Civil War in Philosophy & US Literature

Graduate

Cultural Studies or Single-taught Interdisciplinary This class examines the concept of stasis, originally the Greek word for "civil war" which later came to mean, in English, "stillness" or "immobility." Like other examples of what Freud called "primal words," such as sacer (sacred, unclean), uncanny (which originally meant "familiar"), or cleave (to stick to, to cut), the meaning of stasis welds together opposite notions in a way that bypasses normal thinking. Along these lines, the idea of stasis as both standstill and unrest challenges us to think about the baseline of individual and collective action. Rather than to think of inactivity as the enemy of politics, we come to see how politics depends upon moments of radical suspension; how the momentum for important change takes place when there is a forced halt or a stoppage of production, the way that W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, described the "general strike" of refugee slaves as what led to Union victory in the Civil War. At the same time, we note how incessant activity manifests symptomatically as a general malaise, as Walter Benjamin described capitalist modernity, or the way that Lacan described Hamlet's madness. In this class, we will explore various instances of how stuckness masks strife , how social upheaval demonstrates the paralysis of societies, and how profound moments of immobility (such as a general strike) can be insurgent forces of change. One of the key places where this idea comes to the fore is in the US Civil War. In the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jefferson Davis, Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass, the paradoxes of civil war as foundational to the United States become apparent, as does the long afterlife of what the war was fought over—slavery and democratic sovereignty. Indeed, it is no coincidence that in the United States today, the rhetoric of a second coming of civil war is omnipresent. As David Theo Goldberg has argued, such "polarized" language indicates that civil war is not just an extreme case of conflict anymore but is now normal. We cannot overcome the trauma of the Civil War because it has never fully ended. Through readings of American literature alongside important texts of critical theory, we will see how this continuity becomes established.