The Antebellum American Literature – a response to the fears and anxieties that permeated the North American reality – is characterized by an optimism and idealism that exalts the divine in every human being, attempting to consolidate an American identity, an American self based on the affective bonds in a paradox represented by the relationship between the Unum and the Pluribus, a constant tension that deeply influenced the American imagination of the 19th century. As a consequence, these premises led to a profound democratic movement that presents the American experiment as a potential democracy, a political and social vehicle dependent on the organic emotional relationships between the citizens of this idealized equal, social, and biological system. The political and emotional projects of Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman reflect this connection between love and the political, a connection that still pervades our understanding of society, of our obligations towards other individuals as co-citizens as «lovers» in a democracy.
Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience: Breaking the Law against Inmorality
Thoreau, after inscribing – in his work Walden – the invitation for his readers to contemplate those emotional needs or priorities that satisfy their existence in order to live deliberately, proceeds to write a text, Civil Disobedience, in which he highlights a radical individualism whose consciousness, through its caring and kindness to the other, creates a paradoxical tension that defines Thoreau’s political ideal. In Civil Disobedience, due to the impact that the perpetuation of slavery in the American country and a war motivated by geopolitical affairs had on him, thw author introduces the idea that of self-emancipation «within» and not «of,» in which the individual is critical with the piblic discourses that enslave the population the population leading them to live «miserable failures.» Consequently, Thoreau proposes the possibility for the moral action of the individual against the inmoral state or institution. In other words, sovereignty must be found on the individual consciousness, on his/her deliberate and thoughtful life against the power of the intitution. This individual moral action establishes the aforementioned contradiction of the intertwined individualism and altruism. That is, Thoreau prioritizes the individual, but, at the same time, an ultimate altruism that results from a radical individualism that has the moral obligation to intervene with the state, to reform a life that is not devoted to social improvemet. Furthermore, this moral action is the outcome of an empathy that rejects the «banality of evil» (Hannah Arendt), that develops these ethical obligations, breaking with the ideological state apparatuses that hinder the love for the other and shape the understandong of a moral reality. therefore, through these previous claims, the text’s climax revolves around the idea of breaking the law and embracing justice when the former is inmoral, a radical action that would not be possible without loving bonds between the population. In this sense, Thoreau’s political ideal – which not only includes democracy, but a system based on human rights – that emphasized the moral obligations towards the other, the stranger, due to that individuals are independent, but also ontologically co-dependent, which is a social dynamic clearly determined by the caring for the other.
The Focalizer 