There is a question that has been haunting me about our times and our collective condition, specifically in regard to American imperial decline: namely, how do we effectively mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism? My short answer is that our age of catastrophes—the catastrophic being one of the primary markers of the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism—is in need of poetic responses and, in particular, what William James might call a poetic temperament.
Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’
February 5th, 2010
All used up
posted by David Kyuman KimTags: American exceptionalism, American politics, Barack Obama, civil religion, democracy, empire, Jonathan Lear, mythology, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanley Cavell
Posted in Reconsidering civil religion | No Comments »
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