Capra Contra Schmitt: Two Traditions of Political Romanticism

8:4 | © 2005 Bruce Rosenstock

Bruce Rosenstock

Introduction

1.

This paper explores two different traditions of political

romanticism and their differing critical and artistic

receptions in the twentieth century. The first tradition

emerged in Europe largely in response to the French

Revolution. In the twentieth century, European

romanticis m found its most prominent critic in Carl

Schmitt (1888-1985). In his Political Romanticism,

Schmitt argued that romanticism represents a flight

from concrete, political reality into the inconsequential

realm of fantasy. Above all else, the romantic subject

avoids decision. Intimately connected with Schmitt's

rejection of European political romanticism is his

embrace of fascism. I will argue that fascism for

Schmitt is the precise inversion of politically indecisive

romanticism. Fascism concretizes decision in the

sovereign will of the dictator and in the popular act of

acclamation that, in Schmitt's theory of fascist

democracy, legitimizes sovereign dictatorship.

2.

The second tradition of political romanticism has its

roots in the American Revolution and finds one of its

most most prominent artistic exponents in Frank Capra

(1897-1991).1 Intimately connected with Capra's

embrace of the American romantic tradition is his

rejection of fascism, especially apparent in his movie

Meet John Doe (1941).2 My aim in this paper is to lay

bare the contrast between the two traditions of political

romanticism, one given its theoretical explication and

critique in Carl Schmitt's Political Romanticism, the

other its artistic expression in the movies of Frank

Capra. To understand the theoretical grounding of the

American tradition of political romanticism, and to

explain Capra's artistic achievement, I turn for guidance

to the work of Stanley Cavell, especially his Pursuits of

Happiness in which he offers a philosophical

explication of the genre of film he dubs "comedies of

remarriage.'' Although Cavell is the most important

contemporary exponent of the American tradition of

romanticism, he does not deal directly with the theme

that is central for Schmitt, namely, the identification of

the political with sovereign decision. The thinker who

offers the clearest and most direct response to Schmitt's

central theme is Hannah Arendt. I will argue that she

and Cavell together offer a theoretical elaboration of

what I identify as the American tradition of political

romanticism.

3.

I have titled my paper "Capra Contra Schmitt'' because

I believe that each man, one in his art and the other in

his theoretical writing, represents two different

traditions of political romanticism at a decisive moment

in their histories. This moment brings to the fore the

critical relationship between aesthetics and politics in

the modern democratic state. Capra's faith is that

romantic art in the mass medium of film can sustain and

nurture American democracy in its battle against

fascism. Schmitt believes that romanticism is the

"religion'' of the bourgeois state and must be overcome

in order to achieve the authentic democracy of the

fascist state.

4.

The overcoming of the indecisiveness of political

romanticism would take place, if we follow Schmitt to

the logical conclusion of his critique, when a dictator

brings into concrete actuality political romanticism's

"core'' idea, namely, that "the state is a work of art''

(1986: 125). Richard Wolin correctly diagnosed

Schmitt's theory of fascism as the fusion of the political

and the aesthetic when he speaks of Schmitt's embrace

of a fascist "aesthetics of horror'' (1992: 443). Wolin

points out that Benjamin's critique of fascism as the

aestheticization of the political grows out of his reading

of Schmitt. Benjamin understood from Schmitt that

fascism inverts the bourgeois de-politicization of art,

transforming the political into the realm where free-

floating imagination is given license to test its fantasies

in the living flesh of the state's subjects. Benjamin also

saw film as a medium ideally suited to represent and

sustain the illusions of fascism. I will argue that Capra's

film work attempts to contest this appropriation of film

for fascism. I will also argue that Capra's own aesthetic

draws deeply from romanticism, but in its American

incarnation.

5.

In the next section of the paper I will discuss Schmitt's

analysis of political romanticism and relate it to his

embrace of fascism as the only hope for what he took to

be Europe's inevitable conflict with Bolshevism. In the

following section I turn to Cavell's interpretation of the

romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau and the film

comedies of remarriage as offering a response to the

challenge of skepticism. This section will spend

considerable time in examining the roots of Cavellian

romanticism in Kant's Critique of Judgment. It will

extend this philosophical portrait of romanticism by

offering an interpretation of the Capra film, It

Happened One Night. In the final section of the paper I

will turn to Hannah Arendt's analysis of the American

Revolution in her work On Revolution. Arendt can help

us understand how the American romantic tradition

stands in contrast to the romanticism that, as Schmitt

argues, bears within itself, as the legacy of the French

Revolution, the fantasy of fascist dictatorship.

6.

Helped by Arendt and Cavell, I hope to show that the

American romanticism of Frank Capra offers a direct

challenge to Schmitt's embrace of fascist dictatorship as

the only viable form of democracy. Arendt and Cavell

allow us to see that the romantic hero - and the figures

of Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews

(Claudette Colbert) in It Happened One Night will

serve us as examples of two such heroes - is the one

who can decide to make a promise that re-constitutes

fraternity as the space of the political. The decision to

make a promise is, in fundamental ways, the inverse of

the Schmittian sovereign decision that constitutes the

friend-enemy polarity. Perhaps, therefore, the most

important political decision is between Capra and

Schmitt. This, at least, is the argument of my paper.

Schmitt on Political Romanticism and

Sovereign Dictatorship

7.

Schmitt's book Political Romanticism was first

published in 1919 and is part of his broad assault on the

ideology of the liberal bourgeois democratic state that

informs his key texts from the 1920's, including

Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922), and

Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923). Put

succinctly, romanticism is the civil religion of the

liberal democratic state.

It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society

that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the

intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world

that isolates the individual in the domain of the

intellectual, makes the individual its own point of

reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that

otherwise was hierarchically distributed among

different functions in a social order. In this society, it is

left to the private individual to be his own priest. but

not only that. Because of the central significance and

consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be

his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and

his own master builder in the cathedral of his

personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the

romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood.

(Schmitt 1986: 20)

Rejecting Weber's identification of modernity with

secularization, Schmitt claims that modern European

society is better characterized as embracing a "religion

of privacy.'' Schmitt identifies the first and most

significant of the bourgeois rights to be the freedom of

conscience which turned religion into a private matter

outside the bounds of state control. The bourgeois

liberal state emerges out of the absolutist state, one of

whose major functions, after the catastrophic wars of

the early seventeenth century, was to provide a neutral

space for the exercise of private religious choice. The

sacralization of the private sphere leads to the reverence

for private property: "The fact that religion is a private

matter gives privacy a religious sanction. In the true

sense, the absolute guarantee of absolute private

property can exist only where religion is a private

matter ...'' (1996: 28-9). The state's neutrality in relation

to conscience becomes, in the liberal state, its neutrality

in relation to the exercise of economic self-interest.

8.

The transformation of the absolutist into the liberal state

was accompanied, according to Schmitt, by the collapse

of the deistic world picture. The metaphysical focal

point ceased to be a transcendent God; the place of

authority and legitimation came to be occupied by two

new "this-worldly realities'' ("diesseitige Realitaten,''

1925: 86), humanity and history. The idea of humanity

as the source of political legitimation comes to the fore

in the French Revolution. The idea of history as the

source of political legitimation arises as a conservative

reaction to the revolutionary impetus of the idea of

humanity. Romantic subjectivity wavers indecisively

between both these new metaphysical foci. Schmitt

breaks with earlier analyses of romanticism by arguing

that it is inherently related neither to revolutionary nor

to reactionary political philosophies, but to the

suspension of any decisive commitment to political

action, whether revolutionary or reactionary. The

romantic subject may dream of revolution or

restoration, but in reality he or she is merely the

"neutralized'' agent of the bourgeois order.

9.

Political romanticism as Schmitt characterizes it is only

comprehensible as a response to the transformation of

the bourgeoisie from an agent of radical social change

in the French Revoltuion to an entrenched, conservative

class in the middle of the nineteenth century. "The

bearer of the romantic movement is the new

bourgeioisie. Its epoch begins in the eighteenth century.

In 1789, it triumphed with revolutionary violence over

the monarch, the nobility, and the Church. In June of

1848, it already stood on the other side of the barricades

when it defended itself against the revolutionary

proletariat'' (1986: 12). In the course of the French

Revolution, the bourgeoisie was unable to form stable

political institutions rooted in the revolutionary

moment. Before explaining how the liberal bourgeois

democracies are, according to Schmitt, the breeding

ground of romanticism, it will be useful to briefly

sketch his analysis of the nature of the failure of the

French Revolution to achieve stable political

insitutions. The failure, according to Schmitt,, lay in the

eclipse of sovereign dictatorship, the new political

reality brought to life by the Revolution. In place of

sovereign dictatorship, the authentic expression of

popular sovereignty, there arose the depoliticized

neutrality of the bourgeois order. Stillborn in the French

Revolution, sovereign dictatorship and authentic

democracy is, in Schmitt's view, given a second chance

with the emergence of fascism in the twentieth century.

10.

In Dictatorship Schmitt explains how in the beginning

of the French Revolution the people's power of

constituting a new set of laws and institutions for the

future was theoretically and practically severed from

the legal activity of a constituted government. Using the

terms of Emmanuel Sieyes, the French Revolution

opened a gap between the people's pouvoir constituant

("constituting power'') and the government's pouvoir

constitue ("constituted power''). The reality of the

revolution, so to speak, its power and its self-

authorization, was all on the side of the pouvoir

constituant which, according to Sieyes, existed in a

prepolitical "state of nature.'' The consequence was that

any written constitution and any constituted governing

body was liable to be suspended or disbanded in the

eventuality that a more direct expression of the people's

revolutionary power was called for. Schmitt calls the

unmediated expression of the people's revolutionary

power "sovereign dictatorship.'' It is fundamentally the

same as Sieyes' pouvoir constitutant.

11.

Schmitt distinguishes sovereign from "commissioned''

dictatorship. In commissioned dictatorship the

constitution itself defines the power of the dictator and

is therefore not suspended when a state of emergency

calls for the vesting of dictatorial powers in a

commissioned officer of the government. Schmitt finds

fault with the French constitution of 1793 for failing to

provide for such a commissioned dictatorship. As a

consequence of this failure, the outbreak of war and the

continuing struggle against domestic counter-revolution

led to the complete suspension of the constitution and

made it impossible to step out of the revolutionary

"state of nature'' into a legitimate political order.3

12.

The liberal bourgeois democracies that Schmitt sees as

the breeding ground of romanticism are products of

shifting political compromises between the bourgeoisie,

traditional monarchies, and, toward the middle of the

nineteenth century, the rising socialist proletariat. The

political compromises of the liberal bourgeois state

seek to prevent any future revolutionary upheavals.

Characteristic of the bourgeois order was a horror of

sovereign dictatorship. Legal formalism and

bureaucratic rationality replaced the political

decisiveness of the sovereign dictator. The sovereign

dictatorship of the people that the French Revolution

revealed for the first time was not entirely lost,

however. It took root, in a politically neutralized and

privatized form, in romantic subjectivity.

13.

Romantic subjectivity begins with a flight from the

political as the site of tawdry compromise and failure.

As I mentioned above, Schmitt identifies two

trajectories that romantic flight may take: towards

humanity and towards history, the "this-worldly

realities'' that replace God as the new metaphysical foci

of the nineteenth century. The first direction is taken by

those romantics who seek the creation of a liberated

humanity beyond national boundaries. The second

direction is chosen by those romantics who yearn for a

national identity that is rooted in the historical traditions

of the people. The romanticized concepts of humanity

and history are, in Schmitt's terms, the twin

"demiurges'' of political romanticism. The romantic

concept of a liberated humanity (foreshadowed by the

freedom of the romantic self) is the inheritance of the

French Revolution's dream of creating a society

founded upon "the rights of man.'' The romantic

concept of the historically rooted people reflects a

negative reaction against the French Revolution and

whatever measure of success it may have had in

breaking down social hierarchies within France and

Europe more generally. The romantic seeks to identify

with the supraindividual realities of humanity or

history, but what is most significant for him or her, says

Schmitt, is that concrete, historical reality is always

rejected as inauthentic. To deflate the everyday through

ironization is the romantic's common strategy. In

fleeing from the concrete into the realm of possibility,

whether of a revolutionary humanity or a traditionally

rooted people, the romantic seeks refuge in or another

"higher'' reality. Although at first the romantic is

confident of his or her capacity to create this new

reality through the power of the imagination, there soon

arises a disillusionment even with the possibility that

the ego can fabricate its own reality. "As a result,''

Schmitt writes, "they floated from one reality to

another: from the ego to the people, the 'idea,' the state,

history, the Church'' and ultimately came to feel that

they were themselves the "object of irony of numerous

true realities'' (1986: 92). Schmitt identifies this sense

of being the plaything of forces beyond one's control as

the "disillusionment'' of romanticism, its condition of

"despair.'' In despair, the romantic senses every event to

be a moment in the inexplicable unfolding of a reality

outside his power to change. Romantic subjectivity is

the intersection of this higher reality and the ennui of

everyday existence. Schmitt calls this "occasionalism,''

the notion that all human agency is illusory and merely

the occasio, the point of contact, between a realm of

infinite possibilities and the present moment. In place

of action, the romantic subject uses the occasion as a

point of access into the realm of pure possibility.

14.

Schmitt's discussion of romantic "occasionalism''

permits us to see most clearly how romantic

subjectivity structurally parallels sovereign dictatorship.

"Political romanticism,'' Schmitt explains, "is a

concomitant emotive response of the romantic to a

political event. This political event evokes a romantic

productivity in an occasional fashion'' (1986: 158).

Whatever political position the romantic subject takes

up, he or she is simply responding to political change

and not directly involved in it. Romantic subjectivity, of

course, falsely imagines itself to be the master of its

own reality, judging concrete, political reality to be the

mere "occasional points of departure'' for the "romantic

productivity of the creative ego.'' As a result of this self-

deceptive rejection of concrete political action, the

romantic subject's "sublime elevation above definition

and decision is transformed into a subservient

attendance upon alien power and alien decision'' (1986:

162). In contrast to this kind of passive subjectivity is

that of the individual who can discern that a particular

moment is the occasion for political decision. Such

decisive subjectivity does not respond to an occasion,

but creates it.4

15.

In contrast with what he took to be the romantic's

refusal to make any political decision that would

commit him to a single, finite reality, Schmitt

envisioned a politically decisive form of subjectivity

characteristic of sovereign dictatorship that would

reshape reality in a state of emergency

("Ausnahemzustand''). Schmitt articulates this

alternative to romantic subjectivity most fully in what

can be read as the companion piece to Political

Romanticism, namely, Political Theology. Despite the

differences between the two poles of romantically

indecisive and politically decisive subjectivities, both

share, as Schmitt describes them, a quest for god-like

power. We could say that the politically decisive

subjectivity, what Schmitt calls the sovereign, is a

higher form, a successful form, of romantic subjectivity.

The sovereign dictator is a kind of "hyper-romantic''

hero. In order to see how this is so requires a brief

examination of Schmitt's ideas about sovereignty more

generally. In the course of this examination I will

explain how, according to Schmitt, sovereign

dictatorship has come into being once again in Europe

with the rise of the fascist state. It is such a state that

Schmitt hopes will replace the Weimar Republic's

liberal bourgeois democracy.

16.

Schmitt developed his ideas about sovereign

subjectivity in Political Theology. This book and The

Concept of the Political (1927) are Schmitt's most

widely known works.5 It is useful to begin with the later

book, The Concept of the Political. In it, Schmitt

develops the idea that "the specifically political

distinction back to which political actions and motives

are able to be traced is the distinction between friend

and enemy [Freund und Feind]'' (1932: 14).6 Schmitt

understands the nature of the enemy to be the "the

other, the stranger, and it suffices for his nature that he

be, in an especially intense manner, existentially

something other and strange, in order that, in an

extreme case, conflicts with him are possible that

cannot be decided either through a previously applied

general standard [Normierung], or through the ruling of

a 'disinterested' and therefore 'impartial' third party''

(1932: 14-5). Because the conflict with the enemy in

the "extreme case'' cannot be resolved through

normative principles or formal procedures of impartial

adjudication, only a life and death struggle, i.e. war, can

decide the outcome. Likewise, the decision that an

"extreme case'' has in fact arisen cannot be made

through appeal to general norms or predefined criteria.

The decision that an extreme case exists is an

exceptional decision that both inaugurates and exercises

its power within a state of emergency. This decision is,

Schmitt declares, the defining feature of sovereign

power. Schmitt puts this claim in the opening sentence

of his book Political Theology: "Sovereign is he who

decides in the matter of a state of emergency''

[Souveran ist, wer uber den Ausnahmezustand

entscheidet] (1934: 11). The decision of the sovereign

about the state of emergency reveals the political as

such. The sovereign political decision is not a form of

moral judgment, aesthetic judgment, or economic

calculation. No matter how a state may be faring from a

cultural or economic perspective, if it lacks the power

to make the sovereign political decision it is doomed to

be overcome by a state that does. We might say that the

health or morbidity of the state rests entirely upon this

point.7

17.

Schmitt advanced his claims about the concept of the

political and the nature of sovereignty as part of an

attack on the liberal bourgeois state. Briefly, Schmitt

believes that the liberal state seeks to "neutralize'' all

political decisions. In the liberal state, bureaucratic

expertise and the technological rationality of norms and

standards ("technicity'') have almost completely

usurped the site of sovereign decision.8 Schmitt

embraced the fascist state as the only viable alternative

to liberal bourgeois democracy in what he believed was

the "existential'' threat confronting Europe, namely,

Bolshevism.

18.

Schmitt considered fascist dictatorship to be Europe's

only political option in its confrontation with the

Bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat. But Schmitt

did not believe that fascism was the overturning of

democracy. Rather, Schmitt took fascism to be

democracy's authentic political expression. In

Dictatorship Schmitt argued that dictatorship emerges

during a "state of emergency'' ("Ausnahmezustand'').

Clearly, dictatorship therefore qualifies as the

expression of the political par excellence. Schmitt

further identifies the "inner dialectic of the concept'' of

dictatorship (1964: xvi) to be its power to dispense with

normative legality and yet retain legitimacy.

Traditionally, the legitimacy of dictatorship had been

derived from a special "commission'' granted to the

dictator by the sovereign. Schmitt, as we have seen,

claimed that a new form of dictatorship, sovereign

dictatorship, arose in the course of the French

Revolution. In sovereign dictatorship the will of the

people comes to direct expression. Sovereign

dictatorship is therefore a form legitimate power,

although it exists outside any legal constitutional

framework. There is no formal method for allowing the

people's will to be expressed, such as a secret ballot.

The secret ballot merely dissolves the people's will into

an aggregate of private wills. Authentic democracy

brings the people's will to expression through

acclamation. In his defense of what he calls "direct

democracy'' Schmitt writes that

where there still exists a people [Volk] and wherever it

finds itself, even if it is gathered together as a

collectivity of spectators at a race course where it

demonstrates signs of political life, it manifests its will

through acclamation. In reality, there is no type of state

that could stand up to such acclamations. Even the

absolute prince needs the crowds of his people who line

the streets and cry "Hurrah.'' Acclamation is an eternal

phenomenon of every political community. No state

without a people, no people without acclamations.

(1927: 31)

Sovereign dictatorship comes into being through

acclamation and creates a new normative order where

the word of the dictator expresses the will of the people.

As such, it is the law. According to Schmitt, Weimar's

constitution contained the "residuum'' of sovereign

dictatorship in Article 48, Section 2 that provided

emergency powers to the president. Schmitt believed

that the use of this Article could liberate Germany from

its moribund, depoliticized condition and inaugurate an

authentically democratic state.9

19.

Summarizing the argument thus far we can say that

Schmitt considered the revolutionary and redemptive

potential of sovereign dictatorship to be lying dormant

within the constitutional constraints of the moribund

liberal state, waiting to be reactivated. Just as Marx in

the Communist Manifesto calls for the shattering of

religion in the name of an awakening of the authentic

consciousness of the working class, Schmitt believes

that the reawakening of revolutionary fascist

dictatorship - direct democracy - depends upon

shattering the religion of the liberal state, namely,

romanticism. The romantic subject flees from the

bureaucratic formalism and technologized rationality of

the liberal state into the realm of imagination where,

Schmitt asserts, he becomes a priest of his own god-like

ego. Romanticism offers an illusion of freedom and

autonomy to the liberal subject that prevents him from

achieving true freedom in the "political life'' of direct

democracy. The liberal subject must break through the

private illusions of romanticism and participate in the

decisive acclamation of the sovereign dictator.

20.

In the next section I will discuss Stanley Cavell's very

different understanding of romantic subjectivity, one

that sees in it a renunciation of god-like sovereignty in

favor of a sharply circumscribed, mundane, but

commonly shared, humanity. Cavell's interpretation of

the nature of romantic subjectivity will provide the

basis for a reading of Frank Capra's film, It Happened

One Night.

Kant, Capra, Romanticism

21.

Romanticism is, for Cavell, precisely a rejection of the

quest for god-like autonomy, what he identifies as the

temptation lying behind skepticism. Such a rejection

has profound implications for grounding democratic

sociality in what Cavell refers to as the

"acknowledgment'' of our mutual finitude.10

Skepticism, Cavell claims, expresses the individual's

sense that his connection to the world is questionable,

based on possibly illusory evidence. The everyday

world has lost its moorings for the skeptic. For Cavell,

this loss of moorings is endemic to the enterprise of

philosophy itself. The skeptic seeks the certitude of

knowledge that only a god could possess. The demand

that skepticism makes upon the world, that it provide

epistemological and metaphysical security, can never

be met. The skeptic dwells in a condition of self-

imposed exile from the world and its insecurities. The

way beyond the skeptic's quest for certitude is shown

by romantic writers like Emerson and Thoreau. In his

analysis of the Emersonian response to skepticism,

Cavell asserts that Emerson writes himself into

existence, authors himself, in his address to readers,

calling them to risk a venture beyond their self-limiting

alienation. This self-authoring, unlike the romantic self-

absorbed play with infinite possibilities that Schmitt

describes, risks itself in "the promise that the private

and the social will be achieved together'' (1988: 114).

The claims that Emerson makes for his writing, Cavell

states, are "first, that it proves his human existence (i.e.,

establishes his right to say 'I,' to tell himself to and from

others); second, that what he has proven on his behalf,

others are capable of proving on theirs'' (p. 114). This

kind of romanticism seeks to build a community

precisely through its transfiguring vision of the

insecurities of the world as occasions for reconsecrating

oneself to the companionate bonds that can link us

together. As Raymond Carney puts it in his study of

Capra's films as embodiments of Emersonian

romanticism, "to reach beyond the self to recognize and

honor one's enriching, troubling, stimulating

connections with others'' is the central thrust of

American romanticism.

22.

Cavell situates the philosophical roots of Emersonian

romanticism in Kant. While Cavell frequently names

the Critique of Pure Reason as the text to which the

romantics are responding, it is more useful to begin

with Kant's Critique of Judgment.11

This text delineates

the realm of the aesthetic as based upon a presentation

(Darstellung) that is not "mediated by concepts.'' In

summarizing his argument about the philosophical basis

of the comedies of remarriage, Cavell makes significant

use of Kant's definition of the aesthetic judgment:

"uniquely in this genre of comedy, so far as I know, the

happiness of marriage is dissociated from any a priori

concept of what constitutes domesticity (you might also

call marriage in these films the taking of mutual

pleasure without a concept-whether two people are

married does not necessarily depend on what age they

are, or what gender, or whether legally)'' (1988: 178).

23.

Kant argues that the aesthetic judgment takes place

when the subject asserts the predicate "beautiful'' of an

object not because it is an instance of any objective

concept of beauty, but because it can elicit within the

subject what Kant calls "the free play of imagination

and understanding '' (1952: 58). For Kant, the aesthetic

judgment of beauty (the judgment of sublimity is

different) results from our sense of an object's - a

flower's, say - purely formal harmonies of shape and

color, without any reference to the utility of these

harmonies. The formal harmony of a tulip, for example,

seems to be an "end in itself'' and not purposeful: "A

flower ...such as a tulip is regarded as beautiful,

because we meet with a certain finality in its perception

which, in our estimate of it, is not referred to any end

whatsoever'' (80, n. 1). What Kant calls "free beauty'' is

something that exceeds instrumental or practical

considerations related to the object's use (72-4). Free

beauty arouses within us a sympathetic chord, the

purposeless delight in the free employment of the

cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding to

register such formal harmonies. In contrast, when the

subject apprehends an object and identifies it as an

instance of a general concept - identifying a flower as a

tulip, for instance - there is no free play between the

faculty of imagination (which is responsible for the

presentation of the sensory manifold as a single object

within space and time) and the faculty of understanding

(which is responsible for the conceptual unity that

allows us to call the object "tulip''). The subsumption of

an object under a concept is entirely governed by

objective rules, Kant insists, but the aesthetic judgment

lacks such rules: "There can be no objective rule of

taste by which what is beautiful can be defined by

means of concepts'' (75).

24.

Kant goes further and declares that we do not only

depend upon the natural world to give us a sense of the

beautiful. Kant says that we humans can also create

beauty, and this is the result of genius. Genius arises

from the freedom of the imagination to produce

representations that do not merely conform to a rule

(how to draw a flower, for example) or fall under a

general concept. Genius employs its imaginative

freedom in order to render an unrepresentable idea, an

idea that no single representation could contain. Kant

offers the example of a poet who seeks to present

heaven and hell in his work (one thinks of Dante,

though he is not mentioned by Kant). Neither the

blessedness of heaven nor the suffering of hell is part of

human experience, but they can be imaginatively

represented. Kant claims that the aesthetic imagination

can represent that which transcends human experience -

and he adds that this is true even for things within

human experience such as love, hate, envy and so forth

that are incapable of being experienced in their

completeness - when it creates forms that "animate the

mind by opening out a prospect for it of kindred

representations stretching beyond its ken'' (177-78). In

other words, the aesthetic imagination that is

responsible for works of genius awakens a sense of an

unending series of new representations of the work's

aesthetic idea. The work of genius becomes an example

for further aesthetic production. Being exemplary, the

work of genius can never be reduced to a technique

with fixed rules. Each new product of genius redefines

the genre and sets up new rules: "On this showing, the

product of genius (in respect of so much in this product

as is attributable to genius, and to possible learning or

academic instruction) is an example, not for imitation

...but to be followed by another genius-one whom it

arouses to a sense of his own originality in putting

freedom from the constraint of rules so into force in his

art that for art itself a new rule is won ...'' (181).

25.

What most intellectual historians, including Schmitt,

have identified as central for the thinkers and artists

after Kant who may be labelled "romantic'' is the

possibility of locating human freedom within the

imagination as the source of aesthetic creativity.12

The

sharp line they will draw between mere rule-following

"technique'' and rule-breaking creative genius clearly

derives from Kant. Kant's insistence that the work of

genius represents the unrepresentable idea by arousing

a sense that the work is just one in an unending series of

future representations is one of the major sources for

the romantic emphasis upon the incompletion or

fragmentary nature of the artwork. And, of course, the

sharp distinction between beauty and utility that Kant

draws leads directly to the romantic emphasis upon

artistic freedom from bourgeois economic rationality.

26.

For Cavell, the most important inheritance of

Emersonian romanticism from Kant is not found in any

of these themes, however. Rather, Cavell points to the

problem at the heart of Kant's Critique of Judgment

about how the aesthetic judgment can be more than

merely a subjective matter of taste, how it is able to be

the shared response to the world.13

The claim that our

aesthetic judgments are not merely subjective but can

be "universally communicated'' allows Kant to respond

to the challenge of scepticism. The sceptical position

denies not only that we can know that our perceptions

match reality, but, more fundamentally, that humans

can ever communicate their perceptions to another

since there may be an unbridgeable chasm between

each person's way of responding to reality. The

universalizability of aesthetic judgment would answer

this challenge by demonstrating that our cognitive

faculties, our imagination and our understanding, are

tuned to the same harmony from one person to another.

Kant says that without the communicablity of our

aesthetic judgments "cognitions and judgments ...would

be a conglomerate constituting a mere subjective play

of the powers of representation, just as scepticism

would have it'' (83). The defeat of scepticism lies within

the terrain of imagination, not within the terrain of

concepts. Concepts may be commonly shared by virtue

of conventions about how to use words; but imagination

cannot be shared unless humans possess some deeply

constitutive commonality. Kant calls this "common

sense'' and defines it as "the necessary condition of the

universal communicability of our knowledge, which is

presupposed in every logic and every principle of

knowledge that is not one of scepticism'' (84). In other

words, if we cannot share our sense of the beautiful

which arises from the "fit'' between our imagination and

our understanding, we cannot share anything.

27.

Kant says that we cannot help but feel that our sense of

what is beautiful is commonly shared: "we tolerate no

one else being of a different opinion'' (84). As Kant

says, my judgment is one that I take to be exemplary,

just as genius creates the exemplary work of art.

Common sense is also, says Kant, a "public'' sense, "a

critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account

(a priori) of the mode of representation of every one

else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the

collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the

illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions

which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion

that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its

judgments'' (151). By its focus upon the sheer pleasure

of the object's formal harmony and not upon any

"interest'' the object may have for us, the aesthetic

judgment is able to be free from prejudice and thus

provides a model for how to think with others in mind.

Kant writes: "the aesthetic, rather than the intellectual

judgment can bear the name of a public sense .... We

might even define taste as the faculty of estimating

what makes our feeling in a given representation

universally communicable without the mediation of a

concept'' (153). The challenge of scepticism can be met

by showing that we share a common "tuning'' between

our imaginations and our understanding that permits us

to respond to beauty.

28.

The foundation of our ability to judge without prejudice

or ulterior interests rests upon our ability to sense

beauty. But, Kant adds, if we never make our sense of

the beautiful public we cannot truly be said to feel

beauty. Our feeling, once it rises to the level of

judgment, asserts itself as universally communicable,

and the subject therefore has an interest in realizing this

potential for communication. This interest, Kant says, is

the result of the empirical fact that humans live

together: "The empirical interest in the beautiful exists

only in society'' (155). "The beginning of civilization,''

Kant avers, lies in the dissatisfaction with a merely

private enjoyment of beauty, when an individual "is not

quite satisfied with an Object unless his feeling of

delight in it can be shared in communion with others''

(155). This, according to Cavell, is key to

understanding the inheritance of Emersonian

romanticism from Kant. Cavell, as we saw above, reads

Emerson as laying emphasis upon the need to author, to

publish, oneself in the address to the other, something

Cavell also calls "subjecting yourself ...to intelligibility''

(1988: 115). I take this to be a paraphrase of Kant's idea

that the exemplary work of genius and the exemplary

aesthetic judgment bears within itself the necessity for

being universally communicable. Emerson's romantic

inheritance of Kant is to take the concept of exemplary

genius and make it, like Kant's aesthetic judgment, the

possession of every human. Quoting the fourth sentence

of Emerson's "Self-Reliance,'' "To believe your own

thought, to believe that what is true for you in your

private heart is true for all men,-that is genius,'' Cavell

comments:

(One path from these words leads to the transformation

of the romantic idea of genius: Genius is not a special

endowment like virtuosity, but a stance toward

whatever endowment you discover is yours, as if life

itself were a gift, and remarkable.) Genius is

accordingly the name of the promise that the private

and the social will be achieved together, hence of our

perception that our lives now take place in the absence

of either. (1988: 114).

The promise that private and social, or public, cannot

be achieved except together goes directly back to Kant's

understanding that no aesthetic judgment can be true if

it does not claim to be true for everyone, the mark of

Emersonian genius. One can hear in this formulation, I

know, the voice of dictatorship. It is important to keep

in mind that Kant's, and Emerson's, idea of genius

requires that genius open, not close off, the possibility

of a response from another. The claim to speak what is

true for all others only makes sense if others can find it

the occasion to articulate their truth. This is what Cavell

means when he describes marriage, following Milton,

as a "meet and happy conversation.'' Such a

conversation, Cavell insists, is not mere talk, but

"articulate responsiveness, expressiveness,'' a "mode of

association, a form of life'' (1981: 87) Whether America

"is earning the conversation it demands'' in the promise

of "its new birth of freedom'' is the question to which

the comedies of remarriage are addressed (1981: 152-

53). We might add, the failure to earn this conversation,

call this America's divorce from its constitution, would

be marriage of another kind, the unhappy marriage that

Milton compares to tyranny (quoted in Cavell 1981:

150).

29.

Cavell's identification of marriage "without the

mediation of a concept'' as an emblem for a public

space of conversation derives from the strain of

American romanticism developed most prominently in

Emerson. The difference between Cavell's positive take

on American romanticism and Schmitt's negative

appraisal of the European romantic tradition can be

measured precisely by their respective evaluation of the

idea that the political is marked as the site of

conversation. Schmitt claims the political

indecisiveness of the romantic is revealed in his

devotion to "endless conversation'' (1986: 27, 139-40).

Where conversation is, for Cavell, the very heart of

democratic sociability, for Schmitt it is only an excuse

for evading the political. It is hardly accidental that

when Schmitt describes the moment when the people

emerge from their political alienation, it is the moment

of acclamation when they speak with one voice. In the

next section of the paper I will, with the help of Arendt,

explain the differences between these two "political

romanticisms'' as the result of the different legacies of

the American and French Revolutions.

30.

Let me try to define more precisely what are the

political implications of the Kantian notion that our

capacity to respond to beauty forms the basis of our

sociability. It may at first sight seem as if this notion is

radically apolitical in that its stress falls on the non-

utilitarian, one might say purely imaginative, realm of

beauty. Yet this is one of Cavell's points: sociability

cannot be reduced to a contract entered into for the sake

of economic gain or even sheer survival. Kant puts it

this way: "a regard to universal communicability is a

thing which every one expects and requires from every

one else, just as if it were part of an original compact

dictated by humanity itself'' (1952: 155).

Communicability, or "conversation'' as Cavell puts it, is

its own end. Politics is about maintaining the conditions

for this communicability. Another point we can make is

that we enter into this shared life of communication in a

realm not "mediated by concepts.'' That is, there can be

no rules constraining what counts as "civilized'' or

"civil'' or "public.'' The implication for politics is that

no law can constrain in advance and dictate the shape of

our sociability. We must be free and equal partners in

the creation of the consensus that Kant identifies as the

result of our common sense. We build this consensus

with only our confidence that what we feel is, in fact,

communicable and will meet with a response from the

other. Apart from this initiative, we cannot claim to

have a human existence. Cavell, in a passage quoted

above, says of Emerson's writing that "it proves his

human existence (i.e., proves his right to say 'I,' to tell

himself from others and to others)'' (1988: 114). I

consent, therefore I exist.

31.

The political romanticism that Cavell claims as an

inheritance from Kant is not by any means a pacifist or

sentimental utopianism. In fact, it shares with Schmitt

the notion that the political is the site of the friend and

enemy configuration. However, it understands friend

and enemy in a very different way than Schmitt does.

32.

Cavell explains how, precisely, the romantic authors he

most frequently appeals to, Emerson and Thoreau,

make themselves the enemy of a democratic nation too

much in conformity with itself, too secure in its

consensus. For Emerson and Thoreau, writing is a

strategy of political resistance, an act chosen in place of

what Thoreau calls "running amok'' against society: "I

preferred that society should run 'amok' against me, it

being the desperate party'' (Walden, VIII,3; quoted in

Cavell 1992: 86). This is what Thoreau calls his

"neighborliness,'' a form of political friendship we

might say. Thoreau draws near, nigh, to his friends - we

could also say that he draws them near to him - by

addressing them with words that force them to see their

Union as built upon arbitrary and unjust exclusions: of

the Indian, of the slave. To be Thoreau's neighbor is to

withdraw from the Union, to become isolated in order

to renew the Union in accordance with the promise of

its Constitution. Cavell writes about Walden that it is "a

tract of political education, education for membership

in the polis. It locates authority in the citizens - those

with whom one is in membership - as 'neighbors.' What

it shows is that education for citizenship is education

for isolation'' (1992: 85). Thoreau no less than Schmitt

calls for the people to recognize their friend and their

enemy, only their friend is their present enemy (i.e.,

Thoreau himself) and their future enemy must be,

precisely, themselves (in their present constitution). In

describing Emerson's writing in his essay "Aversive

Thinking,'' Cavell compares Emerson's stance to that of

the reader's "other self,'' Aristotle's definition of the

friend. "To see Emerson's philosophical authorship as

taking up the ancient position of the friend,'' Cavell

says, "we have to include the inflection (more brazen in

Nietzsche but no less explicit in Emerson) of my friend

as my enemy (contesting my present attainments)''

(1990: 59). This kind of authorship seeks to become the

enemy of "the state of conformity and despair in what

has become of the democratic aspiration'' (59).

Emerson's "aversive'' thinking, Cavell claims, "provides

for the democratic aspiration the only internal measure

of its truth to itself - a voice only this aspiration could

have inspired, and, if it is lucky, must inspire'' (59).

Emerson thus becomes, in his own person, the enemy

and the friend (indeed, lover) of the democratic society:

Since his aversion is a continual turning away from

society, it is thereby a continual turning toward it.

Toward and away; it is a moment of seduction-such as

philosophy will contain. It is in response to this

seduction from our seductions (conformities,

heteronomies) that the friend (discovered or

constructed) represents the standpoint of perfection.

(1990: 59)

I take this characterization of Emersonian friend/enemy

authorship as the "internal measure'' of democracy's

truth to itself to be a "politics of friendship.'' I take this

phrase from the title of Derrida's book on, primarily,

Schmitt's Concept of the Political. Derrida too goes

back to Aristotle and Nietzsche in order to recuperate a

concept of the enemy who is also a friend, and of a kind

of authorship, or address, that, if a community is

"lucky,'' calls to it, seduces it, from out of its future, its

always unattained moral perfection as Cavell says.

Derrida calls this lucky aversiveness "the logic of the

perhaps'' (1997: 70). A fuller explication of the

commonalites of Emersonian romanticism and

Derrida's politics of friendship would require a separate

essay. I simply want, now, to point to their deep

affinities, and take this as evidence for my claim that

Emersonian/Cavellian political romanticism offers a

significant alternative to the Schmittian idea that the

political is defined by the friend and enemy

configuration.14

33.

I have tried thus far to explicate more clearly Cavell's

understanding of how Kant informs the romanticism of

Emerson and Thoreau. I hope to have shown how the

political implications of this romantic inheritance

directly contest Schmitt's critique of political

romanticism as the expression of liberal, bourgeois

subjectivity's incapacity to make a decision. Schmitt's

turn to fascism in order to discover authentic political

decision in the acclamation of the people of a dictator

shares with Emersonian romanticism an aversion to the

false sense of community that is really just an

agreement to maintain the status quo in the liberal

bourgeois state. But Emersonian romanticism calls for a

new form of neighborliness that begins with self-enmity

aroused by a voice that is both friend (to one's future

self) and enemy (of one's present self). The call of this

voice, if it is lucky, arouses a public "conversation'' and

conversion. Schmitt has no faith in this voice - he does

not hear it in the European romantic tradition - and as a

result he voices the call for a dictator who can decide a

different kind of friend-enemy configuration. Otherwise

put, Schmitt's politics offers no space for

neighborliness.

34.

The (re)turn to conversation in place of mere

conformity is staged in the comedies of remarriage. It is

to Cavell's analysis of these comedies and, in particular,

Capra's It Happened One Night, that I will now turn.

35.

It is one of the major burdens of Cavell's Pursuits of

Happiness to identify the comedies of remarriage as

precisely that popular art form in which the American

political genius emerges. These film romances, Cavell

insists, are "of national importance'' (1984: 172). The

comedy of remarriage is, in Cavell's analysis, a political

allegory. It stages the founding of the social contract -

marriage - after the "fall of man,'' that is, after the loss

of the "natural'' harmony of man and woman in Eden. It

is not accident that two of the films in the genre make

overt reference in their titles to the story of Eden:

Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve'' (1941) and George

Cukor's "Adam's Rib'' (1949).

36.

The political allegory of the comedies of remarriage

describes the recovery of a state of grace after the exile

of the primal couple from paradise. The sociality that

follows the expulsion from paradise and precedes the

recovery of grace is not, in Cavell's rephrasing of this

history, one of Hobbesian war, nor is it Rousseauan

innocence. It is the sociality of "stupidity in the face of

the riddle of intimacy,'' the inability to live together

with one's closest "helpmeet'' without reducing that

togetherness to a mere formality, or to an economic

instrumentality. The comedy of remarriage charts the

path to grace that is not achieved through an act of

entering into a contract, but through a surrender to

"transience'' and "homelessness'' as the shared

experience of human togetherness, and as the site of

forgiveness and reconciliation. In reconciling the

woman to the husband from whom she has been

alienated, the comedy of remarriage challenges us to

think about the very nature of human togetherness.

They ask us to think about the basis of the social

contract and about

what constitutes a union, what makes these two into

one, what binds, you may say sanctifies in marriage.

When is marriage an honorable estate? In raising this

question these films imply not only that the church has

lost its power over this authentication but that society as

a whole cannot be granted it. In thus questioning the

legitimacy of marriage, the question of the legitimacy

of society is simultaneously raised, even allegorized.

(Cavell 1981: 53)

The comedies of remarriage do not call for a

repudiation of contracts and the formalities of

authentication, but for a sanctification of these contracts

through a rededication to them beyond any legitimating

power, beyond any guarantees, whether legal,

epistemological, or metaphysical.

37.

Let us, then, consider the Frank Capra film It Happened

One Night (1934). In Cavell's analysis, this film

explores the epistemological limits to any social

contract, that is, the limits to our knowledge of

ourselves and others that might serve somehow to

anchor or guarantee the viability of our social

fabrications. Operating within the American romantic

tradition, the comedies of remarriage, and It Happened

One Night most particularly, are struggling to think

through themes of human togetherness within a post-

Kantian matrix. The noumenal realm of the moral law

serves to explicate what it takes to become a member of

a human community, a will to act together:

This realm is also a world "beyond'' the world we

inhabit, a noumenal realm, open to reason, standing to

reason; but I am not fated to be debarred from it as I am

from the realm of things-in-themselves, by my sensuous

nature; for the perfected human community can be

achieved, it may at last be experienced, it is in principle

presentable. Yet, there is between me and this realm of

reason also something that may present itself as a

barrier-the fact that I cannot reach this realm alone.

(1981: 79)

The path beyond solipsism into sociality is the path

taken by an act of the will to join the community of

self-legislators, but this community does not and can

not present itself beforehand as an already constituted

body with, as we might say, "naturalization papers''

available to those who approach its borders. This

community is created through the will to join it, ever

again renewed. We cannot picture this community as a

constituted unity with defined borders; it is presented to

us as the aspiration of the "better angels of our nature.''

If we do not achieve it, it is due, as Cavell says in

explicating the Kantian doctrine of the evil will, "to our

willing against it, to the presence of moral evil. This

takes moral evil as the will to exempt oneself, to isolate

oneself, from the human community. It is a choice of

inhumanity, of monstrousness'' (1981: 80). In the realm

of the human, knowledge is indeed limited, but the will

is free to dwell within the isolated space of that

limitation or to dwell together with others in the

absence of epistemological certainty about the

constitution of the community into which one is about

to enter. The demand for this kind of assurance and

certainty forecloses the grace of betrothal. This is one

of the leitmotifs of Cavell's readings of the American

philosophical tradition.

38.

Cavell pays special attention to the motif of the

"barrier-screen'' in It Happened One Night. The barrier-

screen is a blanket, thrown over a clothesline, that the

protagonists use as a makeshift divider in the auto camp

cottages they share. The barrier-screen, Cavell claims,

stages the problems confronting us in our choice to

dwell together despite the absence of epistemological or

metaphysical guarantees. It is the physical

representation of the barrier that separates us as

noumenal selves from one another. It can only fall, as

Cavell says, when both parties cease to act alone. Since

the barrier-screen functions so importantly, the scene in

which it is erected is an apt point at which to begin the

analysis of the film.

39.

Peter Warne (Clark Gable), a newspaper man, has

found a runaway, the heiress of a great fortune, Ellie

Andrews (Cluadette Colbert). Ellie had just eloped but,

"kidnaped'' by her father, she had not been able to

consummate her marriage. Her father wants to dissolve

the marriage, suspecting the husband, rightly it turns

out, of being a fortune-seeker. Ellie manages to escape

from her father's yacht, anchored off the Florida coast,

and, nearly broke, she sets off to be reunited with her

husband in New York. Peter, recognizing her on a night

bus they happen to share, plans to milk the situation for

a great story as he pretends to assist Ellie in making her

escape. At the end of their three-day trip to New York,

they discover that they have fallen in love with one

another. On their first night they find themselves

sharing a cabin at an auto park and Peter constructs the

makeshift barrier to separate their beds and offer the

woman the privacy to undress and him a respite from

"prying eyes.'' The blanket is nothing more than a

symbolic barrier, but Gable identifies as the "walls of

Jericho.'' He has no trumpet, he tells Ellie, so she can

consider herself safe.

40.

As Cavell points out, any viewer familiar with the

conventions of the Hollywood romance of the period

will know that, once having identified the blanket with

the walls of Jericho, the final scene of the movie will

show us the collapse of the "walls.'' But however it will

finally dismantle the symbolic structure, the film wants

us to imagine that the barrier is no less unbreachable

than were the walls of Jericho and that what it will take

to have them tumble is nothing less than a miracle, a

breach of the natural order. It will require, in other

words, something like what Kant requires of humans if

they are to become more than sensuous beings, namely,

a willingness to join a human community without the

assurance of knowing in advance who dwells there, or

even if there is a "there'' there.

41.

At the end of the film, Peter and Ellie, now married,

return to the auto park. They have bought a toy trumpet

and, from outside the cabin, we hear its playful notes,

and then we see the barrier-screen pulled down. We do

not see the hands that pull it down, suggesting that it

was a mutual act, an overcoming of the enmity

separating the Israelites and the Canaanites inside

Jericho. (Peter had, in fact, identified Ellie with the

Israelites when he had asked her, after he first set up the

barrier, to cross to the other side and "join the

Israelites.'')

42.

Before Peter and Ellie are able to tear down the walls of

Jericho, they must overcome the obstacle of the

marriage of Ellie to King Westley, the man with whom

she had eloped. Since this is a comedy of remarriage,

the couple must marry only having first been lost to one

another. Understanding how it happens that Gable

"remarries'' Colbert will allow me to bring out another

important theme of this movie, and several other Capra

movies, namely, the imagined world of the stars. I will

also say something of the historical situation in which

the film was made, namely, the rise of German fascism.

43.

On the evening of the final day of their trip to New

York, Ellie makes a declaration of love and a proposal

of marriage to Peter. She turns to him because he has

just shared with her, as he lay in bed on his side of the

barrier, his dream of love. Peter says that he dreams of

finding "somebody that's real, somebody that's alive'' to

share a life with him on a Pacific island he once saw

where "the stars are so close over your head that you

feel you could reach right up and stir them around.'' On

this island, he says, "you feel as if you're part of

something big and marvelous.'' Cavell doesn't make this

point, but it seems that Peter's words could nicely

describe the experience of watching these stars above

our heads in the movie theater. Ellie crosses over to his

side of the barrier and tells him that she is the girl of his

dreams. Peter remains silent and somewhat later he

leaves Ellie as she sleeps on her side of the "walls of

Jericho.'' Peter has gone off to sell his story - now the

big news is that Ellie Andrews will not marry King

Westley, but him - to his newspaper editor. He wants to

get an advance on "the biggest scoop of the year'' so

that, as he tells his editor, "the walls of Jericho can fall.''

44.

Peter's reverie about the Pacific Island where the stars

"are so close you feel you could reach right up and stir

them around'' is an emblematic moment for Capra's

film. Ellie's gauze-lit face beside Peter's side of the

blanket appears in the following shot. She has crossed

the barrier, and she proceeds to announce her

willingness to join Peter in the world of his dream. Her

face seems both to look upon Peter and also reflect her

own reverie of the star-filled sky. Her enraptured face

on the screen draws the viewer into the reverie and

represents, in its haloed light, the object of the viewer's

reverie: the face of the star. Capra in his autobiography

twice identifies our higher selves - we might say our

noumenal selves - with the stars, once calling humans a

"miracle born of time and star dust,'' and in another

place "a divine mingle-mangle of guts and star dust''

(1971: 177,495). The moment of private reverie in

Capra's films captures the astral self's vision of its

authentic home. Such a private reverie occurs in Meet

John Doe when John Doe (Gary Cooper) reads his

radio speech about a world lived as if every day were

Christmas. As he speaks, we see the face of the hard-

bitten editor of the newspaper. His gaze is that of such a

visionary reverie of the world evoked by John Doe's

words. It is a world where we are all stars, or, rather,

angels. The opening of Capra's most famous movie, It's

a Wonderful Life, is of the starry night sky. As we hear

the voice-over dialogue between God and the angels,

stars alternately pulse in brightness, in harmony with

the dialogue. Capra seems to be familiar with the

tradition, given its classic expression in Cicero's Dream

of Scipio, that our immortal selves are astral in nature.

But our angelic, divine selves can only come into being

when our private reverie is made public, when it has

been become political (this, too, is a Ciceronian claim).

For Capra, this means that our reverie must awaken

another self and call the other to join us in the realm of

the stars. In It's a Wonderful Life, the angel's task,

required in order to get his wings, is precisely to allow

George (Jimmy Stewart) to acknowledge what it means

to be a star, and at the conclusion of the film we see

George's face as it is transfigured by a reverie evoked

by his daughter's words about the ringing of a bell, that

it signals that an angel has just acquired his wings. A

world that offers no occasion for realizing in public

one's private reverie - a world without stars - is what

George is permitted to see when his tutelary angel,

Clarence, removes him from the world. This removal is,

first of all, meant to represent the world as it has

evolved in the absence of George's existence. But it can

also be understood to be the world as seen through

anyone's eyes when the "star dust'' has been taken from

them. Such a world lacks the possibility of any

transfiguring vision. Capra would say, it lacks the

possibility of Christmas. What each of us contributes to

the world, then, is this possibility. In this film, the star

is Jimmy Stewart, but only because he allows us to see

our own stardom.

45.

Since Capra connects the thematic of stardom with

Christmas, we can be sure that he is invoking the

Matthean tradition of the star that guided the magi to

the infant Jesus. The star points to the Messiah, and

signals messianic natality. Capra's Jesus is very much

an Emersonian one, the figuration of our own authentic

selves, our own stardom. Capra seeks to awaken the

viewer's stardom by haloing the face of his stars on

screen in moments of private reverie. He both exalts the

face and exalts the viewer. But this is no mere

narcissistic identification of viewer and star; rather, it is

an invitation to create - or direct, we might say - a

shared world. The face of the star is the emblem of

Kantian - and Emersonian - genius as both exemplary

and common, the revelation of stardom in the "mug.''15

Capra's message, made explicit in Meet John Doe, is

that this face is all that stands between us and the mass

media seductions of a fascist spectacle that seeks to

reduce our common stardom to the "guts'' of a mob. For

Capra, the only pure political deed is the

communication of one's inner vision of the starry realm,

subjecting oneself to intelligibility as Cavell puts it.

There is a risk is that the deed will be used to serve

partisan political ends, or that it will be silenced by the

cries of a mob (as it is in Meet John Doe), or that it will

be considered insanity (as it is in Mr. Deeds Goes to

Town). Ultimately, the communication must be

translated into the mundane rhythms of day-to-day life,

the life of marriage to begin with. This is the

domestication of stardom, to be sure, but it is also the

acknowledgment that we have "guts,'' or "bellies,'' that

also have claims upon us. (This is what Odysseus

reminds Achilles of in the Iliad (Bk. 19). The flame that

burns like a star over Achilles is a signal of his

connection to divinity, but it also signals his loss of

humanity. Only Odysseus with his hungering belly can

return home in the West's most famous "comedy of

remarriage.'')

46.

Let us pick up the story of Peter and Ellie. Before Peter

returns from his editor with the advance on the story

giving him the money he needs to accept Ellie's

proposal of marriage to him, and make his own to her,

Ellie has awakened to find him gone. She thinks he has

left her and she calls her father to come and get her. She

returns with him to hold a public ceremony of marriage

to King Westley. Her father unwillingly acknowledges

that Ellie has achieved her independence. Ellie, for her

part, continues to long for Peter, but she sees no hope to

escape her status as the "brat'' that Peter has teasingly

named her. Peter's apparent rejection of her drives her

to abandon herself to an unhappy marriage with King

Westley. On the day of her public ceremony, she seeks

to drown her self-disgust with alcohol. The press and

newsreel crews surround her house. The public wants

this marriage, and Ellie is willing to give them what it

wants. We know, as does Ellie, that it is an entirely

false, one might even say degraded, image of happiness

that is seducing the public. The great moment that all

are awaiting is the arrival of King Westley in an "auto-

gyro,'' an airplane with helicopter-like wings attached

above the fuselage. Together with her desperate appeal

to King Westley to "get on a merry-go-round and never

get off,'' the reference to the auto-gyro suggests that the

adventure on the road with Peter has ended with merely

narcissistic play, going nowhere.

47.

As her father walks Ellie to the altar, he tells her that

Peter does in fact still want her - he had met with him

earlier to settle the account of $36.92 that Peter had

spent during his trip with Ellie - and that "it would

make an old man happy'' to see her run away and join

him. He has even prepared a getaway car. At the last

minute, just before she pronounces "I do,'' she runs for

the car and drives away.

48.

I have rehearsed the story of Ellie's aborted public

marriage to King Westley because I believe it can be

seen as a political allegory of the compromise with

fascism that people of Ellie's class might be tempted to

make. This is something that Capra will explicitly

depict in his later film, Meet John Doe (1941). Since It

Happened One Night was made during 1933, Capra

was not, of course, shaping his story to reflect Hitler's

astute manipulation of both aristocrats and industrialists

to gain the position of Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

What I am claiming is that Capra is portraying the

moral decline of Ellie as a representative of her class.

This decline was something Capra understood could be

manipulated for political ends. The portrayal of King

Westley is precisely of a decadent aristocrat who is

interested only in parasiting upon the wealth of the

industrialist father. The swashbuckling, romantic

aviator had become in the 1930s, after the successful

transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh in 1929, a

popular heroic icon. We see this figure most famously

in the figure played by Roland Toutain in Renoir's

Rules of the Game (1939). Capra shows King Westley

to be an effete, morally bankrupt blueblood. Capra is

pointing to the possibility that a wealthy industrialist

and a corrupted aristocrat posing as a national hero

could destroy the dream of an authentic marriage, based

on mutual acknowledgment and consensus, between the

common man (Gable) and the aristocratic elite

(Colbert). A different kind of corrupt romance is

depicted in Meet John Doe between the economically

struggling newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck) and a

swashbuckling paramilitary leader, the nephew of a

newspaper magnate with ambitions to stage a fascist

coup. In both films, the averted marriage of the female

protagonist is an allegory of the public's dangerous

romance with heroes constructed by and for the mass

media.

49.

It is a testament to Capra's own sense for the potential

of film as a propaganda medium that the scene of King

Westley arriving by plane at his wedding, a moment

eagerly awaited by camera crews looking for newsreel

footage, foreshadows the opening of the most

significant fascist propaganda film ever made, released

just a little over a year after It Happened One Night

(theatrically released on January 1, 1934 at Radio City),

namely, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (1935,

released on March 28 at UFA-Palast am Zoo in

Berlin).16

Capra's film places before its viewers two

seductions, one toward a dream of "something big and

marvelous,'' another of a false romance staged before

eager newsreel cameras. If I am right that Peter's dream

is of a world the viewers themselves hunger for when

they come to see stars above their heads, then the film

positions the viewers in two possible roles: the public

consuming the falsehood of the newsreels or the public

dreaming of "something big and marvelous.'' It asks the

viewers to decide between the world's news and, one

might say, a new world. In one position, they will come

as spectators only to applaud, or acclaim, the stars. In

the other, they will join them.

Arendt, On Revolution, and American

Romanticism

50.

Hannah Arendt's reflections on the American

Revolution can help us understand why it is that

Cavellian romanticism seems to have its home - and its

experience of homelessness - in America.17

I do not

mean to claim that the kind of political romanticism

that Cavell identifies in Emerson and Thoreau is unique

to the American continent. The fact is, Cavell shows in

a number of his essays that Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Heidegger, and Wittgenstein all address their readers

with that stance of "aversion,'' or of "friendship-in-

enmity,'' so characteristic of Emerson's and Thoreau's

authorial strategy. But it cannot be denied that Cavell's

reading of the comedies of remarriage depends upon

something unique in the American setting. Capra, I

think, is only possible as an American director, that is,

as a director working within the American tradition.

Capra himself says of his films that they were all his

way of saying, "Thanks, America.'' At issue here is

whether political romanticism must only be the refuge

of politically indecisive, alienated subjectivities within

the liberal democratic state, as Schmitt claims, or

whether it can have, as Cavell argues, a decisive

political role within the democratic state. I will argue

that the issue dividing Schmitt and Cavell, or Schmitt

and Capra, reflects the difference between political

romanticism understood as a response to the French

Revolution and political romanticism understood as a

response to the American Revolution.

51.

Given the close connection Schmitt discovers between

the romantic subjectivity and the French Revolution's

failure, perhaps we can explain the political

significance of Emersonian romanticism as Cavell

expresses it to lie in how it rather responds to the

success of the American Revolution. By "success'' I

mean, specifically, the successful separation from

British domination announced in the Declaration of

Independence and the successful realization of the

institutions proposed in the American Constitution. But

although we can see pretty clearly how the American

revolution succeeded where the French failed, it is

important to examine how, more precisely, the

American revolution succeeded in solving the dilemma

posed by the severance of pouvoir constitutant and

pouvoir constitutue that Schmitt, following Sieyes,

identifies as the central problem of the French

Revolution. Schmitt, as we saw above, believes that the

"residuum'' of sovereign dictatorship within a

constitution alone can breach the gap. The American

solution, and here I rely upon the analysis of Hannah

Arendt in On Revolution, is to dismantle the twin pillars

of sovereignty itself, power and authority, and refashion

the nature of the political.18

This is what will open the

space for and, in fact, demand the voice of political

romanticism in America.

52.

Hannah Arendt, like Schmitt, identifies the critical issue

for the French Revolution to be how to translate the

revolutionary pouvoir constitutant into the legal

structures of the pouvoir constitutue. Where the French

Revolution failed to do this, the American Revolution

succeeded.

The great and fateful misfortune of the French

Revolution was that none of the constituent assemblies

could command enough authority to lay down the law

of the land; the reproach rightly levelled against them

was always the same: they lacked the power to

constitute by definition; they themselves were

unconstitutional. Theoretically, the fateful blunder of

the men of the French Revolution consisted in their

almost automatic, uncritical belief that power and law

spring from the selfsame source. Conversely, the great

good fortune of the American Revolution was that the

people of the colonies, prior to their conflict with

England, were organized in self-governing bodies, that

the revolution - to speak the language of the eighteenth

century - did not throw them into a state of nature, that

there never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir

constituant of those who framed the state constitutions

and, eventually, the Constitution of the United States.

(1990: 165)

The power to constitute the laws of the republic was not

severed from the constituted institutions which that

power was supposed to create. Power, Arendt suggests,

is always constituted within the realm of the political

and is never found in a prepolitical "state of nature.''

Power emerges simultaneously with the mutual

promising that constitutes the realm of the political.

Arendt traces the power that was unleashed in the

revolution to the Pilgrims of the Mayflower Compact

and the "confidence they had in their own power,

granted and confirmed by no one and as yet

unsupported by any means of violence, to combine

themselves together into a 'civil Body Politick' which,

held together solely by the strength of mutual promise

'in the Presence of God and one another', supposedly

was powerful enough to 'enact, constitute, and frame'

all necessary laws and instruments of government''

(1990: 167). Arendt's emphasis here is upon the

"mutual promise'' that, she will argue, brings power into

being: "binding and promising, combining and

covenanting are the means by which power is kept in

existence'' (175). The private motives of the individuals

who come together and form the covenant are not

important, only that they understand themselves to be

incapable of surviving apart from the mutual pact they

enter into. "Homogeneity of past and origin,'' Arendt

concludes, "the decisive principle of the nation-state, is

not required'' (174). What was discovered, and proved,

in America was that "the making and keeping of

promises ...in the realm of politics may well be the

highest human faculty'' (175). A state of nature does not

precede the mutual promising of covenant-making;

rather, mutual promising is preceded by an act of

severance from a prior compact. We can say, in other

words, that political power is always a kind of

remarriage after prior divorce.

53.

The problem of political promises that are "world-

building,'' Arendt points out, is that they bind not only

those who make them, but also their posterity. By what

authority can a promise bind the future? If the authority

is thought to rest in some transcendent popular will that

underwrites the legal constitution, we have lost the

power of promise. The power of the promise resides in

the mutual pledging of a plurality of humans, not in any

single will, even if it is imagined to somehow be

indivisible. It was the idea that power resides in the

unanimity of the popular will and that this will

authorizes the law that Arendt says was the error that

led to the failure of the French Revolution to produce a

lasting constitution. And we can also see how the

homogeneity of the social will stands opposed to the

conversational heterogeneity required for the pursuit of

happiness in marriage, or in a democratic sociality that

is exemplified as (re)marriage.

54.

What authority, then, stands behind the mutual pledges

by which the Founding Fathers bound themselves when

they joined together to sign the Declaration of

Independence and, later, the Constitution? Arendt

points out that there is evidence to think that the

authority was what was announced in the preamble to

the Declaration of Independence, namely, "the laws of

nature and nature's God.'' If this was in reality the

source of authority invoked by the founders, it would

be, for Arendt who believes in neither natural law nor

God, an illusory authority. She is willing to admit the

possibility that only such an illusion can supply

adequate authority to maintain in perpetuity the

institutions created through mutual pledging. But

Arendt argues that, almost without the notice of the

founders, a new kind of authority was discovered.

Arendt, like Emerson and Thoreau before her and

Cavell after her, believes that the American revolution

"made a new beginning in the very midst of the history

of Western mankind'' (1990: 194). Cavell finds this

same thought to lie behind Emerson's words in the

essay "Experience,'' "I am ready to die out of nature and

be born again into this new yet unapproachable

America I have found in the West.'' Cavell makes much

of the expression "I have found.'' He connects these

words to the idea of political founding, and thus

suggests that Emerson's writing, far from being seen as,

like other romanticisms, purely concerned with the

individual, is truly political: "The endlessly repeated

idea that Emerson was only interested in finding the

individual should give way to or make way for the idea

that this quest was his way of founding a nation, writing

its constitution, constituting its citizens'' (1989: 93). For

Cavell, Emerson's authorship is the re-enactment of the

nation's founding. And this is exactly what Arendt

declares to be the nature of America's self-authorship,

its authority. The act of foundation, says Arendt, creates

the authority upon which to build the Union in

perpetuity. And it calls for a renewal of the founding

self-authorship in each generation. The literary voices

calling for renewal, like those of Emerson and Thoreau,

are both authorized by the Constitution and reconstitute

its authority.

55.

The authority of the act of founding is, according to

Arendt, born with the act itself. It comes from the

newness of the act, the fact of a beginning having been

made. The act of founding has no transcendent

authority; it is its own "absolute.'' In words that might

almost be taken as a commentary on Emerson's

enigmatic phrase "this new yet unapproachable

America,'' Arendt describes how:

this 'absolute' lies in the very act of beginning itself. In

a way, this has always been known, though it was never

fully articulated in conceptual thought for the simple

reason that the beginning itself, prior to the era of

revolution, has always been shrouded in mystery and

remained an object of speculation. The foundation

which now, for the first time, had occurred in broad

daylight to be witnessed by all who were present had

been, for thousands of years, the object of foundation

legends in which imagination tried to reach out into a

past and to an event which memory could not reach.

Whatever we may find out about the factual truth of

such legends, their historical significance lies in how

the human mind attempted to solve the problem of the

beginning, of an unconnected, new event breaking into

the continuous sequence of historical time.

Arendt elsewhere uses the term "natality'' to refer to the

"absolute'' of the "new event breaking into the

continuous sequence of historical time.'' Capra,

describing the birth of his second child, says that the

"first triumphant cry of the newborn babe'' is "I am! I

am! Unique, individual; a miracle born of time and star

dust'' (1971: 177). Capra's recurrent use of the theme of

Christmas, of messianic natality, as emblematic of the

miracle of our divine "stardom'' is paralleled in Arendt's

notion that the meaning of messianic natality is "the

affirmation of the divinity of birth as such'' (1990: 204).

By placing the authority of founding in human natality,

Arendt contests the claim that it is rather "dictating

violence'' (213) that is the source of revolutionary

authority. Whether Arendt has Schmitt, Benjamin (who

himself acknowledged his debt to Schmitt), or someone

else in mind here, her opposition of natality to violence

may be taken as fundamental to the opposition she is

constructing between the French and American

revolutions. And, I would add, it is fundamental to the

opposition between the two varieties of romanticism I

have described in this paper. If we return to the

quotation of Emerson, "I am ready to die out of nature

and be born again into this new yet unapproachable

America I have found in the West,'' we see the same

linkage between messianic birth ("born again'' is a

Pauline metaphor for becoming a "new man'' in Christ)

and founding that Arendt is arguing for. What is more,

Emerson, like Arendt, sees this natality as a radical

rupture with the prepolitical "state of nature.'' And we

can now understand why America is "unapproachable.''

The new beginning of a founding birth cannot be

approached. It recedes into the past and is "shrouded in

mystery'' the moment it occurs, if it is a true beginning,

that is, one that can bind the future to itself. As Arendt

says, "the great good fortune that smiled upon the

American republic ...consisted in the extraordinary

capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of

centuries to come'' (1990: 198).

56.

But how can the new beginning remain new? How can

it not become disconnected from the present in which,

if it is to retain its authority, it must live? Arendt points

to the Supreme Court as the institution responsible for a

"kind of continuous constitution-making'' (1990: 200),

but she understands that no single institution is

sufficient to maintain the newness of the moment of

foundation. She is fully aware that the greatest dilemma

that America faces is to retain the twin faces of the act

of founding, namely, its newness and its age, as if it

brought into birth a being already centuries old. "It is as

though,'' Arendt writes, "men wished to create a world

which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because

they knew how novel everything was that their age

attempted to do'' (224).

57.

In the end Arendt sees the only hope for maintaining

the newness of foundation to be "memory and

recollection'' (1990: 280). "And since the storehouse of

memory is kept and watched over by poets, whose

business it is to find and make the words we live by,''

Arendt, like Cavell, asserts the decisive value of

political romanticism, the kind of art that can awaken us

to ourselves, make stars of us. Cavell's description of

the message of Thoreau's Walden, articulates what is at

stake in the memory work of political romanticism:

The essential message of the social contract is that

political institutions require justification, that they are

absolutely without sanctity, that power over us is held

on trust from us, that institutions have no authority

other than the authority we lend them, that we are their

architects, that they are therefore artifacts .... (1992: 82)

58.

The fragility of our foundations demands that we, first,

withdraw from the house into which we are born in

order to examine what it is we have inherited, and what

promises it holds. If our metaphor for this were

marriage, we would say that we must begin with

divorce. And then we must reenter the house, lending

its foundations our trust and confidence. Only in this

way will the house stand. The task must be renewed

every day. Call its accomplishment the unacclaimed

triumph of romanticism.

Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor in the

Program for the Study of Religion and the Program in

Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign. Currently a Fellow at the Illinois

Program for Research in the Humanities, he is working

on a book entitled Philosophy and the Jewish Question:

Mendelssohn to Cavell. He can reached at

brsnstck@uiuc.edu.

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NOTES

1 (1897-1991).My placement of Capra within the canon

of American Romanticism is informed primarily by the

work of Stanley Cavell, as I will make clear in what

follows. I am also indebted to Raymond Carney's study

of Capra in American Vision (1986). Carney, like

Cavell, places Capra within the tradition of American

Romanticism. For Carney, the "central inquiry'' of

American romanticism, which he distinguishes from the

European romantic tradition, "is the adequacy or

inadequacy of social, verbal, and artistic systems to

represent the energies of the imagination in publicly

visible and enactable forms of expression and behavior''

(p. 55). The emphasis in Carney's description falls on

the concern with "publicly visible and enactable forms.''

2

In his autobiography, Capra says that he made Meet

John Doe to reveal "the agony of disillusionment, and

the wild dark passions of mobs'' that were being

manipulated by the "little 'fuhrers' ...springing up in

America'' (1971: 297). He claims that all his movies

after 1934 were responding to the challenge of an

uncanny "little faceless man'' who one day accused him

of being "an offense to God'' for not using art to resist

Hitler, "that evil man ... desperately trying to poison the

world with hate'' (176).

3

It is important to note that Schmitt's historical study of

dictatorship was designed to promote his own solution

to the theoretical and practical severance of the people's

pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitue. Schmitt

thought that he had identified a "residuum of a

sovereign dictatorship'' (1964: 241) in Article 48,

Section 2 of the the Weimar Republic's constitution that

provides the president with broad emergency powers.

He proposed that this residuum be reactivated in order

to stave off Weimar's political disintegration.

4 The structural parallels between sovereign dictatorship

and romanticism are detailed in the insightful essay of

Bernardo Ferreira, "Sujeito e Ordem'': "...in opposition

to the privatization, immobility, passivity, lack of

definition, nihilism, and 'eternal dialogue' of

romanticism, Schmitt places an image of decision [the

political act of sovereign dictatorship] as the political

act par excellence, an act that confronts the necessity of

a public intervention within reality, of a substantive

direction for concrete experience, of a normative

refashioning of social life'' (2002: 633; translation

mine). Richard Wolin (1992: 446, n. 28) also points to

the structural relationship between the occasionalism of

political romanticism and Schmitt's own decisionism.

5 Alan Wolfe (2004) even suggests that Schmitt's ideas

have gained such wide currency that they have

influenced contemporary American conservative

politicians. Although this claim is perhaps exaggerated,

I find Wolfe's brief opinion piece to be directly on

target when he contrasts Schmitt's view of liberal

democracy with the liberal tradition of "Thomas Paine

and the American founders.'' A more nuanced

exploration of the relationship between modern

conservative political thinking and Carl Schmitt can be

found in McCormick (1997): 304-5. McCormick's book

is the best treatment of Schmitt's major writings from

the Weimar period available in English.

6 Translations from The Concept of the Political are

mine. I have consulted the English translation of

George Schwab (1976), unfortunately marred in places

by inaccuracies and omissions.

7 The definition of sovereignty as the power to act

outside all normative frameworks during a time of crisis

is part of Schmitt's attack on legal positivism. The

attack on the positivist definition of health in medical

science by Canguilhem precisely parallels Schmitt's

definition of sovereignty: "Health,'' Canguilhem writes,

"is the possibility of transcending the norm, which

defines the momentary normal, the possibility of

tolerating infractions of the habitual norm and

instituting new norms in new situations'' (1991: 197-

98). Canguilhem's work originally appeared in France

in 1943 and, as Foucault points out, offers an analysis

of "the concept of life'' (21). Foucault offers in his

notion of "biopolitics'' a conflation of Schmitt's concept

of the political and Canguilhem's concept of life that

has been widely influential in recent leftist critiques of

the modern state. See, for example, Mbembe (2003).

Such critiques seem to leave no alternative to an agonal

Schmittian politics of friend and enemy. This paper

seeks to sketch such an alternative in the tradition of

American romanticism.

8 Schmitt addressed himself to the failure of liberal,

parliamentary democracy and the need for a fascist

alternative in several of his writings from the 1920's,

particularly Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des

heutigen Parlamentarismus (1926) and Volksentscheid

und Volksbegehren (1927).

9 In Dictatorship Schmitt concludes that the president

could not simply cancel the constitution itself (1964:

202). He will later alter this opinion with Hitler's

ascension to the presidency. But the groundwork is

already laid in Dictatorship when Schmitt declares that

the president can assume the power of summary

execution - something denied him in Article 48 - if his

opponent "threatens the unity of the state'' (1964: 203).

In other words, the president becomes judge over the

life and death of the individuals within the state and

therefore assumes the position of sovereign dictator.

Commenting on Hitler's Reichstag speech of July 13,

1934 in which Hitler announced his purge of the SA the

previous month in what he called the "Night of the

Long Knives,'' Schmitt (in an article published in

August 1934 entitled "Der Fuhrer schutzt das Recht,''

republished in Schmitt (1988): 199-203) defends

Hitler's description of his summary execution of sixty-

one men and killing of thirteen others during alleged

escape attempts (and allowing three to commit suicide)

as displaying the "authentic jurisdiction'' ("echte

Gerichtsbarkeit'') of Hitler's judgeship (Richtertum).

Hitler's right to put these men to death "was not under

the auspices of justice, but was rather itself the highest

justice'' (200). Schmitt concludes his defense of the

Fuhrer by declaring him to be the ultimate judge of the

nation as well as the embodiment of the ultimate source

of law itself - "the people's right to life'' ("das

Lebensrecht des Volkes,'' '200).

10

To be sure, Cavell nowhere that I am aware of uses

the expression "political romanticism.'' However, he

insists that he is working within the romantic tradition

(especially of Emerson and Thoreau) and that his

thinking is about the conditions of democratic sociality.

An extended discussion of the interconnection between

American romanticism and American democracy can

be found in Cavell (1988): 4-26, and the thematic is

central to his earlier book, Senses of Walden.

11

Cavell talks extensively about the Critique of

Judgment in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome

(1990: xxvi-xxxi) where he is interested in "the

aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgment'' as offering a way

to understand his own and Emerson's "perfectionism''

(xxxi). See also Cavell (1995): 34-5 for a discussion of

Emerson's appropriation of Kant's notion of aesthetic

judgment.

12

See, for a brief account along these lines, Taylor

(1989): 379-80 who points out the importance of Kant's

notion of "the aesthetic object as manifesting an order

for which no adequate concept could be found.''

13

This is also the central problematic in Arendt's

discussion of Kant as a political philosopher. Their

common emphasis upon the "conceptless'' basis of

sociality in their reception of the Kantian critique of

judgment can perhaps explain the many congruities

between Arendt's and Cavell's thinking. Cavell never to

my knowledge refers to Arendt. Arendt (1982): 65-85

offers an extended discussion of the political dimension

of the Critique of Judgment. For a sympathetic

treatment of Arendt's Kantian politics, see Curtis

(1999). Seyla Benhabib (1994): 185-98 offers a

succinct treatment of Arendt's debt to Kant in a book

that remains the best treatment of Arendt's thought in

English (its second edition was published in 2003).

14

How it is that Derrida formulates what I am arguing

is an American romantic political philosophy would

also require a separate essay, touching on the

significance of the biblical tradition of covenanting

behind the American political tradition - Arendt

discusses this in On Revolution (1990: 175)- and the

appropriation of Kant in Hermann Cohen's

interpretation of the biblical foundations of Judaism.

Common to both American romanticism and the

Derridean politics of friendship is the biblical idea that

the nation is a never quite fully achieved promise.

15

Sharing the biblical and Kantian ancestry of this

emblem is Rosenzweig's image of the divine face

within six-pointed star, the "star of redemption.''

16

Capra, as is well known, directed a series war films,

"Why We Fight,'' from 1943 to 1945 that are considered

among the most effective propaganda films ever made.

Capra himself praised Riefenstahl's film as "the classic,

powerhouse propaganda film of our times'' whose

opening was "a masterstroke of god-building'' (1971:

328).

17

Andreas Kalyvas (2004) offers a comparison of

Schmitt's decisionism and Arendt's political theory. I

completely agree with the contrast he draws between

the two positions, and I hope that the following section

will help to clarify Arendt's deep affinity for the

American tradition of political romanticism running

from Emerson to Cavell. Kalyvas does not note the

important place of promising and covenanting in

providing the enduring power behind the authority of

natality, the "miracle'' of the new beginning of which

the will is capable.

18

Although she never refers to Schmitt in this book,

there are numerous places where she seems to be

deploying some of Schmitt's arguments in both

Dictatorship and Political Theology, for example in her

discussion of the emergence of the political notion of

sovereignty from the theological one 1990: 159-62).

Arendt admits to finding the writings of Schmitt "still

arresting'' in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1973: 339).

Bruce Rosenstock is an associate professor in the

Program for the Study of Religion and the Program in

Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign. Currently a Fellow at the Illinois

Program for Research in the Humanities, he is working

on a book entitled Philosophy and the Jewish Question:

Mendelssohn to Cavell. He can reached at

brsnstck@uiuc.edu.

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Copyright © 2005, Bruce Rosenstock and The Johns Hopkins

University Press