Abstract

The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world was alive, provided an unexpected philosophical foundation for the animism that attributes legal and ontological personhood to the corporation, an imitation of life. The transcendental reification of nature, recently evident in Avatar’s fantasies that one could merge with an impersonally conscious nature, turns out to be coterminous with the reification of corporate personhood, and both with the co-option of (fantasies of) white male individuality. The history of the corporation is also the history of the new world: its colonization was facilitated by joint-stock companies. After native populations were subjugated or exterminated, they took on symbolic roles in the colonizing cultures, and the animistic nature with which they are identified has been personified in ways that are transferred to the corporation. As white men began to feel isolated in society, they imagined they could regain connection with a racialized nature; but they could never have access to their conjectured (and ultimately virtual) aboriginal cultures. Transcendentalism also laid the groundwork for merger with the corporation, the dominant manifestation of contemporary capitalist ontology.