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Left Is Not Woke

Left Is Not Woke

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And by unearthing how progress has often been accompanied by new forms of violence and control, he supposedly rejects the very notion of progress, leading the modern Left into hopelessness. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. But it’s not small differences that separate me from those who are woke […] The right may be more dangerous, but today’s left has deprived itself of the ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the right’ (3). Having condemned identity as the basis for a decent politics, Neiman seems determined to link Foucault’s ideas to his sexuality.

I doubt if one in a hundred contemporary activists could identify Schmitt, who was a Nazi apologist and has been seen as an inspiration for autocrats in the postwar world. In her book she defends Hannah Arendt’s use of the term “crimes against humanity” to describe the Holocaust, an expression journalist Michael Gawenda has found objectionable because it elides the particular experience of Jews.One could therefore assume that the term ‘woke’ describes nothing more than the perennial fears of conservatives for a future of human liberation – that ‘woke’ is, in fact, simply the latest shorthand encompassing general leftist principles. Furthermore, and more insidiously, snarl words are frequently the language of the status quo, the epithets politicians and media personalities daily hurl at their targets. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school in the general ferment of the late 60s. Neiman’s response to the use of Enlightenment rhetoric to justify and exculpate global violence against non-Europeans rests on a hypothetical appeal to an imagined guilty conscience: “Rousseau and Diderot and Kant would have seen through the scam – and wept to watch their own ideals turned into ideology”. Neiman takes issue in the first chapter with the putative left’s fascination with fascist thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and subsequently tackles the continued influence of Michel Foucault and the contempt for reason that many such thinkers exhibit.

Was this an unfortunate coincidence or did something deeper connect the Enlightenment’s universalist rhetoric and human slavery? While the idea of intersectionality was intended to emphasize the multiplicity of identities under which we operate in different contexts, woke ideology employs those identities as multipliers of marginalization, thus further essentializing identity rather than complicating it. C]an we allow the experience of powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political authority? I don’t suppose Neiman is in any way suggesting that Nazis and American white supremacists are “woke”, but once again the book would have benefited immensely from the inclusion of examples of “woke” thinkers who had succumbed to the reactionary tendencies of tribalism she frequently names and shames on the right. From 1989-1995 she was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University, and from 1996-2000 she was associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.

In other words, snarl words function more as a boo or a hiss, signaling the speaker’s disapproval and opprobrium. What these groups do share is the certainty that if we have any hope of confronting the future—of even surviving into the future—we need new ways of thinking. 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. From the editor: In a previous version of the above review, an accusation of plagiarism was made against Professor Neiman.

Thus did white supremacists march at the Arkansas state capitol in the late 1950s holding signs that read: ‘Race Mixing Is Communism. Of these two issues, the second can easily be remedied in the second edition which the book amply deserves. The Declaration of Independence, penned by the one of greatest American Enlightenment philosophers, may have held out the promise of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but at the time of its signing, hundreds of thousands of humans were held in bondage in our country. Neiman’s distinction between a “genuine” and “fake” universalism serves to open up a series of key questions that remain unanswered in the book. Much of the content in her book is taken directly from the 2022 talk, with some interesting exceptions.

The author's grasp of economics is also limited - she likes Piketty, misunderstands the idea of human capital, and has nothing but abuse for 'neoliberalism' while conveying no picture at all about how she envisages the world as functioning, in terms of economics or sociology, to deliver the kinds of outcomes that she favours. Her discussion of the Enlightenment and its claims to universalism is genuinely interesting, even if she is too willing to glide over the deep contradictions in America’s favourite Enlightenment figures. S. Department of Defense, Yale University, Jaguar Land Rover workers, and multinational investment management corporations BlackRock and Vanguard have in common? The fictitious right-wing media persona Titania McGrath published Woke: A Guide to Social Justice (2019); current US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy authored Woke, Inc. For Neiman, “woke” bears striking similarities to: the current Republican Party, the Trump administration, the UK government under then-PM Liz Truss, and the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, amongst others, for their focus on superficial trappings of identity rather than material substance, or, as Neiman says, “diversifying power structures without asking what the power is used for can simply lead to stronger systems of oppression”.

Foucault’s critique of modernity, while it has long been criticized for robbing individuals of agency and leading to cynicism or even despair, was not merely an academic one.

Making sense of this seeming paradox, scholars like Uday Singh Mehta have helped us to see that the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason was a particularly European one that viewed the rest of the world as “a vacant field, already weeded, where history has been brought to a nullity,” a dark morass receptive to being enlightened. The implication that I would quote a younger commentator’s ideas without attribution is a serious one. Instead, she conflates two distinct things: on the one hand, we have an epistemic principle that previously silenced voices may have a valuable perspective in virtue of their voices being silenced; on the other, there is the much stronger claim that previously silenced individuals are inevitably a source of political authority.



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