Imagining citizenship as friendship in The Big Chill

This essay stages a theoretically driven critique of Lawrence Kasdan's film The Big Chill as a productive example of a constitutive contradiction animating the liberal political imaginary. In particular, it argues that liberalism relies irreducibly on an under-examined conception of friendship to supply its model of citizenship as a distinctive, ideologically overdetermined form of sociability and demonstrates the de-politicizing effect this reliance produces on liberal civic commitment. By situating the film in relation to theoretical critiques of liberalism, capitalism, and modern forms of sociability, the essay brings into focus the ideological lineaments of the liberal politics of friendship.