/lit/ - Literature

According to JP it all started in Paris, École Normale Supérieure, a Parisian university that was founded on enlightened thinking, and houses both Derrida and Foucault.
Jordan Peterson not only accuses Foucault and Derrida of being Marxists, he accuses them of being advocates for postmodernism, except that Foucault wasn't a marxist and Derrida criticized Marxism to a large degree, even writing books against it.
Foucault and Derrida followed the trend of structuralism based on linguistic theories, and both never claimed to be postmodernists, almost never mentioned postmodernism, and when Foucault was asked about postmodernism the interviewer had to explain what postmodernism actually is (Telos, 1983) because Foucault didn't know.
It took until 1979 before postmodernism became a popular term under Lyotard, described as a society of incredulity towards metanarratives.
Lyotard, the actual father of postmodernism, also stressed that nobody believes Marx anymore, nor his salvation.

Jordan Peterson calls Derrida and his followers hellbent on destroying western civilization, when Derrida's theories were based on repeated dialogue within western civilization, arguing against structuralism, which he himself had gained mastery in.
For someone worried about destroying western civilization, it seems awfully strange to spend your life mastering something you want to use to destroy, only to spend your time mastering the art of destroying it again to the point of becoming the most important critic of structuralism as well as its best writer.
This he was already doing in 1966 (Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences) when Jordan Peterson paints him as a fervent Marxist trying to bring about the destruction of western civilization.
Derrida believed that structuralism had always existed within weatern thinking, but had constantly been neutralized, but was then actually part of western thinking all along, thus defending western thinking.
Secondly Derrida then stresses he doesn't want to lose sight of the subject, which he wants to correctly place back in a different spot, not destroy.
To simply frame Derrida as a Marxist is to reject all of his works, which spoke against totalizing phenomena according to a single originary essence.

Postmodernism is not about destroying truth, it's the defense against secondariness, impurity, difference, and distortion constructing our thought.
It's not about rejecting the idea that there are men and women or pillows, simply that there is no pure transmission of thought due to the secondary medium corrupting it.

Yet Jordan Peterson launched a crusade against postmodernism, not making it a symptom of unease, but the cause of it.
He wanted to launch a program to help people identify and avoid postmodernist lectures, instead of listening to postmodernism from the source and forming an understanding of it that way.

Is he the next Yung or Camis?

Is he the next Yung or Camoo?

Is he the next Nietzsche, Freud, or Yung?