/lit/ - Literature

According to JP it all started in Paris, École Normale Supérieure, a Parisian university that was founded on enlightened thinking, and housed both Derrida and Foucault. Jordan Peterson accuses both Foucault and Derrida not only of both being Marxists, he accuses them both of being advocates for postmodernism. Foucault wasn't a marxist and Derrida criticized Marxism, he even wrote books against Marxism that made him fall out of favor with them. 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. To call Foucault a Marxist is to describe something beyond similar analytical aesthetics, it isn't true.

Another thing to note, he keeps attacking Marxism in universities, but never comes with any significant data to prove that Marxism has taken over parts of our universities. When we look at the data it turns out that there are more American teachers who identify as creationists than there are teachers who would describe themselves as Marxists.

He's creating a problem where there is none, because postmodernism has already been absorbed by civil society, and Marxism has been pretty much reduced as supplementary to Hegel, that is to say quotidian philosophy or the aforementioned analytical aesthetics.
Even Foucault which he often passionately disagrees with wasn't even a Marxist, Foucault did not ever wish America would be Socialist or Communist, nor did Foucault want anyone to submit any kind of grand narrative over that of anyone else, he simply talked about the function of talking to obtain more power to arm yourself against these grand narratives that Jordan Peterson is afraid about just as much.