Ideology, Interrupted

A powerful argument that the failure of ideology has created political disconnection and apathy

Political institutions increasingly fail to provide representations where citizens can recognize, identify, and imagine themselves as part of the institutions’ democratic project. Robin Truth Goodman argues that this disconnection is because ideology itself has gotten interrupted. Reversing Louis Althusser’s famous formulation of ideology as “calling” to citizens who, in response, turn toward the call, she argues that citizens now believe that ideology has turned away from them and stopped calling, endangering the most basic processes of modern democracies.

Deconstructing the widespread failure of democratic institutions to connect with individuals, Goodman examines recent works by authors such as Claire Vaye Watkins, Colson Whitehead, Ling Ma, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki that interrogate subjective agency within three different sites of social struggle: eco-catastrophe, pandemic, and food insecurity. She shows the themes that emerge from the novels reflecting and extending how the privatization and technologization of political decision-making have effectively cut off politicians and political institutions from the people they are supposed to serve.

Basing her study in the political philosophy of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and other prominent feminists, Goodman draws parallels with gender theory and argues that precarity in democratic societies has prevented citizens from finding points of engagement within politics. Diagnosing this widespread inability to translate private struggles into collective responses, Ideology, Interrupted is a powerful and inspiring call for new forms of societal bonds and political engagement to rejuvenate our democratic systems.

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