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Re-thinking American Exceptionalism

Elizabeth Duquette*
Gettysburg College

Abstract

American exceptionalism has been an organizing concept in American literary and cultural studies for decades, but recent years have witnessed the proliferation of new approaches to this topic. After an introduction to the history of American exceptionalism, the essay traces the arguments of several key gures in this debate, especially Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in order to provide an introduction to the utility of their claims for literary scholars.

American exceptionalism is a set of loosely related propositions that collectively assert the unique nature of the United States, its exemption from the historical forces that buffet the rest of the world. Gesturing to what the United States lacks most notably, a feudal past and a robust socialist or Marxist tradition exceptionalist ideology maintains that the problems and paradigms that exist elsewhere are not germane to the United States. It has justied territorial expansion, authorized intervention in foreign wars and the domestic affairs of sovereign nations, and vigorously, sometimes aggressively, promoted free market capitalism. For individuals, exceptionalism takes the shape of the American Dream, promising the possibility of individual self-determination and prosperity, freedom from the rigid class constraints seen in other cultures, and the opportunity to worship and speak without fear of reprisal. The peculiar durability of American exceptionalism derives from the allure of its message and its success in organizing disparate, even contradictory, assumptions about the nation and its citizens. It allows the United States to position itself simultaneously as a model for other nations while positing that it is unlike them in its fundamental values and structures. Although exceptionalist thinking draws on historical events, it is best explained through its successful correlation of ideology, myth, and history. Each of these slippery terms denotes, at least in part, a relationship to time, particularly the movement between past, present, and future. If one of the aims of history is to put past events into an order with meaning, its fundamental impulses overlap with myth and ideology; but whereas history is grounded, in part, by its commitment to evidence and fact, myth and ideology force these same facts to t into a narrative that has an already determined conclusion.1 It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined, Ernst Cassirer famously noted, its history is determined by its mythology (5). In other words, the mythic narratives that emerge to distinguish a people likewise inform the priorities and principles that determine which facts or events are included in their history.2 Exceptionalism is an organizing myth for American culture, one that has a long tradition. This essay will briey sketch that history, before turning to new ways, and alternate traditions, which scholars are using to challenge and revise Americas mythic exceptionalism. Although it draws on historical events, trends, and ideas Puritan theology and the concept of election, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Monroe doctrine and manifest destiny, Lincolns Gettysburg Address, American military intervention
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in World Wars I and II; and the victory over communism American exceptionalism did not coalesce into a coherent narrative until the 20th century. This is not to suggest that earlier writers and thinkers did not assert that Americans had distinct characteristics, they did.3 In Democracy in America, for example, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville uses the term exceptional to describe the position of the Americans. But, as historian Dorothy Ross explains, Tocquevilles formulation is not ideological in that it does not assert that the principle of democracy is essentially American (24). The exceptional position of the Americans has to do with a set of contingent historical and geographical conditions that have been particularly fortuitous, but Tocqueville still cannot consent to separate America from Europe (2: 36). Let us cease, he concludes, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people (2: 37).4 The spatial dimension of Tocquevilles phrase is telling: it is a mistake to put other nations under the United States. Yet the actual content of Tocquevilles text, Democracy in America has come to be revered as the archive in which are preserved the United States core metasocial signications (Pease, 112). The dominant reading of Tocqueville is exceptionalist, and as such, it suppresses alternate interpretations to protect what can be imagined as Tocquevilles original observation of the early years of the United States. The emphasis on the unique nature of American experience that some readers nd in Tocqueville reached undisputed prominence in the 20th century. Delivered on the eve of the 20th century, Frederick Jackson Turners The Signicance of the Frontier in American History (1893) is a key text in the evolution of American exceptionalism as a controlling theme in the history of writing of the United States and presents a ne introduction to its key moves (Rodgers, 21). Presented to the American Historical Association in Chicago, Turners thesis linked the striking characteristics of the American intellect to the ability to begi[n] over again on the frontier (566, 545). Of particular interest to Turner was how the frontier differentiated American and European experience: the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from Europe, he wrote,
a steady growth of independence on American lines. So to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history (546).

For this reason, Turner thinks the fact of the frontier is far more important than the legacy of slavery, dismissed as just an incident in the American narrative (558). Turners argument establishes a link between geography and character; fundamentally masculinist, the American self is rejuvenated by contact with, and domination over, primitive peoples and the land itself. Building from Turners example, 20th-century scholars increasingly focused on the distinct characteristics of the American way of life (Denning), and by the 1940s, exceptionalism had acquired the status of an unquestioned given (Rodgers, 26). Scholars steeped in exceptionalist convictions would search the text or archive in a manner Donald Pease has likened to a romance quest, in order to understand the meaning of their American identity through the uncovering of the special signicance of the nations institutions (2009, 12). Like Turner, these scholars were interested in what it meant to be American the special meaning of American character, practices, and institutions and they pursued their objects in multiple disciplines, including history, literature, sociology, political theory, and the emergent eld of American studies. Indeed, the notion of American exceptionalism is in many ways the foundation of the discipline of American Studies (Denning, 360).
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But, not only did the emphasis on American uniqueness display a smug conceit of moral superiority (Greene, 208), it also prevented the emergence of a more general cultural studies, in part by ignoring non-American theoretical paradigms (Denning, 360). From its disciplinary inception, American Studies has been politically invested, and the cold war climate led scholars to think of their work as crucial to an eventual American victory. The best safeguard against totalitarian developments in our society, Charles Seymour, president of Yale, claimed in 1950, is an understanding of our own cultural heritage and an afrmative belief in the validity of our institutions of freedom, enterprise and individual liberty (cited Davis, 355). Exceptionalism supplied, in other words, the American response to Marxism and communism. (Yet, ironically, the phrase American exceptionalism was coined by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s to accuse a faction of the American Communist Party of heresy.5) While scholars in other countries were drawing key insights from Marxs philosophy of history and his investment in materialism, researchers in the elds surrounding American Studies were reluctant to follow, resulting in what Robert Sklar dubbed the poverty of theory in American Studies (260).6 The emphasis on exceptionalism and consensus was displaced in the early 1970s, however, as interest in questions of gender, ethnicity, race and class increasingly drew attention. Even though some scholars worried about the loss of a synthetic narrative, the turn away from exceptionalism and its narrow focus on a limited range of experience (white, male, Protestant, heterosexual) has expanded the canon and proliferated methodological approaches. But this is not to suggest that exceptionalism is no longer important to the study of American culture, history, and literature. If [n]otions of American exceptionalism cut us off from [a] larger understanding of ourselves and our place in the world as a nation among nations, a people among peoples, producing an odd combination of parochialism and arrogance, the disorienting experience of 9/11 and The War on Terror have brought new energy to the critique of exceptionalism, re-energized by the same events (Bender, 300). Resituating the United States in the world has led to a re-mapping of American literature, a rethinking of translation in literary studies, and a new orientation to the hemisphere and the globe. Rather than explicate a distinctive American character, studies are now attuned to the multiple versions of American-ness that exist simultaneously. At the same time, and particularly in the wake of 9/11, a new way of thinking about exceptionalism has emerged, one critical of existing arguments and their strategies. Although there have always been critics to the coercive consensus on which exceptionalism insisted Edmund Wilsons polemical preface to Patriotic Gore (1962) provides a particularly insightful example recent events have raised questions about American arrogance and the larger implications of what it means to claim the position of exception.7 But where previous arguments focused on overlooked historical details or cultural artifacts, newer approaches to exceptionalism employ different methodological premises and draw on new archives. Rather than focusing on American character or the peculiarities of American culture, recent arguments about exceptionalism pose questions about the nature of the exception in legal and political theory, raising concerns about the nature of sovereignty and the rule of law. To think through these issues, scholars increasingly rely on the work of continental philosophers and political theorists. The studies that result tend to be more critical of American policies than earlier arguments about the American exceptionalism. Because the arguments draw from sources that may be unfamiliar to many literary scholars, this essay will survey the central claims about the exception for four thinkers who are especially important to the larger debate: Sren Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. Although most of them do not address the United States directly in their texts, their ideas are crucial to the project of rethinking American exceptionalism, providing an alternate genealogy for the concept.
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This intellectual trajectory begins with Sren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Danish philosopher whose theological writings are cited less frequently in discussions of the exception than they should be, given the precision and inuence of his claims. Kierkegaards extensive pseudonymous writings explore the nature of faith and the individuals affective response anxiety to its demands and rewards. In two of his most accessible texts, Repetition and Fear and Trembling (both 1843), Kierkegaard charts the central role of the exception in aesthetic and religious experience. In both cases, the exception disrupts the universality of ethical society, installing in its place a rigorous singularity with expansive implications. Fear and Trembling is a meditation on Genesis 22: 118 in which God orders Abraham to sacrice his beloved son, Isaac. Abraham prepares to comply, but at the last moment, God intervenes, praising Abraham for his unwavering faith. Enlightenment philosophers struggled with this story, which seemed to depict God as capriciously cruel, faith as irreconcilable with reason; thinkers, like Immanuel Kant, were eager to explain, or even explain away, the parables message. But Kierkegaard objects to the idea that the story of Abraham should be ignored, arguing instead that it provides an unparalleled means of appreciating that faith should never be seen as a mere matter of thought. Across his writings, Kierkegaard instead stresses the relationship between absurdity and faith. For this reason, he explains that it is a mistake to attempt to think [one]self into Abraham (33) because the patriarchs actions defy reason. [W]e are unwilling to work, and yet we want to understand the story, Johannes de Silentio, the narrator of Fear and Trembling, observes. We glorify Abraham, but how? We recite the whole story in clichs (28). So presented, the story seems easy to comprehend, and an auditor can stretch out his legs, relaxing in its moral clarity (28). But such readings are dangerous, he continues, because Abraham is a knight of faith, not a tragic hero (75). The tragic hero makes sacrices that express the universal, which demonstrate the values a community shares (75). The knight of faith does the opposite: he relinquishes the universal to become the single individual (75). Put differently, the man of faith renounces the shared obligations and privileges of the group, a teleological suspension of the ethical, to attain a private and singular relationship with God. He thus becomes an exception, who can never be a moral model because, when taken literally, Abrahams story is morally reprehensible. The ideas in Repetition run parallel to those expressed in Fear and Trembling. The text is narrated by a second pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, and tells a partially autobiographical tale of young poets ordeal as he relinquishes his beloved. Here, as in its companion text, Kierkegaard raises questions about the nature of communication, arguing explicitly for indirection as a way to express ideas and principles that t uneasily into language. What is most crucial for this essay, however, is the description he provides of the exception. On the one side, he writes,
stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conict between the rage and impatience of the universal over the disturbance the exception causes and its infatuated partiality for the exception, for after all is said and done, just as heaven rejoices more over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoice over an exception (226).

Characterized as a wrestling match, Kierkegaard presents the relationship of the universal and the exception as one predicated on conict and distress (227). There are two key points to note. First, Kierkegaards exception is a person, not a place, epoch, or condition. The dynamic relationship between the exception and the universal is saturated with affect (infatuation, joy, rage, impatience). Nonetheless, Kierkegaard concludes if one really
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wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception; he discloses everything far more clearly than the universal itself (227). Kierkegaard was not translated into English until the 20th century, but his writings were familiar to German thinkers much earlier. Carl Schmitt, a controversial legal scholar from the early 20th century, cites Kierkegaard early in one of his key works, Political Theology (1922), praising his predecessors vital intensity and deploying Kierkegaards authority to buttress his own argument (15).8 It is no surprise that Schmitt would draw from a religious thinker in Political Theology for he argues that the key concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological ones (36). This is true not only because of their historical development but also because of their systematic structure (36). The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology, he concludes (36). For Schmitt, as for Kierkegaard before him, the exception provides unique access to larger systems or structures. In Political Theology, Schmitt states that the exception illuminates the concept of sovereignty, beginning the volume with the claim Sovereign is he who decides on the exception (5). It is neither social contract nor divine authority that subtends sovereignty according to Schmitt, but instead, the decision to suspend the law and establish its exception. He is careful to explain that this is not merely a declaration The very idea of decision precludes that there can be any absolutely declaratory decisions because of his consistent opposition to the emphasis placed on words deliberation and discourse in the evolution of political theory. In The Concept of the Political (1927/1932), Schmitt argues for a second key element of his political theory: the fundamental political distinction is between the friend and the enemy. No mere metaphor, the friendenemy dyad must be understood, he explains, as concrete and existential and as having the possibility of reaching the most extreme point (CP, 27). War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics, he continues, but without its possibility, the political cannot exist (CP, 34). Schmitt argues that what gets lost in the turn to liberal democracy, with its defense of individual rights and reliance on parliamentary procedure, is recognition of this fundamental fact. By emphasizing discussion and debate, rather than decision, liberal democracy mistakes the very nature of politics; it is, in part, the function of the sovereign to nullify such errors. Even further, Schmitt maintains that every consistent individualism leads not only to a negation of the political but also, more importantly, to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces (CP, 70). Juxtaposed against one of Turners claims on the frontier [t]he tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression (562) it becomes clearer why Schmitts ideas have garnered so much interest in recent years. Commitment to the principles of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on rights, equality, and deliberation is fundamentally incompatible with what Schmitt argues is basic to politics, namely homogeneity and the dyad of friend/enemy. Across his oeuvre, Schmitt develops a nuanced argument about the nature of sovereignty and a thorough critique of liberal, parliamentary democracy, ideas that have drawn attention from a wide range of thinkers, including Jrgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Agamben. But Schmitts inuence is controversial because he was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933, wrote essays about the Fhrer, enjoyed the protection of Herman Gring, and held a post at the University of Berlin throughout WWII; his wartime activities caused him to be interrogated at Nuremberg. Some scholars have worried about the inuence of a Nazi jurist, while others suggest that the accuracy of Schmitts arguments about the fate of the liberal democratic state should be the greater source of concern. Given the history of the Third Reich, it has been difcult for scholars to understand the relationship between Schmitt, a member of the Nazi Party, and Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish intellectual who committed suicide in Spain during WWII, fearful of falling into Nazi hands. While it would be wrong to overstate the extent of their inuence on one another, it
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is clear that they were familiar with, and admired, each others work. In Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin briey engages with the problem of the exception, gesturing to Schmitt.9 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule, he writes in the eighth thesis (257). Here, as in elsewhere in his writings, Benjamin is deeply critical of the idea that history is progressive, constantly improving. If Schmitt had linked sovereignty to the possibility of claiming a state of exception, Benjamins position is that it has become the norm. Building from his earlier work on the baroque theater, in which he argues for the fundamental relationship between the sovereign and history, Benjamin here indicates the urgency associated with thinking about the exception. Only when people recognize the limitations of their habits of thought about history will it be possible to ght back against Fascism, he explains.
The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are still possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge unless it is knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable (257).

Unfortunately Benjamin did not live to develop fully the alternate theory of history at which he gestures; scholars have gleaned from his works, however, an idea of messianic time that productively shatters conventions. Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has engaged with the concept of the exception across a series of (to date) ve books.10 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is the best known, in part because because it controversially posits it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West (HS, 181). While some scholars have been repelled by Agambens claim, questioning the propriety of taking the concentration camp as an example, others have lauded the precision of his arguments. These controversies notwithstanding, Homo Sacer, along with State of Exception, is central to the evolution of current debates about the exception, and Agambens dense texts have been important to scholars seeking new paradigms of and for American exceptionalism as well as new forms of activism in political debates. As with the other thinkers surveyed, Agamben establishes a fundamental connection between sovereignty and the exception, gured in his work by the homo sacer. Without an original elaboration of principles of inclusion and exclusion what he calls a ban Agamben argues that a sovereign sphere would be impossible (HS, 83, italics in the original). Although many political theorists point to a discourse of rights to dene the constituting power of a state, Agemben maintains that it is only through the state of exception, and the sovereign ban it allows, that the state can come into existence. The difculty of his prose makes Agambens central claims hard to grasp, but his methodology is not as alien as it might initially seem. Agamben is explicit about his debts to both Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. From Foucault, Agamben develops a method based on philological archaeology and the paradigm. The most famous paradigm from the Foucauldian canon is Benthams Panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1977), where Foucault details the multiple ways in which this representative example makes visible the deep structures of its historical moment. Agamben adapts this way of understanding the kind of work the paradigm can do in his own work, particularly in his analysis of the concentration camp. Agamben shares with Benjamin an interest in historical materialism. Like Benjamin, Agamben vigorously opposes the view that history is progressive. The inuence of Benjamins thought is evident across Agambens work, and State of Exception devotes an entire section to elaborating the relationship between the exception and pure violence in Benjamins work, especially The Critique of Violence.
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In Homo Sacer, Agambens argument depends on several terms excavated from Greek and Roman antiquity. He begins by pointing out that the Greeks had two terms to refer to life: zoe and bios. While zoe designated the simple fact of living common to all living beings, bios indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group (HS, 1). This distinction is key to Agambens revision to the denition of biopolitics, the term Foucault coined to refer to the modern states techniques of intervention into the lives of its citizens. According to Agamben, Foucaults focus on the modern state overlooked a basic fact: biopolitics already existed in the classical world, as the distinction between zoe and bios makes clear. But it is with the idea of the homo sacer that Agambens biopolitical argument becomes most clear. In archaic Roman law, homo sacer designated an individual who could be killed with impunity, because he stood outside the law, but could not be sacriced, as he no longer had any value to the society (HS, 8). As we saw in the discussion of Fear and Trembling, sacrice requires giving up something or someone of great value. The homo sacer suffers from a double exclusion (HS, 82); neither part of the state (he has been stripped of everything but bare life) nor free from its power (because he can be killed with impunity, he lives under a constant threat of death), homo sacer is captured in the state of exception (HS, 83). Although this particular legal category no longer exists, Agamben argues that the homo sacer, like the camp, is paradigmatic of the state of exception, which he points out has become increasingly expansive, both in terms of time and space. In the camp, the exception is the rule, and Agamben posits that this has troubling implications for our contemporary historical moment. He does not go as far as some Slavoj Zizek asserted in 2002 that we are all homo sacer (100) but Agamben is also not willing to relinquish the idea that perhaps this might be virtually the case (HS, 115). From the real state of exception in which we live, he asserts at the end of State of Exception, it is not possible to return to the state of law, for at issue now are the very concepts of state and law (SE, 87). As dire as his account of current conditions are, however, Agambens aim is to energize readers into a new politics, one he glimpses in the example of a ctional character Herman Melvilles famous scrivener, Bartleby where the ability to resist and reject exceptional traps created by sovereignty, power, law, and violence might become possible. But for the nal gesture to Herman Melville, it might appear that these works have little to offer literary scholars, and it is entirely reasonable to ask how scholars use arguments like these to re-think American exceptionalism and its place in literary scholarship. Further, how might this intellectual tradition overlap with the overview of American exceptionalism ideology with which this essay began? A rst response would point to the intriguing points of connection between seemingly disparate traditions, particularly in the ways they correlate history, theology (broadly understood), and politics. Scholars who have sought to meld the traditions, bringing the theoretical sophistication of different modes of argumentation to bear on American exceptionalism, have done so in several ways. Turning to recent events, including the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, debates about the legality of torture, and the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, scholars have posed questions about the relationship between the United States and the international community; these works often use Schmitt and Agamben to explore the limits to American claims of exceptional status. Political theorists, like Michael Ignatieff, have asked searching questions about the extent that American is willing to abide by the human rights laws and international conventions that it helped to establish. Arguing that exceptionalism is too often interpreted as exemptionalism, Ignatieff and others seek to hold the United States to the standards it maintains for other members of the international community, as a way to put human rights, rather than issues of national security, at the center of foreign policy debates (4). Literary
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critics have also entered this debate, either focusing, like James Dawes, directly on the category of human rights or taking a more general approach, engaging with the literature of American imperialism, different ways to think about the role of race in American literary history, and the representation of sovereignty. Arguing that American literature is world literature, other scholars have used the revised approaches to exceptionalism to argue for a different approach to the eld entirely, one that rejects that nation as the primary category of organization. New congurations hemispheric, transnational, multination, and postnational have changed the canon, particularly perhaps for scholars working in the area of early American literature, raising intriguing questions about what counts as an example or an exception, concerns that Kierkegaards writing can help to clarify. While it was formerly the case that John Winthrops A Modell of Christian Charitie (1630) functioned as the Ur-text for American literature (Delbanco, 72), scholars have increasingly established many different foundational texts for American literature, composed in an array of languages. Such comparative models are not, Ian Tyrell notes, necessarily antagonistic to exceptionalism, however, suggesting that scholars must be alert to the potentially imperial aspects of the trans- or postnational project (1035). Donald Pease shares this concern, urging scholars to attend to this danger by turning the states exceptions, as well as the structures through which the discourse of American exceptionalism has historically disavowed them, into objects of analysis and explanatory critique (25). These philosophical considerations of the exception have also been useful for scholars in reframing a variety of problems, from the structure of sovereignty to the status of the everyday. Questions about how we might understand the dynamic relationship the normal or usual and the exceptional or extraordinary can have profound implications not just within literary texts but also understanding the relationship between works and relative to the community for which they are written. As Jonathan Elmer argues, American textual traditions help to reveal how the problem of sovereignty. . .unfolds in the new world; literary expression, he maintains, provides Thomas Jefferson with the means to express, not avoid, conceptual problems (7). Myths normally do the work of incorporating events into recognizable national narratives, Pease explains, and American exceptionalism has been a remarkably successful myth (15). But the new thinking on exceptionalism seeks to do the opposite: to distort the comfortable recognition that myth provides, to startle people out of complacency and into action, and to provide a new way of thinking about the human experience that is not limited to or by the nation. Short Biography Elizabeth Duquette is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Gettysburg College. She is the author of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance (Rutgers UP, 2010), as well as articles on Herman Melville, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. She recently edited, with Cheryl Tevlin, a volume entitled Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press), and is currently writing a book entitled Example, Exemplar, Exception: Representation and Identication in Nineteenth-Century America. Notes
* Correspondence: Department of English, 300 N. Washington Street, Gettysburg, PA 17325, USA. Email: eduquett@gettysburg.edu
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Scholars struggle to differentiate between ideology and myth, both in terms of larger intellectual debates as well as in the more limited topic of American exceptionalism. Rather than worrying about the differences between the terms; however, this essay will focus on the terrain they share, particularly the ways that both myth and ideology mystify power relations. 2 The literature on this topic is vast; some key titles include J. G. A. Pocock, Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Tradition and their Understanding, Politics, Langauge and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1973); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991); Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory. 3 Greene is particularly useful for readers interested in early expressions of proto-exceptionalist thinking. 4 Lipset, for example, reads the passage as suggesting that the United States is qualitatively different from all other countries; for this reason, he thinks Tocqueville should therefore be called the initiator of the writings on American exceptionalism (18). 5 J. Robert Alexander outlines the details of Stalins condemnation of the Lovestoneites in The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981). See, also, Pease 2009, 10. 6 It would be wrong to assume that there was no critical dimension to the study of American literature and culture during the period. Trachtenberg details the ways in which the myth/symbol school offered its own critique (Myth and Symbol, Massachusetts Review 25 (Winter 1984), 6701). 7 Special issues of Diacritics (summer-fall 2007) and South Atlantic Quarterly (winter 2008) offer excellent sustained consideration of the exception, Schmitt, and Agamben. 8 On the inuence of the Catholic Church on Schmitts ideas, see Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005. 9 Benjamin wrote to Schmitt in 1930, suggesting that he had found conrmation of [his] modes of research in the philosophy of art from [Schmitts] in the philosophy of the state (cited Weber, 5). 10 These books, some not yet translated from the Italian, are State of Exception, Homo Sacer II (2003), Remnants of Auschwitz, Homo Sacer III (1998), Il Regno e la Gloria, Homo Sacer II, 2 (2007), and The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, Homo Sacer II, 3 (2011).

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. . State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005. Bender, Thomas. A Nation Among Nations: Americas Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought (Vol. II). Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Davis, Allen F. The Politics of American Studies. American Quarterly 42.3 (1990): 35374. Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Denning, Michael. The Special American Conditions: Marxism and American Studies. American Quarterly 38.3 (1986): 35680. Elmer, Jonathan. On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Greene, Jack. Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1993. Ed. Ignatieff, Michael. American Exceptionalism and Human Rights. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1991. Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Lipset, George. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: Norton, 1996. Pease, Donald. Re-thinking American Studies After US Exceptionalism. American Literary History 21.1 (2008): 1927. . The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009. Rodgers, Daniel T. Exceptionalism. Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 2140. Ross, Dorothy. American Exceptionalism. A Companion to American Thought. Eds. Richard W. Fox and James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 223. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985.
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. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. Sklar, Robert. The Problem of an American Studies Philosophy: A Bibliography of New Directions. American Quarterly 27 (1975): 24562. Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. 2 vols. Trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen. New York: Vintage, 1990. Tyrell, Ian. American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History. American Historical Review 96.4 (1991). 103155. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Signicance of the Frontier in American History. An American Primer. Ed. Daniel J. Boorstin. New York: Meridian, 1966. 54270. Weber, Samuel. Taking Exception to Decision Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Diacritics 22.3-.4 (1992): 518. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.

Further Reading
Hodgson, Godfrey. The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Kammen, Michael. The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration. American Quarterly 45 (1993): 143. Madsen, Deborah. American Exceptionalism. Jackson, MI: Mississippi UP, 1998. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Noble, David W. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2002.

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Literature Compass 10/6 (2013): 473482, 10.1111/lic3.12067