in order to be ‘a good American’, one does not have to renounce one’s ethnic roots—Italians, Germans, Blacks, Jews, Greeks, Koreans, they are ‘all Americans’, that is, the very particularity of their ethnic identity, the way they ‘stick to it’, makes them Americans. This transubstantiation by means of which the tension between my particular ethnic identity and my universal identity as a member of a Nation-State is surpassed, is threatened today: it is as if the positive charge of pathetic patriotic identification with the universal frame of the American Nation-State has been seriously eroded; ‘Americanness’, the fact of ‘being American’, less and less gives rise to the sublime effect of being part of a gigantic ideological project—‘the American dream’—so that the American state is more and more experienced as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of the multiplicity of ethnic, religious or life-style communities. Modernism in Reverse This gradual collapse—or, rather, loss of substance—of the ‘American dream’ bears witness to the unexpected reversal of the passage from primary to secondary identification described by Hegel: in our ‘postmodern’ societies, the ‘abstract’ institution of secondary identification is increasingly experienced as an external, purely formal frame that is not really binding, so that one is more and more looking for support in ‘primordial’, usually smaller (ethnic, religious) forms of identification. Even when these forms of identification are more ‘artificial’ than national identification—as is the case with the gay community—they are more ‘immediate’ in the sense of seizing the individual directly and overwhelmingly, in his specific ‘way of life’

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