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.

American Cringe: Why Can’t the Contemporary Right Make Art?

This is part of what led me to consider this question further after hearing it brought up on that podcast: how is such a large segment of the population – a plurality, if not a majority – so incapable of producing noteworthy art? And what might this have to do with the culture war that never actually seems to stop?

What Actually Is Capitalism?

One thing I noticed during the course of this conversation is a confusion of terms, though. We didn’t agree on what capitalism actually is. I’ve been turning this idea over and over in my head and that’s what I’m going to do today: provide a working definition of the problem.

On Dis-Identity Politics: How Our Social World is Continuously Created

Consider: In the absence of other human beings, what identities do we possess? If you found yourself on a desert island, far distant from other human beings, would you still think of yourself as being an American or a Briton or a Catholic or an Atheist or anything of the sort? Or would, after a period, these identities simply slip from you like dead skin, leaving you just as a person trying to survive in the wilderness?

Anti-Romulus: Notes on the Peculiar Institution of Self

In short, the dominant western conception of self – the Cartesian dichotomy between the mind and the body – is ultimately based on a Roman legal fiction that was originally used to justify slavery. We all conceive of ourselves this way, and it brings with it a cloud of other associations that imply a variety of relations (property and hierarchy, first and foremost) that have been naturalized because this fiction doesn’t make sense without them, and it makes it impossible to root them out so long as the fiction remains in place.