Political Necrophilia

1. Thinking against Freedom

FREE’ DOM, n. A state of exemption from the power or control of another . . . exemption from slavery.

—Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language

Setting his sights on an intellectual position that would announce U.S. cultural independence from European tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson prescribed a revolutionary, if not iconoclastic, nominalism: “Free should the scholar be, free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom.”¹ This desire, for a citizen whose speech is unpolluted by historical precedent and whose thoughts are unfettered by tacit ideological assumptions, led the author of “The American Scholar” (1837) on a well-worn search for a linguistic utopia where freedom could be mined—theoretically but not experientially—in a pure state. Almost a decade earlier, Noah Webster embarked on a similar journey to claim a pristine political vocabulary. The project of his famous lexicon is, as his title suggests, to create An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) that will cleanse the citizen’s tongue of foreign inflection. Despite such intentions to liberate “freedom,” the American Dictionary fails to achieve ahistoricity, its entries burdened with connotations peculiar to U.S. institutions and racial history. This paradox that seeks to define freedom freely, without regard to prior context, does more than enjoin Emerson’s scholar to articulate politics as a tautology: Such constraint at the level of the word reveals the material conditions of a freedom that is supposed to have neither history nor context.

The abiding negativity that permeates Emerson’s and Webster’s statements—each searches for a “freedom from”—echoes with the struggle of liberalism to divest political vocabulary of history.² But promulgating an innocent freedom comes under the purview of the nation-state. Rather than fall back on English authors, Webster trusts in his countryman John Adams to provide an American definition: “There can be no free government without a democratical branch in the constitution.” The American Dictionary spells out a federal pedagogy, establishing freedom as isomorphic to the juridical origins of the state. “Free” becomes demonstrable by a state memory that does not bear the weight of antecedence simply because it is believed that history has not yet debauched America, that political decay has not outmoded Adams’s meaning. A subsequent example garnered from Chaucer is thus reported as “Not in use,” while appearances of “free” in John Dryden are made cumbersome by associations with crime and “slavish conditions.” Although Adams provides a virtuous context for freedom, other illustrations from U.S. situations are invoked only to be rejected, to say what freedom is not: “Not enslaved; not in a state of vassalage or dependence” defines the adjective free; as a verb, free means “to manumit; to release from bondage; as, to free a slave.” Even though Webster collects thirty-five definitions of free and freedom to give his citizen-reader plenty of linguistic liberty, his list nonetheless freights this ideal with overdetermined referents, including “fetters,” “restraint,” “servitude,” and “bondage.” The American tongue—despite Emerson’s injunction—was hardly at liberty to propose its own definition of freedom. Harmony between the lexical and political senses breaks down, signaling that the messy materiality of history has intruded after all. Citizen, scholar, and lexicographer all find that freedom is an unfree concept, alternately elaborated and confined by the untranscended particularities of national culture.

Thinking against freedom negates a lingua franca that simultaneously empties freedom of cultural specificity and ensconces it in a nationalist framework. This negative genealogy works against prescription even as it privileges a material register too often ignored or derided by definitions of freedom—the terror of the particular. Excavation of material histories buried by modern citizenship, as Marx implies, attends to the repressed contexts of political systems: “In democracy the formal principle is at the same time the material principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of the general and the particular.”³ Within this dictum, however, aesthetics intrudes on politics, committing Marx to an ultimate notion of “true unity&rdquo...