Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail Christina Tarnopolsky

Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail Christina Tarnopolsky Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 100-128 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646847 Access provided by Hunter College Libraries (30 Jul 2018 19:59 GMT) Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail Christina Tarnopolsky A commentary on “American Overabundance and Cultural Malaise: Me- lancholia in Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin” by Mary Caputi, Theory & Event, Vol 4, No. 3 (2000) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32596 ublished in 2000 at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, Mary Caputi’s article “American Overabundance and Cultur- Pal Malaise: Melancholia in Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin” examines what she saw then as a prevailing condition of melancholia in America in the midst of opulence and overabundance. One of the characteristics of this melancholia was a nostalgic reaching back to the past in order to redeem the present, which was perceived as saturat- ed with a dizzying array of signifiers, symbols, and commodities that seem hollowed out or vacuous when compared to the fullness of the past. According to Caputi, this nostalgic reaching back to the past had in fact started well before the beginning of the twenty-first century and was a key element of the neo-conservative movement that began in 1980, and which was epitomized by Ronald Reagan’s campaign and his slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again”. Here a notion of a more “innocent”, “pure” and “cohesive” America of the 1950’s or even of the Founding generation was seen as that lost but unified past that could somehow be recuperated in order to reconnect to certain values and meanings that had been rent asunder by the liberal attack on values and “the damaging excesses of liberal administrations.”1 The way to achieve this was, however, not through an embrace of traditionalism but rather through an embrace of capitalism that would ensure Amer- ica’s place at the forefront of the globalizing, technologically savvy world symbolized by opulence and overabundance. This American preeminence was to be achieved by casting off “the abstemiousness of regulation and [allowing] market mechanisms to perform unhin- dered.”2 Ironically and presciently, Caputi states that one element of this 1980’s opulence was encapsulated in the figures of “Donald and Ivana Trump—the extravagant towers, the expensive clothes, the bouf- fant hairdo, and glittering jewelry.”3 Revisiting Caputi’s article with the hindsight of almost 20 more years of neoliberal governance in America, the aim of this essay is to offer a supplement to her account Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 1, 100–128 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press Tarnopolsky | Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail 101 of melancholia by turning to Sigmund Freud’s essay on it in order to explore the forces of aggression within melancholia, as well as within its companion, mania, as a way of shedding some light on the rise of a very different kind of Republican President, Donald Trump. In her article, Caputi turns to Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin to understand this double move of nostalgic reminiscence and capitalism, but also to understand why the resulting opulence or overabundance did not result in the promised state of a recovery or reconnection to a lost past, but instead in a feeling of malaise and melancholia amidst overabundance. According to Caputi, both Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin see melancholia arising out of a feeling of loss in relation to an anterior condition of unity, in Kristeva’s case with the dreaded and loved maternal body, in Benjamin’s case with Adamic language and its intimacy with God’s creative powers. For Kristeva, the unity with the maternal body represents a pre-linguistic state because the body’s “ability to satiate made language unnecessary.”4 While conventional language makes subjectivity and separation from the mother possible, it also produces a subject that acutely feels the loss of the intimate unity with the maternal body and its accompanying feelings of fullness and satiety. On the other hand, Benjamin’s sees the anterior stage of Adam- ic language not as pre-linguistic but rather as a form of revelatory and creative language in opposition to later conventional and instrumental languages “intended [only] to denote, explain, clarify, and persuade.”5 This Adamic language or Ursprache involved a direct connection to God’s creative powers and transcendent meanings in opposition to the chaotic multiplicity of conventional languages and meanings that oc- curred after the Tower of Babel. For both authors, according to Caputi, melancholia registers a move away from an anterior state of meaning- ful closure, fixity, and unity to a state characterized by a proliferating, swirling, ever-changing expansion of instrumental signs and symbols that leaves the individual longing for the “cherished lost realm that preceded the current fragmentation and disarray.”6 In Benjamin’s work, this sense of loss and disorientation amidst overabundance extends not just to linguistic signs and signifiers but also to things or more exactly, to commodities. Under capitalism, the intrinsic value of things and all human relations cede their place to the exchange value of commodities determined only by market relations. As Caputi puts it, “The flux in commodities’ prices—the fact that they can be valued today and worthless tomorrow, their monetary value soaring and plummeting—issues a statement about their depleted intrinsic worth, for their enmeshment within capitalist relations suggests that outside the purview of market forces they are meaningless, forlorn, pieces of wretched materiality with no value of their own.”7 In other words, Benjamin’s Marxist infused analysis of capitalism shows why 102 Theory & Event Ronald Reagan’s neoconservative strategy of promoting opulence and overabundance through an unfettered form of capitalism did not lead to a restored connection to a cohesive and unified past, but to greater feelings of malaise and melancholia amidst material overabundance. This is not to say that Benjamin or Kristeva believe that the forlorn feeling of melancholia necessitates a kind of stuckness in a present per- vaded by hollowed-out meanings, swirling signifiers, and commodities that only highlight their intrinsic worthlessness. For Benjamin, according to Caputi, the very feeling of melancholia can also point to a redemption that involves remembering the richness of the past in order to build a future that will restore the fullness and intrinsic value of things to human life, but this is done through Marxism and not capitalism.8 For Kristeva, the ever-present possibility of a move away from melancholia is not seen in economic terms but rather via the pos- sibilities of language itself in its more Orphic and metaphoric registers, in both art and literature.9 However, Caputi concludes that the current state of America (in 2000) reveals a melancholia that has not been over- come or redeemed in these ways, but which has in fact been heightened by the very overabundance of cultural symbols, signifiers, and commodities that make the very meaning of “America” incredibly un- stable: “The American imagination, at least as coopted by the media, packages the American experience as frenzied prattle, a true reenact- ment of Babel’s chaos. The signature of our society becomes a welter of cultural expressions whose ensemble we cannot comprehend.”10 Writing almost twenty years after Caputi, I take up the notion of melancholia and a melancholic culture to explain certain phenomena now present in America in the early decades of the twenty-first century. For purposes of space, like Caputi, I focus only on the ways in which this melancholia has then been utilized by the Republicans, and in my case, by Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican leader- ship and the American Presidency. What I find particularly generative in Caputi’s article is the way in which melancholia is treated as both a psychological condition and a socio-economic and political one. All individuals, according to Caputi, are prone to melancholia to some degree by the very move into conventional language and indepen- dent subjectivity, yet it can also be heightened or assuaged by certain kinds of socio-economic and political conditions: e.g. the media or the capitalist economy. In my reading, I will expand her presentation of melancholia to include the classic work by Sigmund Freud on this subject, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in order to augment her view of what melancholia means, allows, and forecloses. I will also examine how melancholia’s counterpart in that essay, that is mania, can also help to explain some of the most troubling events in recent times: the stubborn resiliency of neoliberalism that infiltrated both the Republi- can and Democratic Parties in America from 1980-2016, and the suc- Tarnopolsky | Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail 103 cess of Donald Trump’s campaign for the American Presidency. My argument will also involve reference to those sections in Freud’s later works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, and Civilization and Its Discontents, where he develops a number of the key insights that he first formulates in his essay, “Mourning and Melancholia”. In this latter essay, Freud was primarily concerned with individual and familial psychological conditions in isolation from wider societal relations or forms, however, these later works, especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego and Civilization and Its Discontents, show a growing appreciation of the societal forces behind psychic structures and conditions.11 I will argue that the ongoing transformation in America’s economic, social, and political landscape wrought by neoliberalism between 2000 and 2016 actually heightened the melancholia and malaise di- agnosed by Caputi in her article, though my characterization of this melancholia and malaise will differ from Caputi’s in some significant ways.

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