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² Since the Bush II administration, neoconservatism has been identified almost exclusively with American foreign policy, but this connection overlooks the domestic power of neoconservatism and the opportunistic alliances that make it a hodgepodge of constituencies. As Brown (ibid., 696) explains, neoconservatism “emerges from a contingent convergence of interests among evangelical Christians, Jewish Straussians, avowedly secular Cold Warriors who have made a fetish of the West, conservative feminists and other family moralists … random imperialists, and converted liberals and socialists.” If the election of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that conservative thinking tends to foster motley crews. A clear delineation of neoconservatism is not this essay's concern so much as the fact that many neoconservatives, from anti-hippie intellectuals to queerphobic and antichoice crusaders, have stressed the importance of the nuclear family to a healthy American future.

³ Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” New York Review of Books, 20 Nov. 2008, at www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel.

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¹⁴ Cooper, 21, points out that, prior to neoliberal reform, activists “articulated a novel politics of redistribution that delinked risk protection from the sexual division of labour and social insurance from sexual normativity.” These aims were anathema to both neoliberal and neoconservatives, hence their willingness to form a right-wing coalition: “While neoliberals called for an ongoing reduction in budget allocations dedicated to welfare – intent on undercutting any possibility that the social wage might compete with the free-market wage – neoconservatives endorsed an expanding role for the state in the regulation of sexuality” (ibid., 49). For work that demonstrates how neoliberalism issues from an alchemy of market freedom and social oppression see Harvey; Brown, “American Nightmare”; Lazzarato, Maurizio, “Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social,” trans. Venn, Couze, Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 6 (2009), 109–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For work that examines the discrimination hiding behind welfare reform see Briggs, Laura, Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chappell, Marisa, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cruikshank, Barbara, The Will to Empower (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ Engels, Frederick, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (London: Pathfinder, 1972)Google Scholar. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 304, Gramsci points out that capital and sexual normativity conspire: “The new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants the man as a worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly pursuit of occasional satisfaction.”

²⁰ In The Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), Luce Irigaray notes that, in much of Levinas's work, the ethical subject is tacitly coded as masculine. For a sympathetic evaluation of both Irigaray's and Levinas's work see Chanter, Tina, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

²¹ Derrida, Jacques, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Brault, Pascale-Anne and Naas, Michael (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²³ Guenther, “Dwelling in Carceral Space,” 74.

²⁴ As Levinas explains, “justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest (OTB 159). Social justice does not alleviate the self of its responsibility for the Other but works in concert with and supplements each individual's ethical duty.

²⁵ Levinas's inconsistent attitude toward literature complicates this methodological procedure, to be sure. In “Reality and Its Shadow,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 130–43, Levinas views literature as an unethical form of discourse. But in Otherwise than Being (169–70), he contends that literature can assume ethical dimensions in its “implication of a meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concept.” This point opens up two corresponding conclusions: first, that literature can intimate ethical alternatives by interrupting the concepts that ground our thinking and modes of life, and second, that literary criticism, and by extension skepticism tout court, contains ethical force to the extent that it reads for such interruptions. For helpful studies that put Levinas in conversation with literary studies and criticism see Robbins, Jill, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Eaglestone, Robert, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Both Robbins and Eaglestone stress the ethical dimensions of criticism.

²⁶ Robbins, “The Worldling of the American Novel,” 1096.

²⁷ Spillers, Hortense, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 17, 2 (1987), 64–81, 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 54, Simone Browne argues that “racialized practices of surveillance” work to make a “hypervisible racial subject.”

²⁹ Roy is quoted in Madeleine Bunting, “Dam Buster,” The Guardian, 28 July 2001, at www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/fiction.arundhatiroy.

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³¹ Wasserman, Sarah L., “Looking Away from 9/11: The Optics of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland,” Contemporary Literature, 55, 2 (2014), 249–69, 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Joseph O'Neill, “Bowling Alone,” The Atlantic, October 2007, at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/10/bowling-alone/306185.

³³ James, C. L. R., Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 196, 202Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text, labeled BB.

³⁴ Here, too, we find an echo of Levinasian ethics, as Hans's image of his “mothered self” recalls Levinas's association of maternity with the formation of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being (see 75–81). As we will see, however, Hans's memories do not always map neatly onto Levinas's symbolic language.

³⁵ Readers of Levinas will note that Hans's fantasy of Christian transcendence bears no relation to Levinas's understanding of the alteritous Other as inhabiting a transcendent domain.

³⁶ Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin (London: Penguin, 1993), 105, 104Google Scholar.

³⁷ In The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 21, Anna Kornbluh argues that Marx posits “ungrounded social organization – form without content – as the essence of human experience.”

³⁸ O'Neill, Joseph, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (New York: Vintage, 2001), 115Google Scholar.