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National Commemoration and Collective Re-membering for a New Millennium
Barbara Biesecker
University of IowaThis essay is about the body, the construction of a corpus, and collective life. It is about the contemporary transformation of the body, of that which does not signify, into a sign. More specifically, it is an inquiry into the ways in which the given body "always already given, abandoned, and withdrawn from all the plays of signs" (Nancy, 24) is being newly conscripted as an anchor for contemporary American life. This is, then, an essay about the politics of the body's (re)inscription in the current conjuncture, of how a certain body is now being deployed to inspire a new esprit de courps, a new common sense or national sensibility that authorizes political, social and economic cruelties.
Another way of putting it is that this is an essay which critically dissects the recent emergence of what I will call a visual and verbal paregoric rhetoric whose dialectically paired and organizing tropes are the pained body of World War II and the contemporary crippled nation, and whose anodynic power is in part attributable to its simultaneous production and exploitation of a growing public intolerance for wounded attachments and so-called "victim politics." This is, then, an analysis which tracks how that pained body is being made to trump the traumatized psyche in the popular imaginary so as to discern the kinds of political work it is doing in/for the patriotic public sphere.
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