What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy? At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone – often forcing them to show anger, anxiety or desire towards what they considered a challenge or a threat.
This book provides a mapping of this complex relationship between America and philosophy through a series of examples drawn from a wide range of authors, from Freud and Heidegger to Adorno, Derrida and many others. It also examines the way American thinkers themselves have imported, used and abused philosophical views coming from Europe, often transforming them into something other than what they were. Is then philosophy an anti-American discourse, or America an anti-philosophical country? Or is it, rather, that America provokes philosophy from a place where its own history affirms the impossibilities, paradoxes and contradictions of philosophy itself?
At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. “America” is a syntagm for violence, but this violence might very well be different than we thought.
Industry Reviews
"In her vivid, inimitable style, melding the colloquial with the abstract, the German with the American, Avital Ronell explores both America as a test site for philosophy and the status of the idea of America -- in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, and Cavell -- in reflections that put pressure on the fate of philosophy today."
Jonathan Culler, Cornell University
"MAGA (“make America great again”) is not just a formula invented by recent Rightist populists – Trump and his allies brought out what was lurking in the background all the time: the nasty aggressive aspect of American identity. This dark aspect was described in hundreds of books and articles, but Avital Ronell’s new book does something unique: it analyzes “America” as a philosopheme, as a complex network of philosophical presuppositions. So we will look in vain for the usual suspects in her book: no well-known racist nationalists and imperialists but big critical names from Emerson to Cavell, from Freud to Derrida, who all detected something amiss in American identity. The magic of the book is in how it combines the highest subtle theoretical debates with perspicuous observations about daily life, like the oversized trucks transporting homes which indicate a profoundly American notion of permanent displacement. In short, Ronell does what only top philosophers can do: she enables us to detect the taste of philosophy in the most conspicuous features of our daily lives."
Slavoj Zizek
