Just a placeholder for the moment, but something I’ve been thinking about on and off for a little while: does the continual pointing-out of personal privilege, the demand that it be “checked” and “called out” wherever it is imperfectly negotiated or in the slightest danger of passing unnoticed, actually accomplish anything in terms of either a) making the spaces in which people talk about political issues more genuinely equal and inclusive, or b) remedying the effects of inequality and exclusion in the wider social context in which these conversations take place?

I have a strong feeling that the answer in both cases is “mostly, no”, and that the rote conjuration and exorcism of personal privilege is too often a sanctimonious excuse for not taking and defending substantive positions; in other words, that privilege-talk often functions as a form of masochistic-feelgood chatter substituting for real argument. But if one wants to say this, then some real arguments are needed to flesh the assertion out; about the wretchedness of standpoint epistemology, for one thing, and about the theoretical poverty of notions like “intersectionality” and “kyriarchy” for another. And then you have to come up with something better (and the assertion that precisely that something is to be found in, say, Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is likely to provoke derisive cackling from many quarters). So, if there’s a case to be made, it will probably have to be made rather laboriously…