Abstract
Pluralism's renaissance, thanks to William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe and others, has established its position as the distinctive voice of late modern democracy. It thus calls for an explicit theory of tragedy to address the antagonisms and enmities it reflects and fosters. Treating Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Weber and Camus as members of a minor (tragic) tradition of thought, I articulate a political conception of tragedy that flows not from the failures of politics but, ironically, from politics at its best. A tragic understanding can provide a valuable re-description of intractable political conflicts that simultaneously de-moralizes them; it can also furnish vibrant ethical-political resources for an ethos of commitment and accountability suited to life in a democratic pluralist polity. Building on these thinkers, I propose the introduction of a Dionysian festival that subverts, even disables, mere patriotic celebration and turn to a classic in American cinema, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to explore a tragic conception of political life that can be a source of inspiration and energy in a revitalized democratic community.
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Notes
Ford's cinematic sleight of hand can illuminate the film's closing presumption that we, the audience, concur with the decision to conceal the truth. The second flashback spurs reconsideration of the initial presentation of the shootout. As Valance toys with Stoddard, we keep wondering about Doniphon's whereabouts. Nearby in such a small town, he should have arrived long ago. The riddle goes more or less unnoticed, certainly unanswered. Think back, however, to the manner of Valance's death: we know at some level that Stoddard could not have produced the lethal result. His confession confirms our guilty visceral knowledge. As we agree with the decision to bury the truth, is it not because we have been complicit all along? The claim cannot be proven, but I believe it is folded into the film's structure as a possibility. We the people know that our myths bear disconcerting truths. We prefer not to know – not too much anyway.
As Robert Ray, 1985, observes, Liberty Valance proffers a fundamental ambiguity in ‘almost every image, issue, action, and character.’ The ‘inherent equivocalness’ between the contending sets of values represented by Doniphon and Stoddard makes any choice between them not only ‘treacherous,’ to borrow Ray's formulation, but tragic. The film, alas, ultimately obviates the need for choice. Doniphon's death requires silence, which means forgetting and, in effect, denial. The newspaper editor's question at the beginning of the film, ‘Who was Tom Doniphon?’ becomes retroactively unasked. There was no Tom Doniphon, which also means there was no cost to founding.
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Thanks to Kennan Ferguson, Mike Gibbons, Cheryl Hall, Steve Roach and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms of the essay.
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Johnston, S. American Dionysia. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 255–275 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.40