The following paper seeks to understand Donald Trump as a“dialectical image”for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.Trump’s management style,as described in his Art o f the Deal,combines a fetishizing of en...The following paper seeks to understand Donald Trump as a“dialectical image”for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.Trump’s management style,as described in his Art o f the Deal,combines a fetishizing of entrepreneurial risk as a“lifestyle”with the insistence that it is not the entrepreneur but his targets who are ultimately exposed to risk.This suggests that we might understand the elevation of“deal-making”to a lifestyle as a characteristic of modernity that,with neoliberalism,is increasingly coming to the fore.Such a critique of modernity,I further argue,is anticipated by Fichte's Closed Commercial State with its intriguing dialectic of risk.I conclude by arguing that Trump's politics marks the rise of a new,specifically American style of Fascism--one that demands identification not with the state as supra-individual collective,but with an impersonal system governing over individual lives and rendering them precarious.展开更多
文摘The following paper seeks to understand Donald Trump as a“dialectical image”for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.Trump’s management style,as described in his Art o f the Deal,combines a fetishizing of entrepreneurial risk as a“lifestyle”with the insistence that it is not the entrepreneur but his targets who are ultimately exposed to risk.This suggests that we might understand the elevation of“deal-making”to a lifestyle as a characteristic of modernity that,with neoliberalism,is increasingly coming to the fore.Such a critique of modernity,I further argue,is anticipated by Fichte's Closed Commercial State with its intriguing dialectic of risk.I conclude by arguing that Trump's politics marks the rise of a new,specifically American style of Fascism--one that demands identification not with the state as supra-individual collective,but with an impersonal system governing over individual lives and rendering them precarious.
