/lit/ - Literature

That entire generation of French intellectuals; Foucault, Derrida, Debord, Baudrillard, Deleuze, etc; was just butthurt because Charles de Gaulle proved that conservatism was superior to the radicalism and communism that the previous generation (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gide etc) expoused.

Just imagine yourself as a French intellectual in the early 1950s and the 1960s. Your entire notion of self-worth is constructed upon your being smarter than the plebs who unironically go to church and vote for the Gaullist party, you know you are superior because you socialize with communists, who are the agents of the progressive future, and you've read Marx. You have a divine right to rule and everything you believe and say is right.

Then comes de Gaulle and takes power and he establishes the Fifth Republic, he excludes the communists from power, and it works. To make things worse, Khruschev makes his Secret Speech denouncing Stalin and exposing his crimes. The anti-communists were right! It cannot be!!! Didn't Sartre (pbuh) said that every anti-communist is a dog? How can it be possible that those dumb, uneducated peasants be right while the flower of the French intelligentsia was wrong about the most important issue of the 20th century?

Did you imagine yourself in their situation? Now what would you do? Would you admit you were wrong, and therefore throw away your entire concept of self-worth, the entire basis of your tribal culture, the entire basis of the prestige of your caste? Or would you write convoluted shit trying to deny everything, even that reality exist?

Because, after all, if reality doesn't exist, then communism can't be bad, and if communist can't be bad, French intellectuals can't be wrong for supporting it.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/

>look guys, postmodern philosophy was useful in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Establishment was still mildly conservative and we had no rational way to defend the Soviet Union without looking like assholes, but now the Establishment is entirely progressive and we don't have a state founded upon our ideology clearly collapsing to embarass us anymore, and our enemies are using the philosophy we created to deny reality to deny OUR reality, so it's time to throw all those Adorno, Foucault and Baudrillard books in the trash and go back to Enlightened positivist triumphalism

When will you realize that the left is not consistent in anything other than the intelligentsia's pursuit for absolute power.