The following chapter considers the willingness to name and confront �vii as an indicator of Bush's resolve. For now, what is important is the gaze Bush imagines watching him when he speaks, the other he imagines looking at, judging, the United States. In the 2oo6 State of the Union address, Bush avows, "By allowing radical Islam to work its will-by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself-we would signal to al that we no longer believe in our own ideals, or even in our own courage. But our enemies and our friends can be certain: The United States will not retreat from the world, and we will never surrender to evil:' Before this imagined gaze-primarily that of the enemy, the terrorist who would receive the signal that the United States is sending-the wilingness to die for freedom demonstrates that American freedom is not simply a market freedom, a decadent freedom to shop or choose from a wide array of colors, but something more, something as powerful as the conviction driving the socaled terrorist.
Democratic Theory as the Discourse of the University
The third invocation of democracy, Gutmann's and Thompson's theory of deliberative democracy, is usefully read in terms of the discourse of the university. Recall, in this version of the social link, knowledge is in the position of the speaker or agent. Underlying this speaking knowledge, in what Lacan designates as the position of truth, is the signifer of the master. The knowledge that speaks in university discourse relies on an unstated, underlying power, a master's claim to truth. Two points arise from reading Gutman and Thompson via university discourse. The first appears when we understand them to be espousing a normative theory and involves their occupation of the position of neutral knowledge. The second appears when we read them as providing a descriptive theory and involves, one, the imaginary character of their synthesis of Bush and those who opposed his march to war as equals in democratic deliberation, and, two, the closure, the loss of a hope for a diferent future, that accompanies their account of the openness of democracy.
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