Capitalism and Dirty Talk: Donald Trump's Crowdfunded Discourse and the Demise of Political Community1 (original) (raw)

So that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar. —Wallace Stevens, " The Man with the Blue Guitar " Be prepared. You have to understand Trump to stand calmly up to him and those running with him all over the country. — George Lakoff This essay seeks to come to terms with the new political and ethical paradox proposed by the use of language of Donald Trump, the 45 th president of the United States. While some of his statements have been denounced as slander and many others as lies, such rational understanding of Trump's discourse has had but little effect on his supporters and, indeed, has not kept him from winning the presidency. The essay resorts to a linguistic analysis of a philosophical tradition about lies established by Immanuel Kant and reexamines it through the work of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Thus, the essay exposes the linguistic novelty of Trump's discourse in what may be called the " history of the lie " and the ethical and political impact on the political community. The essay concludes, with the help of Michel Serres, that Trump's discourse coalesces with malfeasant forces at the heart of late capitalist discourse that appropriates the world by defiling it. In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant claims that a lie is the exclusive property of the person who utters or writes it. For Kant, a lie defines the person who proffers it, and, like that person's pain or death, that speech act cannot be shared by the community. Conversely, Kant suggests that truth is a common good shared by all. Truth belongs to all and founds the very sense of ethical and political community. Lies are personal and idiosyncratic and rest outside the democratic metaphysics of common sense that establishes the community and in which " common sense appears not as a psychological given but as the subjective condition of all 'communicability' " (Deleuze, Kant 21). Lies, rather, are harangues thrown at the crowd. While lies are practically indistinguishable, from a linguistic point of view, from a truthful statement, they are distinguishable in that the latter is shared by the community while the former aims at exciting the personalities of the individuals forming a crowd. This essay examines the changes made to our understanding of language and politics by the language of the 45 th President of the United States of America, Donald Trump. Performative speech acts form the basis of social life, and Trump's language nullifies this sociality, rendering community no longer a community, but simply a " crowd. " In his reading of Kant,