Left Is Not Woke

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Without clear descriptions, definitions, or examples of “woke”, and without quoting any “woke” thinkers at any point, it may seem Neiman is battling a series of straw-people. All these genealogical roots are held together, so Neiman alleges, by a rejection of “Enlightenment” values. Neiman’s defence of universalism is important and has been praised by Fintan O’Toole in a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books titled “Defying Tribalism”. Richard Wolin’s 2023 book, Heidegger in Ruins , stands as an illustrative example, deftly tying together the evidence of Heidegger’s malign influence on some parts of leftist thinking; Neiman’s book does not. And the “woke” with whom she disagrees “do not realize how heavily they are weighed down by the theoretical views they hold.

But in characterizing Foucault—and the contemporary Left—in this way, she confuses diagnosis for prescription. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. They were thus the privileged vessels of reason, a precious commodity that needed to be brought to the rest of the world, by force if necessary. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (2021); John McWhorter released Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America (2021). Otherwise, we are just left to assume that in a neat feat of dialectics, the “woke” left is simply the unacknowledged mirror image of the identitarian right (i.One of the world's leading philosophical voices, Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign influence of two titans of twentieth-century thought, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, whose work undermined ideas of justice and progress and portrayed social life as an eternal struggle of us against them. In this context, all anyone deemed non-marginalized can be is an ‘ally,’ an idea Neiman dismisses out of hand: ‘I am not an ally.

Another illustrative example of Neiman’s failure to guide the reader through her argument stands out: a good portion of the latter half of Left Is Not Woke is an extended complaint directed at evolutionary psychology. Neiman critiques pioneering texts of this kind of view, And the problem, she adds, is that ‘those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood. Having read Neiman’s book, I do not understand how these examples represent a rejection of universalism or even, more generally, whether these individuals are intended to be “woke” or not. At its best, Enlightenment thought teaches us to be skeptical of received wisdom, to question sources of power and structures of domination. However, I do not understand how these faceless individuals are appropriately dubbed “woke”, especially given the common use of the term.And those tactics were grounded in the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), which queer theorist David Halperin found was ACT UP members’ “single most important intellectual source of political inspiration. And because these norms were enforced not only through edicts backed up with the threat of violence but also through subtler means, these more insidious forms of power and control were able to hide in plain sight. This reactionary tendency has led to some prominent class-first leftists advocating anti-LGBT+ and racist policies, constructing red-brown alliances with right-wing groups that advocate the same purity logic reviled by Neiman, and descending into “ironic” traditionalism, hierarchicalism, tribalism and nihilism.