Die Your Own Death: Walt Whitman's Existential Democracy

• In Event: Democracy beyond Politics in Late Modern Thought

Abstract

This paper is the introduction to my book in progress, DIE YOUR OWN DEATH: WALT WHITMAN'S EXISTENTIAL DEMOCRACY. The book explores Whitman’s suggestion that democracy justifies itself not only by honoring human dignity and equality, but also by teaching citizens “how to die their own deaths,” how to embrace their own limitation and mortality without leaning on the crutch of supernatural religion. Whitman’s suggestion of this existential justification for democracy distinguishes him as a political theorist: no one before him made this argument. At the same time, Whitman’s own mortal limitations -- his fear of posthumous literary obscurity, his horror at the mass death of the U.S. Civil War, his white supremacy -- caused him to waiver in his radical philosophical acceptance of mortality. During and after the Civil War, Whitman experimented with nationalist conceptions of immortality: the idea that democratic selves could live forever by merging their identities with that of the immortal nation. This nationalist defense against death diluted Whitman’s philosophical radicalism and opened him to both racist and imperialist visions of American immortality that betrayed his democratic commitments. DIE YOUR OWN DEATH traces the rise and fall of a radical democratic philosophy within Whitman’s career. The book introduction outlines the argument -- examining the challenges fear of death creates for democratic politics, and the ways Whitman's best poetry on death offered a distinctive existential justification for democracy.

Author

• Jack Turner, University of Washington