The Confidence-Man, Trump & Political Enjoyment

In this episode, I have a conversation with James A. Godley. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. James's work explores mourning as a process of retroactive invention in literary and philosophical works. His current book project, “Unthinkable Loss: Mourning and the Object of Speculation in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature,” examines how slavery, the privatization of mortality, and the Civil War brought vast changes to the ritual structure and philosophy of death in the 19th century, impelling American literary authors to find new ways of mapping speculative futures for those who would otherwise have been condemned to a futureless end. Combining literary-historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic perspectives, the project will constitute the first of a two-volume set devoted to the problem of “infinite grief” in modern and contemporary U.S. literature. Godley’s publications include Inheritance in Psychoanalysis, a co-edited anthology of theoretical interventions into biological, anthropological, aesthetic, and clinical notions of inheritance, and an article on the critique of finitude in Hegel and Lacan in Angelaki.

In this episode, we discuss Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man and its implications for modern political engagement. We weave together a variety of ideas including Freud's myth of the primal horde, Jacques Lacan's notion of the phallus and the exception of masculinity as well as William James' pragmatic philosophy. When it comes to political engagement, we can't reduce everything to knowledge. We have to wrestle with the potent reality of enjoyment. 

If you want to connect with James: James.A.Godley@dartmouth.edu

Here's the article by Jacqueline Rose that we mention:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/trump-disaster-modern-masculinity-sexual-nostalgian-oppressive-men-women