Intense impressions: Joseph R. Biden toward a 2020 national grief

Abstract

By mid-May of 2020, the United States surpassed 100,000 lives lost to COVID-19. The nation was scrambling to make sense of the global pandemic amid the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Focusing on Biden’s pandemic-related speaking moments throughout the 2020 election, I attend to the way Biden lingers in the felt intensities of grief. With this, I illustrate how Biden’s articulations of grief rely on affective intensities which situate a personal grief in open relation to an invisible other, a reaching out, the towardness of which moves away from the particular and toward the singular collective—national grief. Utilizing affect theory, public feelings scholarship, and precedential expectations for presidential speech, I argue that Biden’s grief rhetoric, against the absence of any similar grief-related public address from Trump during this time, defines the emergence of an affective national body—a grieving public. This analysis weaves between notions of individual and collective loss and prompts wider questions of presidential responsibility in response to shared trauma.