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Medieval January is over so I finally read the non-medieval book that the politics book club was supposed to read for January: Naomi Klein’s newest release, Doppelganger.
Nominally, Doppelganger is about the identity crisis Naomi Klein had that was precipitated by her continual conflation with Naomi Wolf, whomst has become a crank and a conspiracy theorist. This is actually quite interesting, especially if you’ve read a bunch of Klein’s other books, where she doesn’t tend to foreground herself that much. Getting mixed up with Other Naomi so much was deeply destabilizing for Klein (whom I have started thinking of as Good Naomi), and the psychological exploration of identity formation and maintenance that she goes through is fascinating, especially for someone whose public identity–or personal brand, as we call it these days–is so tied up with critical deconstruction of ideas like personal branding. But it would still be a pretty navel-gazey book if that was all that was going on–which, fortunately, there isn’t. Klein uses the trajectory of Wolf’s career as a case study/jumping-off-point to diagnose various ills in our current political discourse, and the political reality that discourse obscures.
I definitely regret missing the book club about this because there’s a lot of juicy stuff here–about Covid, about weaknesses in the left and the sort of mainstream liberalism that presents as the left (“progressivism”), about where conspiracy theories come from and how they function, about the power and the limitations of words, about Red Vienna, about Palestine. It’s a difficult book to explain but it really clarified and solidified a lot of stuff I’ve been seeing and worrying about over the past few years.
Nominally, Doppelganger is about the identity crisis Naomi Klein had that was precipitated by her continual conflation with Naomi Wolf, whomst has become a crank and a conspiracy theorist. This is actually quite interesting, especially if you’ve read a bunch of Klein’s other books, where she doesn’t tend to foreground herself that much. Getting mixed up with Other Naomi so much was deeply destabilizing for Klein (whom I have started thinking of as Good Naomi), and the psychological exploration of identity formation and maintenance that she goes through is fascinating, especially for someone whose public identity–or personal brand, as we call it these days–is so tied up with critical deconstruction of ideas like personal branding. But it would still be a pretty navel-gazey book if that was all that was going on–which, fortunately, there isn’t. Klein uses the trajectory of Wolf’s career as a case study/jumping-off-point to diagnose various ills in our current political discourse, and the political reality that discourse obscures.
I definitely regret missing the book club about this because there’s a lot of juicy stuff here–about Covid, about weaknesses in the left and the sort of mainstream liberalism that presents as the left (“progressivism”), about where conspiracy theories come from and how they function, about the power and the limitations of words, about Red Vienna, about Palestine. It’s a difficult book to explain but it really clarified and solidified a lot of stuff I’ve been seeing and worrying about over the past few years.