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ABSTRACT
This essay considers the relationship between the prophet and the charlatan, particularly as they figure in the contemporary American political landscape. It argues that at moments of democratic political crisis these figures arise and reveal the vacancy of sovereignty within the democratic model. The essay treats Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man along with Jacques Derrida’s writings on democracy and the apocalyptic tone as resources in this endeavor. It considers as well why recent worries over the status of facts in the era of “fake news” have led to critiques of deconstruction.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sarah Hammerschlag is Associate Professor of Religion, Literature and Visual Culture, Philosophy of Religions and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018).
Notes
1 “My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions utter lying divinations,” Ezekiel 13:9. “This is what the Lord almighty says: ‘Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you; they fill you with false hopes,’” Jeremiah 23:16.
2 On prophetic rhetoric in the American sphere see Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt and Shulman, American Prophecy.
3 Robin Bates, “Trump as Melville’s Confidence Man,” http://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/trump-as-melvilles-confidence-man/, August 15, 2016.
4 Judith Thurman, “Philip Roth E-mails on Trump,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump.
5 Douglas Perry, “How can we truly understand Donald Trump? Philip Roth says Melville has the Answer,” The Oregonian, January 25, 2017. https://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2017/01/how_can_we_truly_understand_do.html.
6 “Pour l’écrivain Philip Roth, Trump est « juste un charlatan, » La Liberation, January 23, 2017. http://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/pour-lecrivain-philip-roth-trump-est-juste-un-charlatan_56537/.
7 “There is disagreement about its author’s intentions, its title character’s identity and motives, its structure, the relation of parts to the whole and even whether it amounts to a whole.” Melville, The Confidence Man, 255. See also Norton Critical edition: Melville, The Confidence Man.
8 Ibid., 251.
9 Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” 60.
10 Ibid., 45.
11 Ibid., 51.
12 Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” 30.
13 Melville, The Confidence Man, 243.
14 Ibid., 76.
15 Derrida, Rogues, 141.
16 Ibid., 118
17 Ibid., 25.
18 “To Breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?” Nietzsche, Geneaology of Morals, 57.
19 Although Derrida did not himself write about The Confidence Man, Peggy Kamuf supplies a Derridean reading of the novel using Derrida’s Given Time as her theoretical source. For Kamuf the key parallel between American politics and the novel stems from the function of credit that makes both the fictional enterprise and the political enterprise operative. See Kamuf, “Melville’s Credit Card,” in The Division of Literature, 167–222.
20 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 339.
21 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:438.
22 Derrida, Rogues, 121.
23 Derrida, On the Name, 28.
24 Derrida, A Critical Reader.
25 Derrida, Rogues, 92.
26 Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 10.
27 Kamuf in “Melville’s Credit Card,” develops this idea of credit as the theme of The Confidence Man and as the nature of fiction more generally. Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 167–222.
28 Derrida, Gift of Death & Literature in Secret, 157.
29 Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 11.
30 “Within that fictional structure, therefore, one may find inscribed the history of an institution that draws on the line of credit opened in Melville’s name and beyond, perhaps, in the name of a certain American literature as a literature of the self.” Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 172.
31 Derrida, Gift of Death, 156.
32 See Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets, 150–3 for a lengthier discussion of this material.
33 Melville, The Confidence Man, Chapter IV.
34 Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 172.
35 Derrida, On the Name, 31.
36 21.5, 4.
37 21.5, 17.
38 Derrida, Memoires for Paul De Man, 18.
39 Carole Cadwalladr, “Interview: Daniel Dennett,” The Guardian, February 12, 2017.
40 See for example Helen Pluckrose, “How ‘French Intellectuals’ Ruined the West.”
41 For a treatment of the impact of this fear on politics and for an alternative account of how political judgment must proceed without epistemological grounding, See Zerrilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom and Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment.
42 Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political,” 153.
43 Ibid., 160–1.
44 See Honig, “Declarations of Independence,” 97–113. I’m grateful to the anonymous reader who suggested this essay to me as a helpful source for my argument.
45 Melville, The Confidence Man, 14.
46 Ibid., 421.
47 Ibid., 447–52.
48 Ibid., 447.
49 Ibid., 477.
50 Ibid., 349.
51 Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” 279.
52 Derrida, “The Time is Out of Joint,” 26.
53 Ibid., 26.
54 See Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment, 17–27.