The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities.

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YES.... THE INFLUENCE OF THE "FRENCH THEORY" [NIHILISTIC DECONSTRUCTION PHILOSOPHY] WAS LIMITED TO THE INTELLECTUAL CIRCLES...

BUT THE WORLD IS RUN BY BOOFHEADS, MANIACS, PSYCHOPATHS AND SEXUAL PERVERTS WHO PRACTICE DECONSTRUCTION — I MEAN WANTON DEMOLITION — WITHOUT THEORY NOR THINKING... FOR THEM IT'S NATURAL LIKE FIZZY COLA...

THUS, AS MENTIONED BEFORE, THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY ON MODERN WESTERN RULERS IS ZERO. SQUAT. THIS HAS BEEN PROVEN TO ME SINCE THE 1950s... CARTOONING FROM 1951 ONWARDS HAS PROVEN AS FUTILE AS KARK MARX's BENCH POLISHINGS, BUT LESS BLOODY. 

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French Theory in the Intellectual Cold War

by John Bellamy Foster

On October 18–21, 1966, a seemingly innocuous international conference titled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” took place at the Humanities Center of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The conference was billed as bringing the main luminaries of French structuralist thought to the United States. Those who spoke at the conference included such celebrated French philosophers and literary critics as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Hyppolite, and Jacques Lacan. Michel Foucault was unable to attend but played a principal role in the organization of the conference. Gilles Deleuze, though invited, was also not in attendance, but sent a communication to be read. At the conference, Derrida met Paul de Man (the former Nazi collaborator), who became a leading deconstructionist within U.S. literary criticism. The Johns Hopkins conference was to be universally designated as the point of origin of what came to be known in the late 1960s and ’70s as “French Theory,” a term never fully accepted in France, but representing an international amalgamation of French and American structuralist thought that generated what was later referred to as postmodernism.1

Despite all appearances, the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference was not simply an ordinary academic meeting, on no matter how grand a scale, but rather a politically motivated attempt to create a beachhead for French structuralism in the United States that would counter the radicalization then taking place. French philosophical thought in the 1960s, emerging from a period in which Jean-Paul Sartre was the preeminent philosopher, was increasingly enamored with the antihumanist philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the latter an unrepentant Nazi ideologue. The turn to Nietzsche and Heidegger was combined with the French tradition of structuralism, based in linguistics, anthropology, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Structuralism was opposed to all traditional forms of inquiry that relied principally on historical analysis, the (human) subject, and dialectics. The organizers of the conference at Johns Hopkins, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, indicated their intention to bring together thinkers in the traditions of Nietzsche and structuralism, thus casting the conference in conservative and anti-Marxist terms.2

In 1966, French thought was moving away from Karl Marx at the very same time that a reemerging radicalism in the United States was generating an increasing interest in Marxism. Lacan’s Écrits and Foucault’s The Order of Things both appeared in 1966 and became bestsellers in France. Both works trivialized G. W. F. Hegel and Marx. In France, the examination of Hegel’s philosophy was highly selective and approached subjectively, heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology, focusing on the master-slave dialectic. In Écrits, Lacan presented Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an “iron law” of conflict, prior to Charles Darwin, which Lacan was to incorporate into his Freudian structuralism.3 Foucault dismissed Marxism by claiming that it existed “in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water” and was “unable to breathe anywhere else.” In contrast, Nietzsche, with his combination of philosophy and philology and his eternal return, had a meaning that “burned for us” in the twentieth century.4

The intellectual trends on the left in the United States in 1966 were then quite different from those most fashionable in France. The emerging U.S. student movement, which was then focused on the Vietnam War and the critique of capitalism, was reading such radical best-sellers as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964, not translated into French until 1968, when it influenced the student movement there) and Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966).5

As part of the general Cold War offensive, and with the aim of promoting ideas that would constitute a bulwark against Marxist ideas, the Ford Foundation agreed to underwrite the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, bringing French structuralist theorists as a group to the United States. The Ford Foundation was then headed by McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon B. Johnson’s former National Security Advisor, who was closely connected to the entire range of U.S. intelligence agencies. Bundy was one of Johnson’s fourteen “wise men” who advised him on the Vietnam War.6

Significantly, it was within months of the Johns Hopkins meeting, in April 1967, that Ramparts magazine, which was closely associated with the growing student radicalism, broke the full story of the CIA’s funding through its intellectual front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), of dozens of prestigious putatively left journals in Europe and elsewhere, all of which had adopted an explicitly anticommunist stance. The CCF had been founded in West Berlin in 1950 and in the mid-1960s was operating in thirty-five countries. Many leading European and American thinkers were involved in CCF conferences and journals, including figures such as Theodor Adorno, Raymond Aron, Willi Brandt, Daniel Bell, James Burnham, Louis Fischer, Sidney Hook, Karl Jaspers, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Mary McCarthy, Nicolas Nabokov, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils. Following the exposure of the CCF as a CIA front, the Ford Foundation under Bundy, working closely with the CIA, took over CCF funding operations—an action fully in accord with its financial support of the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins.7

Louis Althusser, the preeminent French Marxist structuralist thinker, was not invited to the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, no doubt due to his connections with the French Communist Party. Goldmann, who was an anti-Soviet Western Marxist, and Hyppolite, an anti-Marxist Hegelian scholar—who, despite his Hegelianism, had exerted considerable influence on French structuralist thought—were both invited. Apart from this, the vast majority of invitees were dedicated enemies of Hegelian and Marxist philosophies, even if sometimes characterizing themselves as post-Marxists or as participating in some way in a “dialogue” with Marxism. In a move unusual for academic conferences, Time magazine and Newsweek, both dedicated Cold War organs, sent reporters, along with Partisan Review (which was then being covertly funded by the CIA), and Le Monde from France.8

Remarkably little of substance was said about either Marx or Hegel at the 1966 “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man Conference,” although both nineteenth-century thinkers were often mentioned in passing, and despite Hyppolite’s efforts to make a case for structuralist linguistics in Hegel. Nor were capitalism and imperialism or the affairs of the world at large subjects of discussion. There was no mention of the Vietnam War. Most of the talks were aimed at working out interdisciplinary connections between the various conceptual frameworks of the structuralists themselves.

The big surprise was the presentation by Derrida, which was aimed at the deconstruction of structuralism itself, along with everything else, in accordance with neo-Heideggerian antihumanism and anti-essentialism. Derrida’s analysis in particular gave rise to what in the United States was labeled poststructuralism, the most extreme version of postmodernism.9 With Derrida now playing a leading role, French Theory took on the form of a deconstructionism that was presented as more “radical” and more “left” than anything else, due to its deeply skeptical, nihilistic, antirationalist, anti-Enlightenment views, and its emphasis on purely discursive realities. Without a subject, structure itself became essentially meaningless, leading to a turn to discursive constructions entirely—all was language. This allowed for an almost infinite disassembling of everything in existence in words. The result was the creation of an aura of autonomous thought, lacking any objective moorings beyond those offered by mere discursive forms, while deconstructing the subject and agency. Such an approach could go every which way at once, based on the notion that nothing could ever be pinned down with any degree of certainty. As with all forms of skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism, it was largely impervious to refutation on rational grounds.

When Macksey and Donato sought to summarize the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference in their introduction to the 1971 edition of the proceedings, titled The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, they did not turn to Derrida or any other thinker who had been present at the conference. Instead, they quoted from an article by Deleuze on Foucault. Deleuze had written that Foucault’s postmodernist philosophy represented “a cold and concerted destruction of the [human] subject, a lively distaste for notions of origin, of lost origin, of recovered origin, a dismantling of unifying pseudo-syntheses of consciousness, a denunciation of all the mystifications of history preformed in the name of progress, of consciousness, and of the future of reason.”10 It was obvious that what was being targeted here was all forms of historical, materialist, and dialectical reason focusing on human agency, and particularly the traditions emanating from Hegel and Marx. The strong rejection here of Hegel, who was reduced to an “Otherness,” was tied to French Theory’s adherence at all times to Immanuel Kant’s notion that the noumena (things in themselves), as opposed to phenomena (the world of perception), was beyond the realm of human knowledge, thereby curtailing the role of human reason.11

Historical analysis too came under attack. Thus, in the 1966 conference, Goldmann remarked—no doubt with some hesitation given his still socialist outlook—that “for the present intellectual posture history doesn’t matter, the essential is to avoid history or historicity.”12 Indeed, it was the rejection of the connection between history and critical reason that most characterized postmodernism. A crucial element in French Theory was its general Eurocentrism, which allowed it to ignore all that happened outside Europe and the United States. Imperialism did not exist even as a question within this insular paradigm. At a time when the United States had over half a million troops in Vietnam aimed at defeating a war for national liberation, the issue of the third world was off the table. The narrow Eurocentric viewpoint in which Europe formed the measure of the entire globe provided the cover for the retreat from both class and global struggle. In the philosophical view of French Theory, nothing outside of Europe and the United States, standing for the modern/postmodern world, really mattered.

According to Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979), “I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.”13 All grand historical narratives, including those of science, were to be abandoned. In French Theory, there was no longer any traditional history beyond genealogy in a Nietzschean sense.14 The scientific truth claims of the traditional approach to history, postmodernist Dutch historian Frank Ankersmit claimed, were simply “variants on” the ancient Greek “paradox of the Cretan who says that all Cretans lie.” Historical analysis for Ankersmit was no longer aimed at the study of the trunk, or even the branches, of a tree, but rather the examination of the leaves. Hence, “what remains now for Western historiography is to gather the leaves that have blown away and to study them independently of their origins.” He concluded: “Within the postmodernist view of history the goal is no longer integration, synthesis, and totality, but it is…historical scraps that are the center of attention.”15

For French Theory in general, there was only structure and event, divorced from the subject and history. Structure was viewed in terms of signs/signifiers as evidenced through language, discourse, or psychoanalytic categories, invariably deconstructing the subject. The event, which negated the structure, was defined as a rupture that arrived unannounced. With this essentially irrationalist, skeptical outlook, everything that existed could be challenged. In Nietzsche’s terms, both “God” and “man” could be declared dead. But what primarily came under attack was materialist ontology and the very possibility of any relation between human freedom and necessity, and thus the potential for rational struggle and emancipatory projects.16

An event or rupture, from the perspective of French Theory, was clearly presented by May 1968 in France, with the mass revolt of workers and students. The inner meaning of May ’68, its struggle to make the supposedly impossible possible, was best described by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre in The Explosion.17 The ’68 revolt was inspired to a very large extent by Marxism and anarchism. The workers and students were soon defeated by the powers that be. Nevertheless, the ’68 revolt left its mark. The main proponents of French Theory, such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard, gained historical notoriety from this event, causing them to drop their more reactionary slogans for a time, seeking to clothe themselves as radicals engaged in a dialogue with Marxism, and even as intellectual instigators of the revolt.

In fact, none of these thinkers, including Althusser—as Gabriel Rockhill has shown—played any role whatsoever in the events of May ’68.18 Nevertheless “the explosion” of May ’68 was to give a kind of radical chic to French Theory and its endless deconstructions, which took on a mystique that quickly penetrated into departments of literary criticism, French language and criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences throughout the United States. Meanwhile, the major representatives of French Theory, while sometimes presenting themselves as left thinkers, sought to displace all forms of genuine radical emancipatory critique, principally Marxism, encouraging the general abandonment of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. An emphasis on difference at the expense of all notions of cohesion and unification encouraged a shift from class analysis to a focus simply on ascriptive identities, such as race and gender, no longer seen as dialectically related to class.

Particularly in U.S. postmodernism, the concept of “identity politics,” which had first emerged from Black Marxist feminist lesbian thinkers in the 1970s as part of a revolutionary understanding of “interlocked” oppressions, became a carnival of difference, disuniting individuals and society, not as a necessary step in a process of reunification on a higher level, but simply in support of difference as a value in itself, removed from the question of the historical dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and the struggle for human emancipation.19

Ironically, while French Theory was exerting a pervasive influence on the academy in the United States in the late 1960s and ’70s (notably at Yale, where de Man offered deconstructive readings of nearly everything), becoming fashionable in humanities departments throughout the country, it was already experiencing a rapid decline in France itself. According to Marxist cultural theorist Frederic Jameson in The Years of Theory(2024), there were essentially four periods in the rise and fall of French Theory.20 The first, or pre-stage, consisted of the years immediately after the Second World War, when France, like Italy, had a strong Communist Party, arising out of the Resistance in the Anti-Nazi War. The dominant left thinker was Sartre, representing existentialism and phenomenology, and increasingly aligned with Marxism, along with his close partner Simone de Beauvoir, a leading French existentialist and feminist theorist. These were the years in which the French state was trying to reassert itself as a major colonial power, drawing it into extended wars in Indochina and Algeria. Meanwhile, the United States, as part of its Cold War strategy, was trying to exert control over France through the Marshall Plan, which had a role in subsidizing elite French universities in order to create a more conservative intellectual climate. Washington in these years was in opposition not only to Marxism but also, though less fervently, to General Charles de Gaulle’s Gaullist-nationalist forces. The decolonization struggle centered on Algeria’s revolutionary efforts to free itself from the rule of Paris (and from French settler colonists). The foremost theorist of decolonization was Frantz Fanon, who was influenced by both Hegel and Marx. The main new countercurrent to Marxism that arose at this time was the structural linguistics of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, which gave a big boost to French structuralism in general. This first period can be seen as ending with the close of the French-Algerian War in 1962.21

In the early to mid-1960s, a second period emerged, marked by a decisive turn toward structuralism rooted in linguistics and psychoanalysis, divorced from both the human subject and history, constituting a shift to “trans-individual forces.”22 Althusser, as a Western Marxist theorist, played a key role in the development of an antihumanist, antihistorical structuralism, but French Theory proper was to be dominated by such major postmodernist figures as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. It was in this period, then, that French Theory attained its beachhead in the intellectual life of the United States at the 1966 Johns Hopkins Humanities Conference, followed by the intellectual ascendance of postmodernism in left thought. A related development was the Annales School of historians in France (associated with figures such as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel), which, while not denying historical analysis, as in the case of postmodernism, had as its mission drawing selectively on the methods of historical materialism while also seeking to disavow Marxist historiography.23

The third period, in Jameson’s chronology, can be seen as commencing with May ’68, which both conferred on French Theory a new radical aura and, paradoxically, led to the beginning of its decline in France itself, following the defeat of the left. The main postmodernist thinkers responded to the revolt of ’68 by clothing themselves in the guise of post-Marxists, and then as the full extent of the defeat of the left became clear they came out more fully as anti-Marxists, as in Jean Baudrillard’s 1973 The Mirror of Production, which tried, ineffectually, to provide a postmodernist/post-Marxist deconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy, emphasizing the symbolic elements centered on consumerism.24 Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, published in 1972, was a profoundly anti-Marxist work, manipulating and distorting Marx’s concepts while representing, in the words of Keti Chukhrov, “the radicalization of the impossibility of…exit” from the capitalist system.25

There were French Marxist theorists of considerable brilliance who retained materialist and dialectical perspectives, such as Lefebvre and Michel Clouscard, developing their ideas in this same historical period. However, these thinkers were relatively isolated, not receiving the elite establishment support that underwrote the reputations of the principal structuralist and postmodernist thinkers.

The fourth period of French Theory was the product of globalization, beginning in the mid-1980s. Postmodernist philosophy in France was to wane still further in the face of the continuing decline of the left, with François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, after its initial victory in 1981, capitulating to neoliberalism. The disintegration of the left in this period removed the importance of structuralism and postmodernism, which had served the needs of the system as intellectual responses to Marxism. Hence, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War led ironically to the rapid demise of French Theory. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union, which was negotiated on the side of Paris by Mitterrand, reduced France’s independent imperial role. This was the period of the “epigones” of French Theory, figures like the posthumanist Bruno Latour, followed more recently, especially on the U.S. side, by the so-called new materialists and object-oriented ontology.26

Here the search was directed at finding a place for a new irrationalism, at a time when French Theory had reached the end of its own deconstructive logic. Posthumanism privileged the pseudo-empirical object (or assemblages of objects) seen as “actants,” now viewed as a supreme category, marginalizing not only the human subject and structure, but also, to a considerable extent, discourse.27 Jameson identified this period, significantly, with “de-Marxification.” The entire postmodernist/posthumanist tradition could reasonably be seen in these terms. However, in the fourth period, with the development of posthumanism and the “epigones,” de-Marxification had reached such a point that there was no longer any connection, even in negation, with Marxist theory. Even the critical concepts of reification and commodity fetishism were abandoned.28

Already in the mid-1980s, near the end of Mitterrand’s first administration, the demise of French Theory as an intellectual force in France itself was noted by close observers. The situation was summed up in December 1985 in a research report from the CIA’s Office of European Analysis (a “sanitized copy” was approved for release in 2011), which was particularly concerned to ensure that this demise would not lead to the reemergence of Marxist theories. Here the CIA analysts explained that while structuralism and the French Annales School of historians had by then “fallen on hard times…we believe their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship both in France and elsewhere in Western Europe.” In this respect, Aron, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault were particularly commended. Not only was Foucault, in the eyes of the CIA researchers, “the most profound and influential thinker” in France, he was to be praised for the direct support that he had provided to the French “New Right,” viewed by the CIA as the successors of French Theory, and “for, among other things, reminding philosophers of the ‘bloody’ consequences that followed from the rationalist social theory of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the Revolutionary era.”29

For the CIA, then, the decline of French Theory was not a tragedy, because it had served what the intelligence agency considered its principal task, the destruction of Marxist thought. Moreover, French Theory had provided the added benefit of opening the way to New Right doctrines, also rooted in Nietzsche and Heidegger, made possible by the vacuum left by the self-destruction of French left thought.

Today the death of French Theory has become a common topic. It is not only the subject of Jameson’s final book, but it is also addressed in a different way in the present dialogue, by Aymeric Monville and Rockhill (in conversation with Jennifer Ponce de León). Attempts to criticize French Theory from a Marxist perspective have often been superficial and undeveloped because relatively few genuine Marxist theorists have had sufficient entry into the elite inner circles of French postmodernism to develop an internal critique. In this case, Monville and Rockhill, coming from two sides of the Atlantic, but both having an intimate, firsthand knowledge of French structuralism and postmodernism, are exceptions. They agree with the CIA assessment that the inner logic of French Theory was the “critical demolition” of Marxist theory in France and the United States. But they disagree with the CIA’s wishful conclusion that this meant that the demolition of Marxism would “endure.”

As Clouscard said of contemporary capitalism, with Rockhill extending this to French Theory, “Everything is allowed, but nothing is possible.”30 Marxist analysis, in contrast, is engaged in a real-world revolt against capitalism, and it is most influential not when emanating from the ivory tower, but, on the contrary, when emerging from organic intellectuals tied to material conditions and to the class struggle against existing social relations. Historical materialism is thus at its best when the struggles for human freedom and necessity coincide. It cannot be fully suppressed, because it is humanity’s defense against the totalizing destruction wrought by capitalism. In our time of planetary crisis, the necessity of Marxism’s confrontation of reality with reason is once again evident. Hence, there is little room today for an irrational discursive carnival as a substitute for genuine intellectual activity. Nevertheless, the vast armature of postmodernism, which was used as a weapon against Marxism, has to be engaged with and the reason for past failures of the left analyzed.

In this respect, every line of the present dialogue between Monville and Rockhill is essential, providing the basis of an internal critique of French Theory, the legacy of which still walks around in the world like a ghost of the early Cold War era. In this critique, which overlaps with that developed by figures such as Clouscard and Domenico Losurdo, French Theory and Western Marxism shared a common Eurocentric failure to confront the reality of imperialism and revolution in the world. In fact, it was the weaknesses of Western Marxism that left it intellectually vulnerable to the tactics of deconstruction that characterized French Theory. A critique of French Theory thus needs to go hand in hand with a critique of Western Marxism and its fourfold retreat from materialism, the dialectics of nature, class, and anti-imperialism.31

Nor is the intellectual civil war introduced by structuralism and postmodernism entirely over. Today this has taken new forms in Europe, the United States, and the world at large, in the extremes of posthumanism and postcolonial studies.32 In today’s fashionable posthumanism, there is a proliferation of Latourian-style object-oriented ontology and “new materialism,” suitable for the age of Artificial Intelligence. Here the focus is on abstracted objects viewed as independent of any relation to human subjects, history, or social transformation. This leads to the worship of the technocratic. As Latour put it, in the context of the planetary ecological crisis, you simply have to learn to “Love Your [Frankenstein] Monsters.” In the work of posthumanist thinkers such as Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett, objects such as a stone or a lump of coal are actors/actants on the same horizontal plane as human beings.33 In such an irrationalist frame, the external objects of human production as opposed to the human subjects themselves have become the identical subject-objects, displacing all possibility of meaningful human social transformation and generating a perverse ecology that reverses the real alienated relations.

Meanwhile, the clownish Lacanian-Hegelian posthumanist Slavoj Žižek occupies a position on center stage, where, under the pretense of furthering Marxist dialectical materialism, he continually seeks to bury it, making him a celebrated and amusing figure in the eyes of the establishment, bewildering many on the left. As Žižek wrote in 2020, the neoclassical economist “Tyler Cowen [in 2019]…asked me why I continue to stick to the ridiculously outdated notion of Communism?” Žižek replied on that occasion, “For me, Communism is just, the name of a problem. It’s not a solution.” More recently he declared facetiously: “My reply [to Cowen] should have been that I need Communism precisely as the background…the commitment to a Cause which makes all my transgressive pleasures possible.” All this allows for continual reactionary antics dressed up provocatively and humorously in red clothing, accompanied by a kind of Tristram Shandylike style of half serious/half comical transgressive erudition that ends up trivializing almost everything, while ultimately reinforcing the capitalist lexicon.34

In contemporary postcolonial theory, which has grown rapidly in the present century, many of the characteristics of French Theory were carried over into the realm of the theorization of decolonization.35None other than Fanon was reinterpreted as a proponent of postcolonial discourse and even as an Afropessimist, rather than a dialectical thinker and a fierce opponent of colonialism and imperialism, strongly influenced by historical materialism.36 The Marxist critique of Eurocentrism, arising first in the 1960s, and most clearly articulated in the work of Joseph Needham, Martin Bernal, and Samir Amin, was to be turned against Marxism itself by postcolonial culturalist thinkers.37 Thus, historical materialism, despite all the evidence to the contrary, was accused of Eurocentrism—an accusation that gained credence from the actual Eurocentric views of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, which, as Losurdo argued, distinguished it from Marxism generally.38

Indeed, as Simin Fadaee argues in Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (2024), not only are such accusations of Eurocentrism inapplicable to Marx (at least in his mature phase), but “it is in fact Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric, because this entails dismissing the cornerstone of some of the most transformative movements and revolutionary projects of recent human history.… A more fruitful engagement with history would instead urge us to learn from the experiences of the Global South with Marxism, and ask what we can learn from Marxism’s global relevance.” Here we can draw on the theory and practice of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Amílcar Cabral, Fanon, Ernesto Che Guevara, and many others. There is thus a need “to reconnect with Marxism as a framework for analyzing global capitalism’s multiple crises and the prospects for revolutionary change but also as the basis for reimagining a world beyond capitalism.”39

In October 2024, Foreign Policy, one of the two main U.S. intellectual organs of the New Cold War (along with the Council of Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs), published an article by Gregory Jones-Katz titled “The World Still Needs French Theory: Postmodernism Is Dead. Long Live Postmodernism.” Consisting of a commentary on Jameson’s The Years of Theory, Jones-Katz’s article is illustrated with photos of Lacan, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, and Foucault. Brushing aside the radical criticism that French Theory was guilty of “capitulating to capitalism” (which in any case would hardly be a problem for Foreign Policy), Jones-Katz claims that it can usefully be revived as a force against globalization. The “conceptual instruments” of postmodernism, he contends, have given the world the basis for addressing its problems, independent of the theory’s decline in France. It does not take much imagination to see that the subtitle of the Foreign Policyarticle, “Postmodernism Is Dead. Long Live Postmodernism,” is in line with the recognition—contrary to the CIA’s triumphant assessment in 1985—that French Theory ultimately failed to put the philosophy of praxis to rest and hence is still needed on the intellectual front in the New Cold War. Here the revived French Theory is not to be employed against liberal globalization as such, but against the rise, in part, of the Global South, which, as in all anti-imperialist struggles, is informed by Marxism.40

Viewed against this background, Monville and Rockhill’s Requiem for French Theory: Transatlantic Funeral Dirge in a Marxist Key can be seen as both a critical Marxist dialogue on postmodernism and a call to the left to inoculate itself against the Nietzschean and Heideggerian viruses, of which French Theory was in large part a manifestation: the scourge of the very idea of a universal revolutionary humanity.

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/french-theory-in-the-intellectual-cold-war/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.