Roman colonization of Greek thinking—and its consideration of the efforts of scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Mary Louise Pratt, and Edward W. Said to come to terms with these shifting economies of reality, offers an act of criticism that defies classification. Resisting the enactment of an orthodoxy, America’s Shadow can best be thought of as an ontological archive of the current world order.

Retrieving crucial foundational shifts in history that determine the order of existence in our present marks the first aspect of this archival study of empire, or, to use Spanos’s term, “anatomy.” The second involves the interrogation of not only accepted discourses, but cutting-edge movements of critical thought as well, an aspect of scholarship that good cautious scholars take as a principal charge. In the work of Edward Said, for instance, Spanos traces a movement of thought that inadvertently leads to a major oversight in the field of postcolonial criticism empowered by Said’s insights. Fleshing out the influence of colonization along the full continuum of being, Spanos throws into relief the repercussions of Said’s emphasis on geopolitical imperialism and subsequent failure to give full weight to the ontological origins of occidental imperialism. This gesture enables Spanos to reveal the extent to which the relay of imperial ideologies is enabled by a centuries-long colonization of the notion of “truth” itself, a colonization governed by a logic of mastery that stems from Imperial Rome and that “derives from thinking being meta-ta-physica [“above,” “beyond,” or “outside” things in contextual, temporal flux].” Similarly, Spanos finds it highly disabling that critics have come to take Foucault’s emphasis on the period of the Enlightenment as evidence for concluding this moment in history to be a “mutation” in thinking resulting in Western Imperialism proper.” Consequently, postcolonial theory in general heedlessly contributes to a failure to consider the full jurisdiction of imperialism. The widespread impulse to emphasize the period of the Enlightenment as if it were the cradle of true imperial practices is...