Abstract
The management of a dynamic and raucous democracy, as Jacksonian democracy proved to be, resulted in the deployment of a biopolitical order capable of disciplining an intractable citizenry. This chapter reads Poe’s work as a thoughtful meditation on democracy’s somatic investment in the regulation of the lives of citizens.
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Notes
- 1.
As John C. Calhoun writes, “all who have reflected on the nature of our complex system of government, and the dangers to which it is exposed, have seen that it is susceptible, from its structure to two dangers of opposite character: one threatening consolidation, and the other anarchy and dissolution,” 64.
- 2.
For Northrop Frye, Romance is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that seeks the transformation of everyday reality in order to restore a prelapsarian world where the limited conditions that result after the Fall are eliminated (186). Fredric Jameson’s metacritical position historicizes the genre’s salvational drive at the juncture at “which two distinct modes of production, or moments of socioeconomic development, coexist. Their antagonism is not yet articulated in terms of the struggle of social classes, so that its resolution can be projected in the form of a nostalgic … harmony” (Political Unconscious, 148). For both Frye and Jameson, Romance foregrounds modernity’s defining conflicts and allegorizes them into antagonisms between youth and age, innovation and tradition, in attempts to achieve a balance between the present and the past.
- 3.
As Agamben writes, “the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested,” 9.
- 4.
For work exploring Poe’s critical assessments of American political and economic orders, see Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses, Betsy Erkilla, “Perverting the American Renaissance,” Duncan Faherty, “‘A Certain Unity of Design,’” and Paul Downes, “Democratic Terror in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” to name a few.
- 5.
Colin (Joan) Dayan has argued that “if we begin to look at Poe’s characters as legal personalities, we can read may of his tales as concerning (i) the existence of actual as opposed to civil or legal facts, for example, the physical person (solely body and appetite) and personhood (the social and civic components of personal identity); and (2) the supernatural relation of the believer to the dead who do not die, as opposed to the natural and daily relation of the living who are dead, those who have undergone ‘civil death,’” “Poe, Persons, and Property,” 109. In keeping with Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, the figure abandoned by the sovereign to the space of nonlaw, Dayan reads Poe’s faux vivants as figures inhabiting an “intralegal” zone, at once abandoned, yet also within the law’s jurisdiction.
- 6.
Alenka Zupančič extends Badiou’s discussion of infinity in her reading of the comic dimension of Hegel’s notion of concrete universality. Zupančič argues: “it is not simply that, as human beings, we are marked by a fundamental contradiction and are therefore finite—the contradiction applies, or stretches, to the very finitude which is our human condition.” (194). Zupančič builds on Lacan’s thesis on the relation between comedy, ethics, and desire. For Lacan comedy’s satisfying element “is not so much the triumph of life as its flight, the fact that life slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely those that are most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier,” 314.
- 7.
Roderick Usher’s hypersensitivity to light and sound are a case in point, as is William Wilson’s psychic disintegration as result of his double’s over proximity.
- 8.
See Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing mediator; or, Max Webber as Storyteller.”
- 9.
Dennis Foster notes that Poe’s narrators “stand—and sometimes make us stand—as upholders of the law who nevertheless, in secret, watch what should not be seen. Reason and the law are the foundation of a civilized life, in relation to which Poe’s perversions are unhealthy deviations, cautionary tales. Bu the fascination of the accomplice—the priest, the doctor, the reader—allows Poe to turn reason and law into the props for perverse pleasures. The inversion of priorities makes Poe’s madmen the most insistent advocates of the law,” 44.
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Rodriguez, R. (2019). Poe and Democracy’s Biopolitical Immunity. In: Immunity's Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_4
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