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Book Review, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11
By Walter A. Davis
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A Review of Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11
One of the hard truths of Leftist politics in America today is that the conservative view dictates the terms of the debate. The political questions we consider—should we bomb Iran? should we lower taxes again? should we build a fence along our Southern border or not? and so on—almost unequivocally stem from a conservative agenda. Even when the Left wins a victory (as was the case with the defeat of George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize social security), the victory only stems the conservative tide; it doesn’t represent an authentic push in the other direction (which is not to discount the importance of such victories). Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this right-wing control has expanded. When security becomes the primary issue, the Right is on its home turf. This situation seems to leave the Left with few alternatives to rearguard actions, though it has also spawned periodic announcements of panaceas. The most famous of these instant cures for the Left comes from linguist George Lakoff. In fact, Lakoff’s views have helped to change the way in which the Democratic Party markets itself today. According to Lakoff, the Left need not undergo a fundamental transformation in response to current conservative domination. The corrective he proposes is strategic—reframing issues from a leftist perspective rather than accepting the Right’s terms on their own. Reframing, for Lakoff, involves placing issues in the moral schema of the Left, which he identifies as nurturing rather than authoritarian (which is the Right’s model). We would speak, for instance, of our moral responsibility to improve the lives of all citizens, to eliminate poverty, and to provide universal health care. In doing so, we would appeal to a moral frame that most Americans share, and this would propel the Left into the dominant position. Lakoff is responding to a genuine problem, but his solution actually furthers the problem rather than ameliorating it. The attempt to reframe issues in terms of a nurturing morality only further identifies the Left with weakness, which is an especially damning identification today. Furthermore, Lakoff’s solution contributes to the Left’s turn away from the economy and the critique of unbridled capitalism, which is the only terrain on which it has a chance for genuine success. The Left must change the terms of the debate—on this question Lakoff is undoubtedly correct—but the change must go beyond mere reframing. It requires an interpretation that gets to the foundation of the social order itself and to why people accept the moral frame that they accept. This is the achievement that Death’s Dream Kingdom, Walter A. Davis’s most recent book approaches.  Even when the Left wins a victory (as was the case with the defeat of George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize social security), the victory only stems the conservative tide; it doesn’t represent an authentic push in the other direction (which is not to discount the importance of such victories). 
Death’s Dream Kingdom represents the first genuine attempt to think through the psychic underpinnings of American politics since the September 11 attacks and the response to them. What stands out in this remarkable work is the interweaving of political, economic, and psychical analysis. Davis accomplishes what Lakoff advises—he reframes from a leftist perspective the issues that confront us today—but he does so by getting to the root of these issues and by demonstrating the inseparability of the psychic and political levels. For Davis, our political position is an expression of a certain psychic approach to the world. If we want to change the contemporary political terrain, we must provide an interpretation of the contemporary psyche that explodes its stasis and occasions a radical psychic revolution. Without this psychic revolution, attempts at political revolution will involve simply spinning our wheels. At every turn, Davis reverses the terms of the debate in order to undermine the inherent conservative advantage that exists in contemporary politics. When he discusses terrorism, for instance, Davis does not resort to the standard Leftist clichés about understanding the economic hardship that produces terrorism. He accepts the conservative attack on terrorism as an evil that we must eradicate, but he shows that terrorism is not limited to setting off suicide bombs or flying planes into buildings. Terrorism includes the inhumane acts perpetuated in the pursuit of extending American hegemony and capitalist accumulation throughout the planet. He locates terrorism in the American dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, and the reintroduction of torture as a normal mode of interrogation. Above all, we see in Davis’s book that terrorism is a psychic position as much as it is a political operation. Political terror derives from an attempt to accomplish something psychically. Understood in this way, we can confront terrorism from a Leftist perspective and transform the struggle against terrorism into a struggle against those who today claim the moral high ground of being terrorism’s opponents. If we want to change the contemporary political terrain, we must provide an interpretation of the contemporary psyche that explodes its stasis and occasions a radical psychic revolution. Death’s Dream Kingdom refuses to treat terrorism or fundamentalism as issues that one might separate from our current economic system. For Davis, terrorism is one of the chief ways in which global capitalism extends its dominance, and fundamentalism provides the ideological justification for capitalism without restraint. Just as Max Weber identified Protestantism as the logic necessary for the birth of capitalism, Davis sees fundamentalism as the ideology of capitalism in its global era. The apocalyptic thinking that fundamentalism provides facilitates an embrace of untrammeled capitalist accumulation. The sheer destructiveness that this accumulation brings with it delights the apocalyptic imagination of the fundamentalist, who sees the destruction of the planet’s resources and the ravaging of the planet’s humanity as the signs of the end. Without our shared investment in fundamentalist-type thinking, the project of global capitalism would be unthinkable, so Davis contends. What is remarkable about this thesis (which I find almost convincing) is its ability to link the forward-looking optimism of the capitalist spirit with the world-negating destructiveness of fundamentalism. Where Death’s Dream Kingdom makes its missteps are the points at which Davis tries to distinguish his thought from theorists who are in fact his allies in the struggle to ground politics in the psyche. This occurs most notably in the chapter that criticizes the thought of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan. Žižek and Lacan become, in Davis’s reading, abstract thinkers who reduce every concrete experience to a general formula that they arrive at deductively. This critique relies on an untenable distinction between abstract and concrete in which the concrete experience exists prior to and independent of the theoretical abstraction. As Hegel (a thinker Davis himself is indebted to) makes clear, we arrive at the concrete through the process of abstraction, not independent of it. There is no such thing as the concrete experience independent of all abstraction. Furthermore, in the final chapter of the book, Davis contrasts the ethic of the tragic that he is developing with the Kantian ethic of pure duty. In order to make this contrast, Davis must reduce Kant to a straw figure. Kant becomes a partisan of duty to the symbolic order and its commands, while the ethic that Davis endorses (which he associates with Hamlet) involves eliminating all symbolic support for one’s identity. The problem with this distinction is that a more generous reading of the Critique of Practical Reason would reveal that the latter ethic is precisely what Kant describes there. For Kant, duty is duty without guarantees rooted in the symbolic order. It is a duty that I give to myself, not a duty that I accept from an external authority. The absolute distinction between a Kantian ethic and the ethic of the tragic that Davis develops here does not exist. Kant, like Lacan and Žižek, is a fellow traveler with Davis. But this is nonetheless a work that disciples of Lacan and Žižek (and Kant, for that matter) must wrestle with and profit from. The gain will be, if nothing else, a sense of the stakes involved with the ethic of the tragic. The ethic of the tragic that Davis develops is the highlight of the book. It represents the pinnacle of his attempt to renew leftist politics. For too long, the Left has ceded a tragic understanding of existence to the Right. Right-wing thinkers and leaders have emphasized the underlying tragic dimension of our existence while proponents of a left-wing agenda have stressed our ability to overcome the tragic and live without antagonism. Even someone as sober-minded as Marx has succumbed to the temptation to believe that we could achieve a life free of the tragic. Leftists have traditionally assumed that people acting out of their own self-interest can work together to create a life together in which things largely work out. But by ceding the ground of the tragic to the Right, the Left has given away a tremendous political advantage. People act like they do not because they follow their self-interest or a rational conception of how the world should be. As Davis contends here, they act like they do in response to the tragic nature of their existence. If a regenerated Left is possible, it must root itself in an experience of the tragic. by Todd McGowan, University of Vermont
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