‘Scrooge’s Rejection of Christmas Is Merely a Particularly Recognizable Subset of a Broader Rejection of Reproductive Futurism, and Is For That Reason Depicted as Monstrous’

Christmas is about capitalism—of course; everyone knows that, albeit usually in the context of bemoaning it. Sedgwick’s insight is that Christmas’s univocality allows each of these sites of power—capital, the state, “the” (heteronormative, reproductive) family, religion—to stand in as a metonym for all the rest. You buy Christmas presents because you love your family because the Christ-child loves you because you love the Child because the Child is the future of the nation, and round and round. Christmas has meaning, we are continually assured, and it is all the same meaning—the single, univocal meaning that the unmeaning sinthome both opposes and makes possible. If Christmas is about “meaning,” then a purely negative Scrooge is the reason for the season.

Children Dressed as Animals Dressed as Children (or, The Meaning of Christmas). Also via zunguzungu.