“New World” Ghosts

Abstract This essay reviews Germanist, literary scholar, and philosopher Avital Ronell’s America: The Troubled Continent of Thought (2024), a two-chapter text, the first written for Polity’s “Theory Redux” series in the runup to the 2024 presidential elections, the second published in 2021 for the Oxford Literary Review. In America, Ronell uses an analytic of deconstructive haunting to compellingly read “America” in texts by Stanley Cavell, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and others. With this analytic, Ronell reveals “America” as a network of textual metaphors, rhetorical structures, linguistic associations with a powerful psychanalytic charge. However, this essay argues, Ronell’s ghosting of “America,” which offers insights into the violence enacted by philosophical quests for the truth of “America,” is insufficient as a critique in our Trumpian world. Nevertheless encouraged by Ronell’s text, the essay proposes an alternative manner of reading “America”/America, one based in a metaphysical-materialist approach potentially usable by literary scholars seeking an intellectual practice beyond the deconstruction of metaphysics.