What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy?  At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone – often forcing them to show anger, anxiety or desire towards what they considered a challenge or a threat. This book provides a mapping of this complex relationship between America and philosophy through a series of examples drawn from a wide range of authors, from Freud and Heidegger to Adorno, Derrida and many others.  It also examines the way American thinkers themselves have imported, used and abused philosophical views coming from Europe, often transforming them into something other than what they were.  Is then philosophy an anti-American discourse, or America an anti-philosophical country? Or is it, rather, that America provokes philosophy from a