Under the banner of “family values,” a discursive campaign, in the form of a diverse set of closely associated conservative reactions, is being waged.¹ At stake is control over contemporary national culture and the consciousness of succeeding generations. Articulated in political speeches by public personae as well as in trade and academic publications, the family values discourse is aimed at redeeming an imagined past and colonizing the present and future. The aim, specifically, is to install a commitment to the moral and political importance of the traditional family, a regulative ideal that is represented as both contractual and natural: It...

It has been frequently noted that in Aeschylus’s tragedySeven against Thebes, the main character, Eteocles, undergoes “an abrupt transformation” (at line 653), changing from “a man who is ‘cool and at ease, ready-witted and concerned for the morale of his people’” to a man driven and out of control, seemingly finally overcome by the curse imposed on his lineage in the Oedipus saga.¹ The elaborate mythological background to Aeschylus’s story is outside the scope of this chapter. My concern is with the political implications of a philosophical trajectory running from Aeschylus through Nietzsche to Foucault and other contemporary writers...

Shortly after the turn of the century, my paternal grandfather, Benjamin Shapiro, a man of humble origin and limited means, sought to move up in the world. After emigrating with his extended family from czarist-held Vilna on the Russian pale at age ten, he had gone to work almost immediately upon his arrival in the United States in the factories of the Connecticut River valley. By the time I knew him, he read the newspaper with his eyes following his forefinger across the page, and his spoken English was in an unpolished idiom, not unlike the itinerant laborers in Dos...

Of all the genres treating public life, explicitly political treatises have been among the most insensitive to changing circumstances. Political theorists persist, for example, in referring to private versus public interests as if the boundary practices constructing these domains are historically stable. A simple narrative has dominated influential, canonical political texts; “private life” precedes civic life, which, in turn, creates the conditions of possibility for the state as a political realization of popular will. In one version, inaugurated in the writings of John Locke, the state is a contractual extension of the civic order, which is composed of an aggregate...

The initial impetus for this chapter is Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of the influence of democracy on “the American family,” from which the epigraph on social versus kindred ties is taken.¹ Restricting his observations to a comparison between the traditional aristocratic family in Europe and white bourgeois families in nineteenth-century America and perceiving what he regarded as a spirit of equality prevailing “around the domestic hearth” (2:193), Tocqueville imagined, simultaneously, a breakdown of “all the old conventional rules of society” (2:197) and a closer family bond (especially between fathers and sons). Such a bond, he noted, reflects an affection and...

As I noted in chapter 4, Tocqueville’s civilizational moral geography was complemented by a commitment to nation-state time. His “America,” as an imagined, politically consolidated, democratic union, represented for him an inevitable future. In preparation for this inevitability, Tocqueville conceptually evacuated the American continent of recalcitrant modes of cultural and political organization. Despite Tocqueville’s predictions, however, recalcitrance remains. Some people(s) and structures of attachment continue to resist the time of the nation-state. In this chapter, I analyze the disjunctures among alternative temporalities, especially as they bear upon the concept of citizenship. Then I turn to a consideration of the state-resistant...

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are down in the temple of Baal.¹

These two lines from verse 6 of Lord Byron’s poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib” are spatially disjunctive in the context of his otherwise exclusive focus on the battlefield. Substantively and melodically, Byron’s poem celebrates the Israelites’ Jehovah-aided victory over their Assyrian enemies, namely, the first two verses:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the foal,

And his cohorts were gleaming of purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the...

Throughout the investigations in this book, I have opposed critical, historically sensitive thought to reactive moralizing about families and about the relationship of families to civic life. I have attempted both to explicate and to demonstrate ways of construing a “politics of the family” that pluralize and open what cultural conservatives would like to close or restrict and that conceptually broaden access to political eligibility (of persons, ideas, and genres). My articulation of a conceptual practice, which has involved both abstract theorizing and applied treatments of genres,with political practice has been aimed at, among other things, displacing certainties with ambiguities...