Oedi-Politics

Oedi-Politics is the intrusion of patterns of behavior and thought characteristic of family dramas – specifically those characteristic of the bourgeois nuclear family – into the realm of the political. It is the adoption of maternal, paternal, and filial roles by political actors and the determination of future courses of action by the relationship between these roles. In short, when people should be coming to agreements, making compromises, working through problems, they are instead defaulting to playing house. Everything else becomes secondary, and poisoned by this.

The Aim Is To Have Chosen Successfully: On Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow

Within the Context of No Context essentially read like the I Ching with anger management problems. It’s an abstract text: I’m beginning to think it best to read it more like a map than a book. It’s a work of genius and madness. Possibly, it’s the last great work of bourgeois philosophy.

Something To Do On the Way To the Grave: Fisher's "Depressive Hedonia" and Getting Some Hobbies (Fisher's Ghosts, part 2)

Put simply: it’s not a job or a side hustle per se, and you have to actually do something.

On Reactionary Cute: How Childish Images and Nostalgia Hack Our Minds

One might ask how we got here, but that's a topic for a historian (May's book seems to be a good trailhead.) If I were to have to venture a guess, I would look to the addition of liminal states between child and adult: the teenager, the "emerging adult", and so on. Another suspicion would be the emphasis placed on youth culture since the 1950s, and especially the youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s. If your life is effectively over at 30, then of course you're going to live in denial about being over thirty, of course you're going to tell war stories about what you were doing when you were nineteen, of course you're going to lie to yourself.

Escaping the Prison of Contingency: Another Attempt to Pin Down the Utopian Impulse

What I am calling the Utopian Impulse is a hypothetical third drive, something to break the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. What Marcuse called “The Great Refusal” and Mark Fisher called “the Specter of the world that could be free”, I view as expressions of the Utopian Impulse. I don't want to think of it as anything mystical, but I can't help but feel inflected by mysticism when I discuss it. It is a haunting spirit, a radical outside, an alchemical potential. (Image is taken from instagram user @prismattco.)