I have a new philosophy book obsession.

When a book published in 2019 warns us about a new form of politics and says that, 👉 “Gaza is the paradigmatic example,” and, “Gaza might well prefigure what is yet to come,” and, “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories serves as a laboratory.”

It has my FULL attention.

This new form of politics? It’s the far-right, deportations, mass surveillance, a politics of hate, it craves apartheid, it increases insecurity with one hand and dominates in the name of security with the other, it’s the MAHA death cult…

I think we’re all watching our democracies gleefully descend into anti-vaxx, anti-intellectual, nationalist authoritarianism and we’re just like “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!” This book is why—it’s NECROPOLITICS.

The philosophy nerd argument in here demystified the WHY?! through a critique/development of philosophers Foucault and Agamben. But this also synthesized a bunch of other philosophical ideas I've been thinking about with respect to the current state of politics: Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Hegel, Judith Butler (on grievability, violence, and the reactionary right's beginnings in the Global South), Anthony Loewenstein, Quinn Slobodian (particularly Crack Up Capitalism), Lacan, and Žižek.

This book was so good. One of the best explanation for the rise of the far right, tyranny, and exit neoliberalism I’ve ever seen.

I hated this book for (mostly) one reason: its terrible autism rep.

Arguably, this entire book is about autism. Emily Wilde is the 1909 version of a high-masking autistic woman. Her hyperfixation (faeries) drives the plot. Her hyperfixation journal is literally the text. And her trouble with social cues is the backbone of the story’s tension, the romance plot, and her character growth.

As a high masking woman who also has a hyperfixation journal? I loved her. I saw myself in her.

👉 But there’s another 1909 autistic character in this book: the changeling child.

The sad truth about changeling faerie lore is that those were just human kids with disabilities like autism. So it was a CHOICE to make the changeling child a villain. It was all about “fixing” him, unburdening his parents, and… literal child abuse 😵‍💫

And F all the way off with that. Because, as someone with a 7 year old nonverbal autistic daughter with eerie pattern recognition and a fae-like love of mischief, I just know some biatch named Emily would’ve been telling me she’s a changeling and to leave her under a tree if this was 1909 😤

So here’s my argument: if a book has good autism rep for socially acceptable autistic characters but bad autism rep for the truly marginalized types of autism in our society, then it’s actually terrible autism rep.

And the rest of the book didn’t save it for me. Because: ▪️ as much as I liked the overwrought navel-gazing of Emily’s journal, especially the interesting limitation it placed on the storytelling… we annoyingly dropped this limitation whenever we needed to. ▪️ as much as I liked that our love interest was kind of a shithead (lol)… chemistry and romance plot, where? ▪️ as much as I liked an anthropology of faeries, the story read 1940s Karl Popper science demarcation criteria back into 1900s science (👎) and didn’t recon with how racist social anthropology was in 1909 (her own university, Cambridge, was particularly bad 🥴)

I hated this book for (mostly) one reason: its terrible autism rep.

Arguably, this entire book is about autism. Emily Wilde is the 1909 version of a high-masking autistic woman. Her hyperfixation (faeries) drives the plot. Her hyperfixation journal is literally the text. And her trouble with social cues is the backbone of the story’s tension, the romance plot, and her character growth.

As a high masking woman who also has a hyperfixation journal? I loved her. I saw myself in her.

👉 But there’s another 1909 autistic character in this book: the changeling child.

The sad truth about changeling faerie lore is that those were just human kids with disabilities like autism. So it was a CHOICE to make the changeling child a villain. It was all about “fixing” him, unburdening his parents, and… literal child abuse 😵‍💫

And F all the way off with that. Because, as someone with a 7 year old nonverbal autistic daughter with eerie pattern recognition and a fae-like love of mischief, I just know some biatch named Emily would’ve been telling me she’s a changeling and to leave her under a tree if this was 1909 😤

So here’s my argument: if a book has good autism rep for socially acceptable autistic characters but bad autism rep for the truly marginalized types of autism in our society, then it’s actually terrible autism rep.

And the rest of the book didn’t save it for me. Because: ▪️ as much as I liked the overwrought navel-gazing of Emily’s journal, especially the interesting limitation it placed on the storytelling… we annoyingly dropped this limitation whenever we needed to. ▪️ as much as I liked that our love interest was kind of a shithead (lol)… chemistry and romance plot, where? ▪️ as much as I liked an anthropology of faeries, the story read 1940s Karl Popper science demarcation criteria back into 1900s science (👎) and didn’t recon with how racist social anthropology was in 1909 (her own university, Cambridge, was particularly bad 🥴)

You know what I didn’t expect?

How un-radical this book was 😆

This book, originally published in 1916, was downright quaint. I thought I was going to be all like ‘look at me, I’m so rebellious, I’m reading Lenin’ lol nope

He argued that capitalism incentivizes certain business behaviours, sounding the alarm bells that: ▪️ companies buy their direct competitors (a trend towards monopolies), ▪️ businesses become ‘combines’ (buy up stuff to vertically integrate or to diversify), ▪️ finance and shareholders were becoming a thing, ▪️ European companies invest capital into colonies expecting to get back more than they give (then reinvest that capital into further monopolizing and further ‘combining’), and ▪️ these now-large companies/investors pressure governments to use taxpayer dollars for imperial arrangements that benefit themselves

Aka, a totally normal description of late 19th century and pre-WWI economics that—and I cannot stress this enough 😭—even the most rightwing pro-capitalist person would agree with Lenin on.

But his “we can fix it!” can-do attitude snapped me out of my cynicism. And his links between capitalism and modern imperialism were good primer for books I read after this one. Namely, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (Imperialism is the title of its second of three volumes) and Globalists by Quinn Slobodian (about the imperial origins of neoliberalism).