Ownership’s Shadow Neoauthoritarianism as Defense of Phantom Possession

Abstract

This article theorizes contemporary authoritarian mobilization and its continuities with liberal modernity. It draws on the genealogy of modern property to systematically integrate two registers that often compete in explanations of authoritarianism: materialist analyses of the political economy, and accounts of racism and sexism. Following intersectional feminist and race scholarship, it argues that liberal capitalist societies rely on inbuilt entitlements to group-based oppression, and that these oppressive relations historically took on a form analogous to property. This analogy is not accidental. Propertized oppression supplements the promise of selfownership that liberalism rests upon; and it compensates parts of the population for the material dispossession on which capitalism thrives. At the present historical conjuncture of formal legal equality and neoliberal material dispossession, the logic of property is replicated in a new key. Neoauthoritarianism seeks to protect embodied entitlements to appropriate for select groups, and to designate others as disposable.