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This paper will compare two controversies related to museum exhibits, one at the National Air and Space Museum, and one at a Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung. The first exhibit was to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the second was designed to convey to the general public the existing scholarly consensus concerning the war crimes of the German army on the Eastern Front during World War II. In both cases, a controversy ensued, in the first, over the proposed exhibit, and in the second, over the exhibit in place.

Both controversies were heated, and in both, indignation was the chief emotion displayed; in both and on both sides, anger was directed at criticisms that were deemed unworthy of the object. Thus it would seem that both of these controversies exhibited a subjective dimension, a dimension primarily personal. But to hold this view would be to misconstrue the nature of this subjectivity, which, however personally it might have been experienced, was a property, primarily, not of persons, but of the agonistic field of which persons are a part. To enter into this field on one side or another was also to experience and to express indignation.

In the case of both controversies, national identity was involved as a central and recalcitrant element. But in the German case, the issue was later successfully redefined more narrowly as factual accuracy; as a consequence of this success, the issue was settled and a revised exhibition mounted. In the American case, the controversy stubbornly remained one of national identity. Because of this, in the American case the divide created by mutual indignation was simply duplicated and deepened at the level of discourse designed to resolve it.

These divergent outcomes suggest that, because subjectivity is a structural property of the agonistic field, and only incidentally a property of individuals, controversies as deep and recalcitrant as those over national identity will not be resolved unless they can be consensually redefined in a way that excludes subjectivity as a property of the agonistic field. In the American case, this exclusion may have been rendered less likely because of an anti-intellectual trend in American life, the reluctance of Americans to defer to expertise in the interpretation of their national past.