Cesare and Lucrezia at the Rosada. Sketch of power without an outside
I. Pierre Legendre writes that the taboo of incest is the founding prohibition and the structural condition of the necessary division between the private and the political—without which neither law nor State can exist.1
When that boundary becomes blurred, there is no community; the public is absorbed into the intimate, and any possible legality is shut down.
It is in this light that something stands out in the incestuous political structure between Javier and Karina Milei (I am not referring to incest in the literal sense).
Like Caligula and Drusilla (or Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia) they exercise a kind of political incest, understood as a structure in which power closes in on itself and becomes immune to any exteriority. It leaves power without an outside.
Karina’s figure as sister-chief dismantles institutionalism from within. It makes the law redundant (without the need to abolish it).
And what if this is not an eccentric excess of mileism, but (in part) its very condition of possibility? It is not even nepotism—that is not the point. It is something deeper: the structuring core of a form of power that displaces traditional political mediations in favor of an intimate, non-symbolizable logic (that is, resistant to any institutional symbolization).
II. For Legendre, modern democracy rests on a legal fiction: that power emanates from the people. Dynastic politics, even without breaking the incest taboo, disrupts that logic. It grounds legitimacy in blood and sidelines institutional mediation. In a liberal democracy in crisis, such a shift may not be seen as an anomaly but as a possible (even effective) way of organizing power. The repetition of a surname (Bush, Gandhi, Kirchner) can be read as a sign that inheritance is gaining ground over the institution.
Fraternal power, by contrast, requires no transmission—not even the fiction of inheritance. It is a closed circle from the start, a mirror-power that recognizes no exteriority. This is why the Milei-Milei pairing is neither familism nor dynastic politics in the usual sense (as in the Kirchnerist push to have Máximo take Cristina’s place), but something more radical: the pure embodiment of a power without mediations.
— E.
In Leçons VIII. Le crime du caporal Lortie. Traité sur le père (Fayard, 1989).↩