For reflection this weekend: On the apprentice sorcerers of French Theory – what I believe

I don’t know who wrote the text I’m sharing below.

Someone sent it to me, correctly thinking it would catch my attention.

French Theory is indeed one of my areas of interest.I am steeped in the ideas of French Theory, in the discoveries of structuralist thought, and in the genius of great philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and “masters of suspicion” such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, Godelier, Bourdieu, Goux, and others.

I fully acknowledge their considerable intellectual contributions.

They reveal what is buried and hidden; they bring to light what is concealed within our systems.What is hidden is what resists knowledge, and what resists being brought to light is what has been repressed by the weight of the existing order. And that order is always that of the master (with a lowercase “m”) — the Imaginary of the master, not the Symbolic, to use Lacan’s categories.

But I have never taken the extra step of believing that because these authors and thinkers uncovered elements of intelligibility in our societies, we should follow them so far as to let ourselves be impregnated by their ideas.There is a gulf between philosophically doubting truth and living as if truth did not exist — that is, living in relativism.

There is a gulf between endorsing Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus and living as if the Oedipus complex did not exist! Isn’t that right, Macron?

I maintain that one can follow the path of knowledge opened by all these authors, while still relativizing them — relativizing even them — and seeing them as one moment in thought, or even in history, and yet remain a conservative.

One can recognize their contributions without granting them the status of ideological guides.

I believe in the progress that comes from becoming aware, from bringing the hidden, the unknown, the buried, and the repressed into the light. I believe in the almost revolutionary character of spreading knowledge.However, for example: just because one thinks psychoanalysis offers a formidable tool for understanding human subjects does not mean one must organize one’s life according to the “liberations,” “disinhibitions,” or “transgressions” it might seem to authorize.

The same applies to Marxist discoveries, particularly that of “exploitation”: recognizing its importance does not mean one should foolishly rush into the communist dream and real socialism, at the risk of creating an even worse form of “exploitation” than the one one wanted to eliminate!

The fact that Althusser, his disciples, and his students produced exceptional work on cultural racism does not give anyone the right to impose the Grand Remplacement (Great Replacement) on the French people, which is ruining their lives.

Discovering the secrets of the atom does not grant the right to use the atomic bomb.

The passage from ideas to actions and slogans is a terrible leap; one is no longer operating in the same register.We should deeply examine Marx’s concept of “praxis”; with it, we are at the heart of the problem posed by the discoveries/progress of thought.

Speaking of all this, the author of the text below says:

“It’s shit for a simple reason, and it must be said calmly.”

I do not follow him at all in that state of mind. I do not share that judgment — not in the slightest.

On the other hand, I completely agree when he writes:

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 an inheritance to be transmitted.

The author of that text is reductive — “it’s shit” — he tears things down, whereas I argue that faced with these discoveries we should not reduce them to nothing. We must go beyond them, see what they contribute, and integrate them into a broader civilizational approach.Integrate and surpass — that is my motto.

Read the text.

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I want to apologize, on behalf of the French, for having given birth to French Theory, which in turn gave birth to the worst ideological shit: wokeness.

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, and Tocqueville. Then, in the intellectual ruins of post-68, we gave it Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. Three brilliant men who, in the elegance of our language, manufactured the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did.

Foucault taught that truth does not exist — 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, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns.

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 vulgarized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

Here is what happened: these texts, often unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments at Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist here: American puritanism, its racial guilt, its identitarian obsession.French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that marriage is called wokeness.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents gender as performance.

Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism.

Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality.

At every stage, the matrix is French: there is no truth, only power; therefore every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and therefore negotiable, every majority is guilty.

This is how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined the practical consequences, provided the operating software for an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR departments, journalists, and legislators. This is how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, or whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.It’s shit for a simple reason, and it must be said 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 an inheritance to be transmitted.

French Theory set out to blow up all three.

Not out of malice, but out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, and hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them.But the result is there.An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to construct.

An entire generation knows how to suspect but no longer knows how to admire.

An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.I

apologize because we, the French, bear a particular responsibility. It was our language, our universities, our publishers, and our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now — in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people are still making things instead of deconstructing them — is the answer.A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to.By those who accept a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, and the good, and who are not ashamed to transmit it.So, sorry. And back to work.

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