While reading Gabriel Rockhill’s exposé on Slavoj Zizek what stood out to me a lot was the brief mention of postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida being involved in “anti-communist political activism against the government in Czechoslovakia”.

While I’ve always known that Postmodernism is an enemy of Marxism, this makes it sound like postmodern philosophers are also feds. The source Rockhill cites for Derrida’s anti-communist praxis is the 1999 book The Velvet Philosophers by Barbara Day. Has anyone read this book? What specifically is said about the topic in it?

  • @xenautika
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    1 year ago

    postmodern philosophers are not necessarily postmodernists. these philosophers are probably better considered as post-structuralists identifying their contemporary condition as postmodern. these philosophers frequently critique the postmodern condition, such as what Fredric Jameson said in chapter 1 of The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:

    If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.

    and

    Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized “postindustrial society”(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.