Oikopolitics, and Storms

Abstract

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America's future by not only invoking We People's faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so–by this time, as his signature rhetoricity—by evoking Every so often, he remarked, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. He also spoke of an immeasurable sapping of confidence in America's futurity, alongside indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics, such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how measurable acquaints itself with immeasurable (desire and future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in accounting of household–and oikos , in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of classical distinction between public realm of politics and private domain of household in trammelling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of ways politics assumes task of securing an intimately normative disposition, raising of a properly political subject on grounds of at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.