A World Without Fathers

This essay describes the elaborative model of knowledge production that is both the topic of Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage and its method. The annotative procedure of (as Psomiades puts it) “adding” to what has come before is dialectical insofar as it understands any concept to emerge from the historical conditions enabling it; it is collaborative insofar as it links thinking agents across bounds of difference; and it is political in that it offers to locate the preconditions for thought in time but then find supplements, blank spots—openings for change. The essay closes with a biographical example of this model in action, in a scene of feminist mentorship from the early 2000s.