This work offers an analysis of America’s turning mean and MAGA (Make America Great Again), tracking the incorporation of European racisms and seizing upon particular algorithms of social injustice, theoretically locked in. The depth of American anti-intellectualism—the astonishing pride of stupidity, politically pitched—must not be undermined. With its borrowed made-in-Germany nationalisms, Avital Ronell argues that America is a country lost to intellectual discourse.

Among so many time-release questions and effects of language, we are given to understand that events turning on historical delivery still hit you in the gut and make your immune system give way—and not only because of this or that decimating decree, violent dispatch, or throw-back to primal injury. Friedrich Nietzsche, the first philosopher to put his body on the line, warned against the way political events, the implacable rhetoric of politics, and recurring destructions would disturb your organs, making you want to puke. Shuttered by migraines and retching, Nietzsche dismantled any certitude we might have about separating work from life, thought from existence, and body from the pulse of malheur in political strife. Donning night goggles, Nietzsche also took it upon himself to capture futural flashes: in order to give a leg up to philosophers of the future, he had to calibrate the capacity for human figures of dominance to mutate and step away from false sovereignties. Ever becoming- woman, choosing Eve as the primal “gay scientist,” Nietzsche made it a matter of duty to regender and multiply the existing possibilities of inhabiting different facets of Geschlecht (gender, genus), resetting the sexualities, adding question marks, implanting zoomorphic insets, sizing up difference among species, and breaking genus down. Nietzsche took time to review, in short, everything that would have sought to stabilize a concept of “humanity,” suppressing its violent undertow and a history of severely mis-managed disavowal. Kant had already thrown in the towel regarding the human as essence, pointing out the instabilities of the human figure in its mutating self- production. It was not clear what the future would hold, as humanity lost substance and “man” no longer lined up as a refracted image of God. For his part, Kant had to pen in the wayward human through moral laws, short- leashing the autonomy of man. Becoming dangerous to itself, man as concept was on the ropes. Being and responsibility, caught in the ongoing destruction of humanitas, had to convene a summit meeting. The outer reaches of sovereignty appeared to muscle up mainly in acts of self- destruction. For what is more sovereign than running high on empty, itching to do away with oneself, and scaling back on exalted figures by means of willed extinction?

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