(Spoiler Alert: The French, Of Course!)
A French intellectual, who goes by Brivael Le Pogam on X, has written a tightly focused and brief explanation of it worthy of Eric Hoffer, putting his finger on the thinking of French philospher-historian Michel Foucault, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and French philospher-literary critic Gilles Deleuze, the first of whom claimed there was no such thing as truth, just power relationships, the second of whom claimed truth was malleable, and the third of whom made the really weird claim that seeds were greater than fully developed trees because becoming was more important than being, poor romantic devil.
I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination.
Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme.
Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here’s what happened.
These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.
It’s sh** for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly.
A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted.
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