The Specter of the American Revolution: A Post-Nihilist Republic Seen Through Memory Assemblages

This essay presents a reading of Shajara Bensusan’s Memory Assemblages alongside a dilemma in the U.S.A. over the meaning of its commonwealth. Across two and a half centuries, America’s republic has drifted toward despotism under the disguise of a liberal democracy. A consolidating class of monopolists compete to reign over the commons like landlords, while an increasingly indebted majority struggle through anti-socialist politics to find any mutually persuasive solution and aim. This essay capitalizes on Bensusan’s call to “reshuffle the archives” of memory as a method for imagining what may yet be added to this reality, bringing the unfulfilled republican ideals of the first American revolution to the forefront. The focus especially lies in restoring a notion of the commonwealth advanced by this revolution’s founding philosopher, Thomas Paine, and how this notion might re-contextualize the troubled social projects which followed.