ABSTRACT
This conclusion explicates the salience of Rogin’s work for theorizing our own historical moment, characterized by the (re)emergence, across the Euro-Atlantic world, of nationalism and authoritarian politics fueled by economic precarity and anxiety about cultural identity. In the U.S., the challenge is to register what is distinctive and unprecedented about Donald Trump as a candidate and president, while at the same time underscoring how this figure is also symptomatic of deep patterns in American history. In these broader and local contexts, modes of argument seem to be congealing in ways that simplify and isolate dimensions of politics that Rogin’s work interrelated. As a charged demonology of a raced and gendered nationalism on the Right has been met, on the one hand, by a Left response that tends to detach class from the “identity politics” of race and gender, and, on the other, by a liberalism defending Madisonian checks and balances, Rogin’s creative tracing of intertwined symbolic, libidinal and political economies seems especially crucial. The lesson of Rogin’s work is to refuse “splitting” – separating reason and desire, conscious rhetoric and unconscious motivation, the symbolic and material, subjective and worldly, familial and market, state and culture, identity and class, local and national, personal and political. An insistence on entangled complexity is his central methodological (but also ethical and reparative) legacy: a critical theory of political derangement must resist splitting in its own practice of analysis; otherwise it repeats the very problem that must be named, evaluated, and opposed.
