Walter A Davis
Editor in Chief

Biographical

      I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, the first of six sons born to working class parents.  (The Chicago Cubs remain my favorite lost cause.)  Thanks to my parent’s sacrifices I was the first member of our family to go to college. I attended Marquette University and later The University of Chicago.  I then taught at The University of California and later at The Ohio State University.  Three years ago, I took early retirement in order to write full-time.  I miss teaching but am glad to be relieved of everything else that makes up academic life. (See my website-- www.walteradavis.com  for my Vita and a fuller description of the works described below.)

      My second book, Inwardness and Existence, was an attempt to lay a philosophic foundation for the new left.  Its basic argument was that in order to understand the connection between subjectivity (or the psyche) and history we must bring together four frameworks of thought that are frequently, unfortunately, opposed:  existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Hegelian dialectics.  Since it took 16 years to write, by the time I finished the book the “new left” was a thing of the past.

      My subsequent books have attempted to develop that philosophic framework in concrete ways. It is easy to “lose one’s wits” studying philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis.  I’ve always tried to balance these pursuits with active involvement in the theatre, both as an actor, director, and playwright. This work resulted in the book Get the Guests. In it I tried to show how great drama is a revolutionary force that exposes dominant ideologies by leading an audience to confront the buried conflicts of the collective and individual psyche.  Culture, I argue, is essential to our struggle; without great art we remain subject to the mass delusions of the entertainment industry and the popular media.

      My last three books have focused on the question of history.  In effect they constitute a trilogy.  Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative develops a new theory of history and, specifically, of how to read an event such as the bombing of Hiroshima.  Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 applies that theory to the present.  In it I develop a psychoanalytic reading of Bush’s Amerika which offers us a new way to use psychoanalytic categories in order to comprehend historical events.  I recently completed a new book—Theatre and Ideology: The Corrie Controversy and the Prospects for a Radical Politics.  In it I extend the analysis of Bush and Co. to a critique of the Left, i.e., of the ideologies that paralyze our thought and confine our praxis. 

      While working on these books I have also continued my involvement in theatre.  My best work in that venue, and perhaps the book of mine that best illustrates how my thought applies to a particular event and what a play, a drama alone perhaps enables us to know, is An Evening With JonBenét Ramsey. The book begins with a full-length play, “Cowboy’s Sweetheart,”  followed by a long essay on all the ways in which the Ramsey case was exploited so that we would not see what it so clearly reveals: how the contradictions of a society are mirrored in the family and why, as a result, the sexual abuse of our young is a national epidemic.

      One of my hopes as Editor in Chief of MWCNews will be to produce a series of timely essays on the pressing issues before us. The contradictions of our historical situation are intense.  They require us to rethink everything.  While contributing to that effort, I will continue to work on two large projects that I hope to complete in my lifetime.  One is a theoretical “magnum opus” dedicated to developing a theory of psyche as tragic process. Recovering an understanding of the tragic and liberating the tragic from an a-historical essentialistic humanism is, I think, the ultimate task we face in order to complete our entry into history, i.e., to become ethically responsible historical agents who have freed ourselves of all otherworldliness and (to put it in slightly different terms) all transcendental guarantees.  The other long term project I’m working on is a novel.  Its current title—The Last Catholic-- provides the quickest indication of its deep tie to the projects described above.

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