The Impassable Dream

Abstract:This essay approaches the theme of “impasse and democracy” through the motif of the American dream, a dream, as many have noted, unfulfilled both at home and abroad. This lack of fulfilment is here read as a structural impasse within democracy, as a sign that democracy dreams, or is a dream, because it cannot come into its own. Building toward a sustained reading of a typically neglected volume in the Freudian corpus, his collaborative study (with William C. Bullitt) of Woodrow Wilson, this essay teases out the theoretical and political implications of thinking the dream that America remains, ambivalently idling, from a psychoanalytical point of view.