The Names-of-the-Fathers

The oligarch becomes the main figure of analysis in this chapter. The author traces popular feelings about the political-economic elite through their nicknames. The author examines these nicknames, which often combine a shortened diminutive version of their first names (marking them as intimate figures) with another name that points to their brutality and criminality (marking them as brutal sovereigns to be feared), through speculatively narrating the material and intimate connections these elite figures claim over localized spaces and neighborhoods. These “nicks”—cuts in the name of local sovereigns who we might understand as political Fathers—bifurcate these figures, producing them both as the Name- and the No-of-the-Father and as one in which the brutality (the wielding of the Father’s No) is separated from identification (the Name). The author also explores the possibilities of queer futures that might emerge through such perverse present conditions.