The enemy, in comparison

By: Jose Luis Rico

There is war in the world. Right now. That is a thing that we know. It is quite easy to bet that, in
this very instant, somewhere near or far, a bunch of humans is storming into a house to end the
lives of fellow humans. We’ve watched the firing of long-range missiles that burst into flames on
TV. People have enemies. Peoples are willing to spend huge percentages of their national
budgets to reshape the inner structure of adversarial nations. We see bad things happening and
know there are many more that we don’t see, threats lurking somewhere in the globe, as if the
globe were a haunted house. We want to save ourselves. We drone the solutions to the problems.
No one listens. We drowse away.
In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak shouts a wake-up call, she snaps her fingers to
make us remember that, for all our rambling about “saving the planet”, we seem to be missing
sight of things: “The globe is on our computers. No one lives there” (72). Spivak is writing
against an instrumental or monetary view of the world, appealing to the actual bodily presence of
humans that are “here” with us. We are “intended towards” these humans (73), but we can’t see
them because of the myriad walls of the city and the thousands of miles that separate us.
Paradoxically, if you are close to humans, you can’t see them clearly either. Those faces that
stare at you with a hardened gleam in their eyes are also breathing, blood is circulating in their
veins, and you will never ever know what it is like inside their heads. Their minds are, in
Spivak’s terms, a “psychologically unavailable (metapsychological) apparatus” (76). What does
that have to do with war? Why swerve from the costly and intricate maneuverings of global
warfare to the elusive darkness of the psyche?
The objective of this essay is to glean a contemporary concept of the enemy, grounded in
the theory of cultural and literary comparison. The world dwells in the mind, even the material
world (as propounded by either Marx or Madonna) is a matter of figuration.1 In the world, there

1
Here, I’m following Philippe Descola’s essay “Modes of being and forms of predication”: “I argue that ‘what is
the case for us’ is not a complete and self-contained world waiting to be represented according to different

1
are humans who are not us and some of them are our enemies. What do we think we are allowed
do to them? What structures in the contemporary mind allow us to believe we can do those
horrible things to other humans? The hypothesis is that a specific notion of enemy will correlate
to a specific civilizational universal, both in the sense that my concept of the enemy will
condition my own civilizational universal and also that we construe enemies at least partially in
terms of what we believe they pursue, in terms of what we suppose their universal utopia to be.2
Furthermore, I believe the main factor to gauge is the expansive quality of that universal. That is,
when trying to understand figurations of enmity, the static, contractive, or expansive quality we
allot to our enemy’s universals will determine the degree of threat we perceive in them. It will
even determine if we regard them as enemies at all.
Two notes about the scope of the essay. The “we” that will be delved into is grounded in
a general notion of the Western subject, which is strictly a particular in the Hegelian sense, viz.,
not a human “in general” (not a universal idea) but also not a concrete individual (any person
with a social security number). By Western subject I mean a way of “worlding” (cf. Descola)
present to several degrees in millions of humans, an ontological regime that has spawned a
history and political-economical might,3 which some societies agree to consider their common
inheritance. Diagnosing the symptom of a whole chunk of humanity, using --as I will be using in
this text-- a few critical texts and in only a few pages, is certainly problematic. The chances of
erring are big and the reliability of synthetic thinking becomes questionable when so little
grounding is available for such a disproportionate enterprise.
My gamble is that, in using the expansiveness of the enemy’s utopia as the main factor in
diagnosing the whole structure of threatening otherness, we will be able to give a basic account
of the structure of Western relationality in general, in so far as the enemy is one of the founding

viewpoints, but, most probably, a vast amount of qualities and relations that can be actualized or not by humans
according to how ontological filters discriminate between environmental affordances” (272-273).

2
Descola frases this as an inner need for an ontological regime: “each of these modes of identification prefigures the
kind of collective that is suited to assembling within a common destiny the various types of beings that it
distinguishes” (278).

3
Again, Descola: “My conviction is that systems of differences in the ways humans inhabit the world are not to be
understood as byproducts of institutions, economic systems, sets of values, cultural patterns, worldviews, or the like;
on the contrary, the latter are the outcome of more basic assumptions as to what the world contains and how the
elements of this furniture are connected” (273).

2
components of any worldly4 consciousness. In this sense, we will be using this expansiveness as
the very specific Ansatzpunkt5 that will shed light over a wider set of questions.
The second note is that, along this text, we will be relying in mostly European philosophy
and critical theory, while at the same time broaching mostly U.S. anthropological examples. It
goes without saying that many other national histories could just as well serve for any inquiry
into the shortcomings, potentials, and paradoxes of Western enmity. And it would also be fairly
easy to bring up examples from peripheral cultures afflicted with the same pathologies. Our
choice is just a matter of convenience, and, in this, we follow several Americanists6 but also
thinkers from other parts of the world that find U.S. culture to be a particularly daunting strain of
Western worlding.7
We will proceed to divide the different kinds of inimical relationality into three types,
although it should be stressed that this is by no means an exhaustive account of this correlation
but only a heuristic typology to gain entry into a subject that is as elusive as pressing. The first
type reduces the enemy to a hindersome nothingness that will, of its own accord, be effaced from

4
Here, the reference is to Said’s use of the term worldliness in the sense of a circumstantial reality that the subject
can never strip himself from, and which is tantamount to the inescapability of class ideology, privilege, race,
historical vantage point, etc. Cf. “The Text, the World, and the Critic.”

5
In “Philology and Weltliteratur” Erich Auerbach explicates a method for gaining entry into large portions of the
world literary or cultural tradition, given that, as much as the injunction will always be to read more than we are
doing right now, there is not enough time to cover all the ground of a specific discipline. At the same time, fulfill the
duty of making “men conscious of themselves in their own history” can not be put off by the scholar. To this
objective, it is important to find an Ansatzpunkt: “The point of departure must be the election of a firmly
circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which
orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy.” (14)

6
In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter makes a similar case for his inquiry: “I choose
American history to illustrate the paranoid style only because I happen to be an Americanist, and it is for me a
choice of convenience. But the phenomenon is no more limited to American experience than it is to our
contemporaries. Notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international
capitalists, international Jews, or Communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern
history.” (6-7)

7
In Le virus libéral: La guerre permanente et l'américanisation du monde, Samir Amin portrays U.S. history as a
unique product of European endeavor, but in a sense opposite to the exceptionalism that characterizes most of
contemporary right-wing political thinking: “Vers la fin du XXe siècle un mal a frappé le monde. Tous n'en sont pas
morts, mais tous en furent atteints. On a donné le virus qui était à l'origine de l'épidémie le nom de ‘virus libéral’.
Celui-ci avait fait apparition vers le XVIe siècle à l'intérieur du triangle Paris-Londres-Amsterdam. Les symptômes
par lesquels il se manifestait alors paraissaient anodins et les hommes (que le virus frappait de préférence aux
femmes), non seulement s'y accoutumèrent et développèrent les anticorps qu'il fallait, mais surent même tirer parti
du tonus renforcé qu'il provoquait. Mais le virus traversa l'Atlantique et trouva dans la secte de ceux qui le
colportèrent un terrain favorable, démuni d'anticorps et de ce fait donnait à la maladie qu'il provoquait des formes
extrêmes. "

3
the landscape of existence, even if the self --which deems itself impervious to any kind of
othering-- has to bother to pull the trigger. The second type conceives the enemy as an opponent
whose defeat allows us to collect a tribute which we then might offer to our gods, but which
demands that we immediately abandon the podium in a pact of nonaggression: repetition will be
infinite, the hybris must be curtailed. The third type perceives the other as an element exogenous
to the self but also acknowledges the psychic presence of an Other that destabilizes the
monolithic notion of selfhood. In every case, we will underscore the comparative aspect of
enmity as a drive to assert oneself in relation to another.

Negated otherness in the Age of the Comparison

Comparison seemed to be in the air in the German states in the 19th century. In a conversation
with Johann Peter Eckerman, in January 1827, Goethe called poetry a common good and assured
no people or language had the claim to the supreme mastery over it. It was time for World
Literature. In 1848 Marx and Engels preached the end of narrow-mindedness and particularism,
brought about by the circulation of literature across national divides, following the lead of
merchandises. It was time for World Literature. In 1878 Nietzsche diagnosed the outward
restlessness of men and the weakening of the roots and traditions that kept Europeans attached to
land and religion. It was the Age of Comparison. It was the moment of summoning cultures from
all around to build a virtual, exchange-based version of the Babel Tower.
There was a clear sense, however, of what civilization had the upper hand in this
anagnorisis; what society was single-handedly turning the tide. In his analysis of the bourgeoisie,
Marx states that “by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely
facilitated means of communication, [bourgeois society] draws all, even the most barbarian,
nations into civilization” (477). For Nietzsche, in his time all cultures, moralities, and
philosophies of the world were standing side by side at the disposal of the freedom-loving spirit,
but they were there as if before an execution squad:
Now an enhanced aesthetic sensibility will come to a definitive decision between all these forms offering
themselves for comparison: most of them - namely all those rejected by this sensibility - it will allow to die
out. There is likewise now taking place a selecting out among the forms and customs of higher morality
whose objective can only be the elimination of the lower moralities. This is the age of comparison!
(Human, All Too Human, 24)

4
These were not only the musings of German intellectuals eager for spiritual renovation. This
bringing into civilization of the lower moralities and cultures was a concrete military endeavor,
that several European countries carried out during a few centuries amidst a relatively stable
continental peace, which in turn allowed them to picture a bright future of liberal, economically-
driven, enlightened edification. In The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm sketches this
unquestioned dominion in the sphere external to Christian Europe:
Between 1815 and 1914 no major power fought another outside its immediate region, although aggressive
expeditions of imperial or would-be imperial powers against weaker overseas enemies were, of course,
common. Most of these were spectacularly one-sided fights, such as the U.S. wars against Mexico (1846-
48) and Spain (1898) an the various campaigns to extend the British and French colonial empires [...] Even
the most formidable opponents of modern states, their arsenals increasingly filled with an overwhelmingly
superior technology of death, could only hope, at best, to postpone the inevitable retreat. (23)

Comparison had to happen overseas but yielded compelling results. The enemy’s retreat was the
measure of Europe’s self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung, the basic attribute of life, according
to Nietzsche). This had been happening, ever since the beginning of the modern era, more than
300 years ago by then.8
After the signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620, the territories of North America
became a harbor for Europeans seeking religious freedom and economic opportunities. The
common conception was that of the rising of a theater curtain over an empty, fruitful land, where
weak Untermenschen slugged along awaiting for the arrival of history:
Of America and its grade of civilization, especially in Mexico and Peru, we have information, but it
imports nothing more than that this culture was an entirely national one, which must expire as soon as
Spirit approached it. America has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and still shows
itself so. For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at the breath
of European activity. In the United States of North America all the citizens are of European descent, with
whom the old inhabitants could not amalgamate, but were driven back. (Hegel, 98)

8
Many scholars have upheld this bipolar view of geopolitics. Samuel P. Huntington lays it out very simply: “Then,
with the beginning of the modern era, about A.D. 1500, global politics assumed two dimensions. For over four
hundred years, the nation states of the West — Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Germany, the United States,
and others—constituted a multipolar international system within Western civilization and interacted, competed, and
fought wars with each other. At the same time, Western nations also expanded, conquered, colonized, or decisively
influenced every other civilization” (21)

5
The retreat was inevitable, the light of the Hegelian Spirit shone wide.9 After the foundation of
the Union and the consolidation of European domination of the Eastern coast, the next challenge
appeared: a wide frontier that had to be pushed back by Christian piety and Anglo-Saxon
strength.10 And yet, this consolidation of European dominion was a struggle. On the side of
stately enterprise, it was embodied mainly in the peaceful and forceful acquisition of territories
from France (Louisiana Purchase, 1803), Britain (Oregon Treaty, 1846), and Mexico (Mexican
Cession, 1848). Then there was a vast barren territory that had to be imbued with industry and
mystique (Robert Frost in “The Gift Outright”: “The land was ours before we were the land’s”).
In Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), John A. Lomax depicts the pristine state of
the Lebensraum conquered by the Anglo-Saxon settler:
Out in the wild, far-away places of the big and still unpeopled west,— in the canons along the Rocky
Mountains, among the mining camps of Nevada and Montana, and on the remote cattle ranches of Texas,
New Mexico, and Arizona,—yet survives the Anglo-Saxon ballad spirit that was active in secluded districts
in England and Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning. (xvii)

But there was also a more direct confrontation with the unknown. Ever since the Jamestown
settlers annihilated the Paspahegh tribe in the early 17th century, Europeans and Indians waged
war and inflicted abundant suffering to each other. In spite of all this, cowboys had to shepherd
their livestock “up the trail”, from Texas to Montana; wagons and trains had to cross the plains.
The symbolical continuity of this European drive is clearly seen by Lomax as the frontier moves
west and the United States of America acquires its current shape. Besides the injunction to
spread Christian piety and culture, economic development was a main driving force that turned
settlers into the avant-garde of expansion:
Most cowboys, however, were bold young spirits who emigrated to the West for the same reason that their
ancestors had come across the seas. They loved roving; they loved freedom; they were pioneers by instinct;
an impulse set their faces from the East, put the tang for roaming in their veins, and sent them ever, ever
westward. [...] To the cowboy, more than to the goldseekers, more than to Uncle Sam's soldiers, is due the

9
It is evident that the notions of expansion and retreat in the civilizational sense are not only inherent to the case of
the conquest of the West by the settlers in the United States. In What Is Modernity?, Takeuchi Yoshimi undertakes a
similar procedure of comparative diagnosis in the case of East Asia and Western influence: “In the Europe of
infinite advance, that which was previously outside history is consumed within it through European self-expansion,
thus becoming historical. Europe gives content to the abstract through its transformation of history” (59).

10
Cf. the seminal essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893) by the American historian
Frederick Jackson Turner, which advanced the Frontier Thesis of American history.

6
 conquest of the West. [...] The cowboy has fought back the Indians ever since ranching became a business
and as long as Indians remained to be fought. [...] He has always been on the skirmish line of civilization.
(Lomax, xxi-xxii)

Lineages of humans flew west like the wind of the European self-grounding force, humans who
no longer felt European (again, Robert Frost: “We were withholding from our land of living, /
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.”). It was a subsumption to the land and of the
subaltern. The Western subject had the steam engines, the gunpowder, the Bible, and the
engineering. But the Untermenschen were sneaky and treacherous. In these troubling journeys,
an image of the Native Americans was crystallized in the U.S. imaginary, as can be attested in
the cowboy ballads of the 19th century compiled by Lomax:
We heard of Sioux Indians all out on the plains
A-killing poor drivers and burning their trains,--
A-killing poor drivers with arrow and bow,
When captured by Indians no mercy they show.
[...]
We shot their bold chief at the head of his band.
He died like a warrior with a gun in his hand.
When they saw their bold chief lying dead in his gore,
They whooped and they yelled and we saw them no more.

With our small band,--there were just twenty-four,---

And the Sioux Indians there were five hundred or more,--
We fought them with courage; we spoke not a word,
Till the end of the battle was all that was heard.
(57)

Eventually, Native Americans were reduced to harmless numbers and confined to reservations so
small they could no longer thrive or properly feed themselves. Thousands of lives derailed or lost
or, as Hegel puts it, a simple breath of the Spirit. In the introduction to his Philosophy of History,
Hegel declares his project can be regarded as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of god, by
means of a reconciliation of the thinking Spirit with “the fact of the existence of evil.” In order to
effect it, it is necessary to regard the “negative element [as] a subordinate, and vanquished
nullity” (29). This is a perspective from which violence and brutality are simple manifestations

7
of the spirit, necessary to the unfolding of Reason on Earth. In Carl Schmitt’s paraphrasing of
Hegel, “the enemy is a negated otherness” (Schmitt, 63). The image the English settlers
poisoning the wine at a "peace conference" with Powhatan leaders (1623), killing about 200, is
simply an existential byproduct of the self-realizing self-awareness of human freedom. The
Powhatan universal was not an embodiment of the Spirit. The Sioux universal was not an
embodiment of the Spirit. No community in the wide reaches of the new continent embodied the
Spirit simply because their utopias, their desiderata, their sense of future was not expansive, but
static at the very best. There was no space in the narrow confines of their inner worlds for the
light of Reason to move and create itself by becoming self-conscious. The poison in the wine and
the gunpowder in the rifles are the concrete manifestations of this Reason. From this perspective,
at least in our reading, the act of vanquishing, regardless of the means employed, is sanctified.
Aborigines vanish at the breath of European activity.
Is this any different from the fantasy of “wiping out” ISIS or of “totally destroying North
Korea”? When seen as a negated otherness, the enemy is a candle you candidly blow out before
going to sleep.

Uncle Sam Beats Them All: Competitors in the Anglo-Saxon Helicon

After the conquest of the West, perhaps the most decisive expansion of American culture was not
spatial, but technological. In the course of the 19th century, steam and electricity were mastered
and their scientific implementation spawned a series of revolutions in social life.11 The U.S.
international exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 was a chance to show the world that the country
founded by Washington had become a veritable industrial power. At least according to the
narrative of institutions like the Henry Ford Museum “America’s industrial progress shocked
Europeans. They had not expected America, then only 100 years old, to compete with their
industries for decades to come.”12

11
A high number of distinguished European engineers and scientists became active in the United States in the
second half of that century, and, alongside with born Americans, propelled the country’s technological infrastructure
into direct competition with Europe. Developed in armories in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia, The American system of manufacturing made a new and more effective use of two principles: the
interchangeability of parts and the mechanization of production. The entire world of consumer products was
transformed in a mere fifty years, roughly from 1850 to 1890, when new substances --like aniline, celluloid and
vulcanized rubber-- were used in common goods and new objects --like sewing machines, bicycles, and electric
fans-- were invented.

12
From the Made in America exhibition at the Henry Ford Museum. Visited in October 2015.

8
 Perhaps the area of technological expansion that most represented the American sense of
self-expansion was arms. Halfway through the 19th century, the U.S. government exerted
pressure on the national arms industry to produce reliable and repairable guns, which could be
easily duplicated and assembled as quickly as possible. The results were fast. In the 1851 Crystal
Palace Exposition in London, Samuel Colt’s revolvers became world famous. The American
system of manufacturing was implemented in gun factories as soon as its advantages were
demonstrated in other industries. Guns were mass-produced and they had to be put to use. In a
friendly way.
The core of our argument is best presented in an illustration by Charles S. Reinhart drawn
for a July, 1875 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which boasts the subtitle A Journal of Civilization.
The illustration’s title is “Uncle Sam Beats All Creation”13 and portrays an American marksman
departing triumphantly from the international rifle competition at Dollymount, a shooting range
outside Dublin, Ireland. Robert C. Kennedy summarizes the context of the American triumph
over the nations of the British Isles:
In 1875, an American rifle team traveled to Great Britain and Ireland, where they competed against Irish,
Scottish, and English marksmen. A practice match took place at Dollymount Range, two miles outside of
Dublin, on June 17, in which the Irish narrowly edged the Americans. On June 29, the international match
memorialized in this cartoon also took place at Dollymount, with the Americans triumphing over the Irish.
(...) The next day, the Americans won the Spencer Cup at another contest open to all qualified shooters. On
July 7, they won a shooting match at Lord Dufferin's grounds near Belfast (note the cup in Uncle Sam's
carpetbag). The Americans then traveled to England and Scotland for other shooting matches.14

In Works and Days, Hesiod laid out a fundamental distinction between two kinds of human
conflict, represented by two advocations of the same goddess: Eris, “strife.” One of the
manifestations of this goddess was spawned by “dark Night”: it leads humans into murder, war,
and cruelty. The other one, Zeus’s child, “stirs up even the shiftless to toil”, drives men into
productive competition, by showing them the possessions and accomplishments of their
neighbors. The nefarious Eris is easily associable to the Indian American war bloodshed. It is

13
The illustration is included as an appendix to this paper.

14
Online version of the article, available on the New York Times educational resources webpage,
(http://events.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0724.html). November, 2017.

9
possible to perceive the influx of the auspicious goddess of strife in the case of the International
Shooting Competition at Dollymount.
This event took place in terms very similar of those depicted by Nietzsche in On the
Genealogy of Morals, where he explains the value system of the Homeric Helicon, in regards to
the education. The youths had to engage in leisurely competition with citizens of other cities.
The city’s gods were the ultimate possessors and purveyors of meaningfulness. When winning a
race or a javelin competition or a singing contest, the increase of personal reputation was only
valuable insofar as it reported honor to the city of birth. This was the main source of self-
realization. Contest, and not war, was the relationality model of the Helicon, at least according to
Nietzsche: “From childhood, every Greek felt the burning desire within him to be an instrument
of bringing salvation to his city in the contest between cities: in this, his selfishness was lit, as
well as curbed and restricted. For that reason, the individuals in antiquity were freer, because
their aims were nearer and easier to achieve” (179). We can imagine the same kind of productive
envy operating at the Dollymount Range in the outskirts of Dublin: “The Lord Mayors of Dublin
and London, and an estimated crowd of 30,000 by the afternoon, attended the match.
Participants joined together in the evening at a banquet hosted by the Lord Mayor of Dublin”
(Robert C. Kennedy).The selfishness of the Scottish, Irish, British, and American were lit by
ambition of recognition, and also curbed and restricted, given that the honors received by the
winners were only the byproduct of the comparative exercise. Comparison --to find out if you are
indeed the best-- is the drive of these transactions, but even though there is testosterone and
gunpowder explosions, no one needs to be “wiped out.” This is also the tone in which Goethe
spoke to Eckerman about the comparative ethos of poetry: every single community has it, and no
one has a claim to its ultimate essence.15
However, the gregarious setting at the Dollymount Range seems at odds with the tone of
the illustration’s title. The term “creation” in “Uncle Sam Beats All Creation” can be seen to

15
Goethe actually seems to be thinking about the athletic contest as the model for literary comparison: “Einer macht
es ein wenig besser als der andere und schwimmt ein wenig länger oben als der andere, das ist alles. Der Herr von
Matthisson muß daher nicht denken, er wäre es, und ich muß nicht denken, ich wäre es, sondern jeder muß sich eben
sagen, daß es mit der poetischen Gabe keine so seltene Sache sei, und daß niemand eben besondere Ursache habe,
sich viel darauf einzubilden, wenn er ein gutes Gedicht macht.”
However, it must be said that, only a few lines later, Goethe seems to jettison that comparative impulse and
revert to Hellenocentrism: “Wir müssen nicht denken, das Chinesische wäre es, oder das Serbische, oder Calderon,
oder die Nibelungen; sondern im Bedürfnis von etwas Musterhaftem müssen wir immer zu den alten Griechen
zurückgehen, in deren Werken stets der schöne Mensch dargestellt ist.” (Eckerman, online version)

10
denote here the entirety of the Christian God’s endeavors, the universe as “godly creation.” In
this sense, Uncle Sam would be guilty of hubris, at least according to Nietzsche’s argument.
Trembling under the gaze of the zealous gods, the individual must not covet the entirety of
triumph and glory for himself, for if he does so, he will attract the envy of the gods and be
destroyed for it: “Because he is envious, he feels the envious eye of a god resting on him
whenever he has an excessive amount of honor, wealth, fame and fortune, and he fears this envy;
in this case, the god warns him of the transitoriness of the human lot, he dreads his good fortune
and, sacrificing the best part of it, he prostrates himself before divine envy” (177).
But this success wasn’t punished by any God, Greek or Christian. At another level,
“creation” could be interpreted in the sense of human creation, innovation, technology;
understood as the simple statement of the superiority of U.S. industrial products over those of
Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, which are represented in the illustration by a man in a top hat, one
wearing a monocle, and another in a kilt, respectively. Indeed, the collegial purpose of the
competition is somewhat undermined by the image. The three defeated marksmen stand in the
background, with countenances that range from astonishment to outright dismay. In the
foreground, Uncle Sam seems to double the size of his recently-defeated competitors and looks
at the viewer with a smug and joyful gaze. Not only has he won the Dollymount competition. He
carries a carpet bag full of other trophies (including one won at Lord’s Dufferin’s grounds near
Belfast). Unlike Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), the angel
pushed away into the future with his gaze turned at the past, Reinhart’s Uncle Sam is heading
into the future, and he no longer regards his fellow marksmen, who are stranded in the past. He is
walking towards the next competition he will win, with a sideways gaze to the spectator, as if to
elicit a smirk that matches his own. But he will soon be fed up with games. After defeating the
athletes of the other Anglo-Saxon countries in friendly competition, he’ll strive for higher
accomplishments. In this moment, Uncle Sam is no different from Miltiades, the Marathon
runner who, after obtaining incomparable success and recognition, and lacking an ulterior
competition to entice his will, disgraces himself through erratic vengeance and violation of his
society’s religious law. (Nietzsche, 180) Ultimately, what for the American marksmen is the
ultimate act of self-fulfillment, destroys the system of competition:
For why should nobody be the best? Because with that, the contest would dry up and the permanent basis
of life in the Hellenic state would be endangered. (...) The original function of this strange institution is,
however, not as a safety valve but as a stimulant: the preeminent individual is removed to renew the

11
 tournament of forces: a thought that is hostile to the ‘exclusivity’ of genius in the modern sense, but
assumes that there are always several geniuses to incite each other to action, just as they keep each other
within certain limits, too. (178)

Nietzsche praises the freedom he perceives in a value system where individual aims were
subordinate to the city’s glory. In the pre-Homeric times, no such constriction was in place and
not the benevolent envy, the good Eris, but her evil sister held sway in the will of men. The
disruption of the system by a “genius” (the word is Nietzsche’s) will not bring about a new,
different epoch, it will simply revert the Helicon or the British Isles back to the time of Night and
Cruelty. In Nietzsche’s perspective, this characterization of the pre-Homeric era of savagery fits
his time, which is also, incidentally, that of Uncle Sam’s feats as a marksman. Unlike the
Athenian youth with his circumspect desires, the American gunslinger is guilty of hubris:
“Modern man, on the other hand, is crossed everywhere by infinity.” And that hubris brings
about the dark Eris. This technological drive led to the ultimate feat of U.S. hegemony, the
Manhattan project, with Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, uttered right
after witnessing the dropping of a test hydrogen bomb in the desert of New Mexico: "Now I am
become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It is in this sense, also, that after the battle of
Aegospotamoi, cruelty took hold of Spartan culture and that of the Helicon. As the
expansiveness of the self’s universal increases, it regards other ontologies as hindrances in the
way to the embodiment of the universal in reality: competitors vanish and are replaced by
enemies. With the usage of an apocalyptic weapon never imagined by men, the United States
ended the biggest war on human history, halting, for decades, the rise of international fascism.
However, in deliberately attaining this unprecedented level of destructive power and hegemony,
Nietzsche could have argued that America became pre-Homeric, it returned, at least at the level
of geopolitical interventionism and coercion, to that “abyss of a gruesome savagery of hatred and
pleasure in destruction” the Greek had taken centuries to leave behind (179). Uncle Sam started
seeing Indians everywhere on the globe, and had to keep them under watch.

Fragmentation, Planetarity, Claustrophobia: the Haunted, Hospitable World

With the rise of the United States to the throne of hegemony right after the end of WWII, the
division of the world in two political blocks and the birth of thousands of Japanese citizens
affected by radioactivity-triggered illnesses, there was also a change in the constitution of the

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Western subject. In Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric
Jameson depicts this shift as “one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the
latter’s fragmentation” (14). The instances of this new paradigm are “the notorious cases of
burnout and self-destruction of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences of drugs
and schizophrenia,” which for Jameson have little to do with cultural pathologies of the modern
era, including Freud’s “hysterics and neurotics”. In La existencia sitiada, the Spanish
philosopher Eduardo Subirats holds the opposite argument: the postmodern fragmentation of the
subject is the consequence of the modernist and avant-garde obsession with delirium, childhood,
and hallucination.
In any case, what interests me in Jameson’s text is that he seems to be discarting
psychoanalysis along with the other depth models owed to dialectics, existential philosophy, and
the semiotic binary of the signifier and the signified, respectively. It is telling that twelve years
later, Spivak returns to Freud to rehabilitate the latent and manifest duality precisely in order to
counter the seemingly all-encompassing grip of commodification and oblivion that characterize
late capitalism. Spivak and Jameson seem to agree in a distrust of the intellective capabilities of
the subject, insofar as the hermeneutic model has collapsed and there doesn’t seem to be any
infallible mode of thought. Spivak writes: “I keep feeling that there are connections to be made
that I cannot make, that pluralization may allow the imagining of a necessary yet impossible
planetarity in ways that neither my reader nor I know yet” (92). The monad was cracked open.
The disjecta membra of the Western subject’s consciousness hover in the wind, adhering to other
equally messy homuncului.
Unfortunately, this crumbling doesn’t necessarily mean, as Jameson would have it, that
the next-to-last cultural pathologies have been cured or invalidated. It seems that, more in line
with the continuity thesis proposed by Subirats throughout his oeuvre but especially in La
existencia sitiada, the umbilical cord connecting the modern to the postmodern is precisely that
of cultural infirmity. This idea seems more convincing when going back to Freud, who, in his
analysis of Hoffmann’s Elixire des Teufels, lists the several processes that produce the
impressions of uncanniness in relation to the Doppelgänger:
transferring mental processes from the one person to the other—what we should call telepathy—so that the
one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another
person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words,
by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self. (9)

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Among many other traits, the uncanny is produced by a disruption of the self, both in the sense
of amalgamation with, or substitution by, the other. What can be the status of enmity in this
ontology of the subject The question about the expansiveness of the enemy’s universal here is
peculiarly pertinent in so far as it seems out of context. If I lose my sense of self and believe my
enemy is imbued with parts of me, or that I might be receiving his ideas through telepathy, how
can I know if the universal I’m fighting for is truly mine? Would it not be possible for me to
actually pursue the destruction of my own utopia if, perchance, the limbs moving in my enemy’s
body weren’t stranger to my own? I experience a sense of claustrophobia as I say this. Indeed,
the the horizon seems harrowingly narrow if it is not something foreign to myself; emotions,
perhaps grafted into my consciousness by the whispers of others, blindside my own reasoning;
the human bodies that walk past me in the streets are suffocatingly similar to my own, possibly
more me than myself. When they die, I will be alive but buried with them. Freud diagnoses this
and finds the double drive underwriting these experiences of loss of self:
Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves—all these
have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to
move of themselves in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association
with the castration-complex. To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is
the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a
transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was filled
with a certain lustful pleasure—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence. (15)

The stillness of the motherly womb turns into the claustrophobic castrations pendant to the
constitution of the mature (nüchtern) self. But, as we’ve seen, this constitution is messy, elusive,
and this elusiveness could be read as the price the Western subject has had to pay for this
abandonment of animism and the originary forms of thinking, which are repressed but still
dormant and ready to reappear in monstrous forms. In Totalité et infini, Emmanuel Levinas states
that the Western ego has cut off all ties to the cosmos, it renounces to participate in the drift of
the constellations, and therefore surrenders to infinite reasoning that is structurally incapable of
attaining the transcendental. Fragmentation from the world and isolation turn into inner
fragmentation. For Spivak, “the shift from vagina to planet as the signifier for the uncanny” (74)
will be used to rethink the act of reading the colonial and the postcolonial subject. I believe her

14
argument is also useful as a means of recognizing that the subject’s participation in the cosmos--
in the planet, the home--is real, although we should be aware that this dwelling is “on loan.”
***
We are rote minds communicating through telepathy (or gestures or Facebook). We are
lumps of flesh that don’t end where our skin touches the air. Our universals are staunchly
particular but beacon at us from the visages of passers-by. “To be human is to be intended
toward the other” (73), Spivak says in a very Levinasian tone, and this intention is incompatible
with expansive universals altogether. We cannot “wipe people out.” For better or for worse, no
idea, no matter how seductive it seems to us, can be weaponized to force our enemy to destroy
his universals either. The sense of embodying the Spirit of Reason is just a lie of utter cruelty,
dark Eris, which will one day come to slit our throat. On the other hand, the collegial contest that
curbs hybris won’t ensure peace of its own accord, for it is too easy to use the skills developed in
friendly competition to (try to) take over Mount Olympus. Perhaps the most effective way of
fending off enemies is to participate in the competition knowing that our greatest deed will be to
come back to our borrowed, uncanny home, without disturbing the neighbors. After the javelin
and the oratory, let’s keep to our ghosts and leave the doors and windows open, so that the wind
refreshes our dwellings, so that our Doppelgänger can drop by to say hello.

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 Appendix
C. S. Reinhart, Uncle Sam Beats All Creation

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