Emerson’s Operative Mood: Religious Sentiment and Violence in the Early Works

JASON BERGER Emerson’s Operative Mood: Religious Sentiment and Violence in the Early Works UR RALPH WALDO EMERSON STILL HAS TWO FACES. THE FIRST, REPRESENV_ /tative of the early works, is portrayed in an 1849 New-York Daily Tribune cartoon of Emerson swinging on an inverted rainbow,1 a mood reified by F. O. Matthiessen’s claim that Emerson was a Neoplatonic opti­ mist who epitomized the wishful longing of the “optative mood.”2 The second, representative of his 1850s turn toward political radicalism, is seen in Emerson’s enthusiastic declaration while visiting the Charlestown Navy Yard, echoing out of time, it seems, from the lips of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, “Ah! Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”3 I suggest that these two Emersons share the same conceptual horizon—that the disengaged transcendental eyeball Emerson peddling visions of the Oversoul and the gun-toting, bloodlusting Emerson collecting donations for John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry evince an important and unac­ knowledged structural continuity. The perspective I present in this essay thus contributes to contemporary scholarship that seeks new ways of thinking about an “other Emerson.” In their collection by the same name, Branka Arsic and Cary Wolfe suggest that they intend to follow the “vertiginous sense of (dis)location invoked . . . by Emerson” and aim to “induce a similar kind of dislocation” in their audience.4 By arguing that the explicit political engagement of Emerson’s middle period (late 1840s through 1860s) is a logical development of his earlier thinking rather than a marked departure from it,5 I hope to create a 1. See the 6 February 1849 issue. 2. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age ofEmerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3. 3. Qtd. in Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and The American Re­ naissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 46. 4. Arsic and Wolfe, “Introduction,” in The Other Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), ix. 5. Recent scholars who, to various degrees, portray a definitive political turn in Emerson’s SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 477 478 JASON BERGER similarly productive disturbance, offering a picture of Emerson’s brand of political subjectivity that radically departs from Enlightenment and Ro­ mantic models ofpolitical ethics that continue to shape modern democratic assumptions about identity. Several decades of scholarship have detailed Emerson’s embrace of reli­ gious violence in the run up to the Civil War. These studies leave relatively unexplored the question ofwhether this embrace involved a real turn away from Emerson’s earlier thinking on the subject. Given the predominant narratives of Emerson’s life that stress his secularizing and liberalizing trajectory—and considering his abrupt return to religious and illiberal pro­ nouncements around slavery in the 1840s and 1850s—it is easy to conclude that there was in fact a significant discontinuity.6 This essay, however, re­ turns to Emerson’s early work to argue that he maintained a core commit­ ment to “religious sentiment” that contained within it the structural means and justifications for explicit forms of historical violence. A reexamination of Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason reveals that Emerson’s writing is philosophi­ cally consistent in its insistence on the human subject as “operative” in form and function. Shifting our critical and conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with a reli­ gious and universal Other, or what scholars of Emerson, following Emer­ son’s own terminology, often term the “impersonal,” as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to specific social and histori­ cal landscapes.7 Indeed, in her discussion of Emerson’s conception of moods, Branka Arsic departs from previous scholars by depicting the way thought abound. See, for instance, Len Gougeon’s Virtue’s Hero (1990), Michael Ziser’s “Emersonian Terrorism: John Brown, Islam, and Postsecular Violence” (2010), Donald Pease’s “‘Experience,’ Antislavery, and the Crisis of Emersonianism” (2010), and Larry Reynolds’s Righteous Violence (2011). For studies that link...