Reaganism in Literary Theory
Reaganism in Literary Theory
Negative Moralism and Hermeneutic Suspicion
Jeremiah Bowen
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Jeremiah Bowen 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-278-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-278-0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Essay OneInterpretive Politics: Reading Systemic Oppressions with Eve Sedgwick, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus
Bad Religion
Noninterference and Neoliberalism
Privilege and Self-Censorship
Essay TwoDevotional Scholarship: Reading Academic Reaganism with Edward Said, Stanley Fish and Walter Jackson Bate
1.Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism Neoliberalism and Religious Intellectualism
Culture and Legacy
Emulation Pedagogy
2.Neoconservatism as Negative Devotion
Bate’s Trivial Titles
Indifferent Opponents
3.Professional Privilege
Mirrored Positions
Essay ThreeNegative Moralism: Reading Literariness, Materiality and Revolution with Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller
1.The Disqualification of de Man
Singular Circumstances
2.Reference to Nothingness
Discrepancies of Desire
Negative Moralism
3.Misreading Materialism
Culture and Soil
Overturning and Displacement
Progress and Determination
Index
For all my teachers, whether I encountered them as allies or as opponents.
We can say of the eighties what Orwell could say of the forties: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’”
W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Interpretation” (1982)
The current era of political polarization and culture war in the United States is often measured against a fantasy, an imaginary era of nonpartisan harmony in the wake of a war that established “The American Century.”1 And yet this depoliticized image signifies the same age Orwell describes as inescapably political, in an essay written to span the ocean between allies.2 Like the forties, the eighties is now often mythologized as a time of American triumph, when good struggled against an Evil Empire, and freedom overcame tyranny. This mythological narrative of holy war is presaged by Ronald Reagan’s depoliticized image of the 1962 election in “A Time for Choosing”: “There is no left or right [...] only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”3
