Time and the spectral other: Demonstrating against ‘Unite the Right 2’ |
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| Authors: | GREGORY STARRETT JOYCE DALSHEIM |
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| Institution: | 1. Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Putting Islam to work: Education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt (California 1998).;2. Author of Unsettling Gaza: Secular liberalism, radical religion and the Israeli settlement project (Oxford 2011) and Producing spoilers: Peacemaking and the production of enmity in a secular age (Oxford 2014). She is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. |
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| Abstract: | Recent public protests against right-wing politics in the United States have often demonstrated a sense of surprise at the recurrence of racist, anti-Semitic and fascist ideologies and movements which ought to belong to the past. Using insights from Walter Benjamin, Johannes Fabian and Jacques Derrida, the authors analyze the recent gathering of thousands of counter-demonstrators at the ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally in Washington, DC and discuss how political and moral enemies are rhetorically consigned to another time. The temporality on display at this demonstration was more complex than linear, progressive time. Instead, it consolidated events from the past, present and future into a sense of eternal and recurrent victory. They argue that this temporality is an expression both of Derrida’s ideas about spectrality and Tanya Luhrmann’s analysis of the moral psychology of faith. |
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