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Coming
Heavy: The "Sopranos", Communitarianism and the Violence of Identity
Dr.
Peter Steeves
Tony Soprano feels disappointed that he came in at the end of "this thing of ours." "The best," he says with great remorse and in the grips of depression, "is over." But regardless of the fact that the Mafia seems to have lost the code of honor that once—at least so goes the collective myth—held it together, Tony’s identity, his sense of self, his set of values, are direct creations of the community in which he finds himself today. Against the tide of multiculturalism with its constant undertow of Liberal metaphysics and ethics, Tony treads purely communitarian waters: he is his roles and relationships; father, husband, lover, Don, friend, and executioner; the point of overlap of the many narrative threads that converge in modern Jersey to constitute this man. And while Sandel and MacIntyre and Etzioni, et al. are generally right in their metaphysics—right that what it is to be an individual is to be an inherent member of a community—and while Livia Soprano is entirely wrong—wrong that we are isolated, monadic, and alone in the world, that "in the end you die in your own arms"—then in what sense does the Mafia constitute a true community? Who is the "our" in this thing of ours, and is there any way to critique the violent ethic that holds such a community together which does not depend on some Liberal conception of rights, some appeal to values that are beyond a real community, some inappropriate—that is—understanding of social identity and morality? In this paper, I argue that a violent and fractured community such as the one constituted by the Mafia and depicted in The Sopranos offers a challenge to communitarianism—one that only a newly postmodern communitarianism can rise to meet. Looking at the ways in which identity is constructed in The Sopranos (through, e.g., analyzing specific episodes such as "Commendatori" in which the crew heads back to the Old Country and finds that they are not quite "Italian," or the fourth season episode dealing with the controversy over Columbus Day, etc.), I come to argue that identity is indeed communally constituted but that there is always a self-referentiality—an impossible and yet necessary bootstrap raising—involved here as well. The actual Cosa Nostra inspired The Godfather films which inspired the characters in The Sopranos (who see themselves in relation to the characters in The Godfather as much as in relation to their own ancestors) which inspires modern day mafiosos which inspires The Sopranos ad infinitum. If the brutality that permeates the Sopranos’ community in word and deed is an inappropriate foundation for a true and/or just community, if Levinas is right that ethics as first philosophy begins with the encounter of the face of the Other (and this becomes problematic in Ralphie Cifaretto’s case because that face is in a bowling bag and no longer attached to a body), then what comes next? Perhaps in the end the agita of identity is a sign, the trace of violence inherent in all naming and all being. Only a thorough deconstruction of identity, then, can possibly hope to unravel these interconnected strands and, in the end, point toward a new understanding of ethics and perhaps the violence of existence itself.
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