Cirrus@Austlit

'It’s all happening very quickly. Work passes by in a blur. I barely have time to read. When I do, it’s on a deadline. I swallow knowledge without chewing and then I spit it back up just as fast. I turn it over in my mind exactly once, flipping it onto its back, and then throw it back out into the sea. Just last week I went to a meeting of a critical theory reading group I’m in: I read the book, entitled For a Left Populism, by Chantal Mouffe, a prominent post-Marxist, in the two hours beforehand. During the meeting I mention, sheepish, that when I was younger I was a post-Marxist. That is, I found it conceivable that material determinations could not a priori be privileged over others: that the class structure did not pre-exist the social, or that domination could be formulated in terms other than class terms. I scoffed at class reductionists who failed to realise that there would continue to be misogyny, violence against women, or unequal distribution of social reproductive labour under communism or socialism. Such a post-Marxist was I that I would often anger my former partner by insisting that I wanted to name my firstborn child – whom I don’t have time to conceive, birth or raise – ‘hegemonise’, a term that crops up often in this particular niche of academia. I don’t want to name my child – who doesn’t exist because I don’t have time to make them – hegemonise. I was only trying to goad my partner, thought it was funny. With a straight face, I’d insist: ‘C’mon! You have to admit, it’s an original name. No one else will have done it before.’' (Introduction)