It’s anachronistic and arbitrary, but a post on X by Brivael Le Pogam apologizing on behalf of "the French" for "French theory" (he mentions the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze) has set off a flap. Le Pogam blames French Theory (FT) for woke, the particular brand of leftism that, I agree, vitiated American academia from 2015-2025 or so.
What’s distinctive about the woke era can be summed up in a phrase I heard constantly from colleagues, administrators, and students as I taught my way toward retirement as a philosophy prof at a liberal arts college in that period: "the words we use matter." And what they meant, in my experience, was that words matter most of all, or only words matter, or words are the most or only real things. The history of oppression, taught the woke, is a linguistic history, and the coming liberation will be linguistic too.
Those are unfortunate and ridiculous positions. They’re unfortunate in that talk is cheap and yip-yap will not save you. They’re unfortunate because oppression and inequality are real and material, and even bad words don’t constitute violence. Woke rested on a very particular and very half-assed metaphysics, and many college administrators who had no idea how to assess the plausibility of philosophical ontologies bought it as though it was obvious and inculcated it on their campuses as though it was uncontroversial.
On the contrary, their sheer implausibility was a reason that the positions had to be enforced, and cancelling, silencing, and censoring their opponents was as close as wokesters ever got to a competent conceptual defense of their positions.
So I agree with Le Pogam that woke really sucked (or sucks, insofar as it persists, as the brouhaha concerning Jonathan Haidt at NYU suggests it does). But I don't agree with him in blaming FT for "an entire generation [that] knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation [that] sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere." Le Pogam's thesis is that wokeism arises from the combination of French theory with American puritanism. The puritanism would help explain the “church lady” or “he said a bad word” quality of woke, because the role of Michel Foucault, about the least puritanical person who ever lived, definitely cannot.
I don't think we can blame Jacques Derrida for the spirit of "he wore a bad Halloween costume, let's put him in stocks on the quad" flavor of 2017. I really don't. But "at every step" in the conceptual construction, Le Pogam claims, "the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty." He seems to be launching a global attack on French intellectual culture.
I'm going to say what a lot of people ended up saying on X: those are definitely not the positions of those three thinkers, and also each of them (and this is true of a number of other “French theory” figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Bruno Latour, Jacques Lacan, or Luce Irigiray) is a distinctive philosopher and there are no positions on which they all agree. None of them would endorse the positions Le Pogam attributes to them all, though some of them might inch toward some of them. "There is no truth, only power": that is not Foucault's position at all, and it’s not the position of woke college administrators, who in my experience were enforcing a moral and political code they took to be objectively true.
I picture confronting Jacques Derrida with the claim that "every majority is guilty"; he'd just roll his eyes, really. Also, you can't hold both that there’s no truth and that every majority is guilty. Saying that Deleuze thought things like that would be silly if Deleuze were easier to comprehend. As things stand, however, it's just wrong. None of these figures abandoned beauty, by the way; they wanted to reconstrue and expand it.
I do think there was or is some sort of philosophy or theory underlying woke, with at most an indirect connection to FT. At its height, in fact, I argued in The Wall Street Journal that woke was underpinned by "postmodernism." But the particular postmodern flavor involved, it seems to me, was not FT, but a position I’s term "linguistic idealism," and which I've already described.
It holds that reality is linguistically or narratively constructed and hence can be linguistically or narratively remade. It appears to be confused as between words and rocks, or for that matter between words and grenades, which is confusion indeed, but can’t be attributed to Deleuze. Foucault believed in the existence of bodies and thought that's what we were. Maybe he thought the truths of our bodies could undermine the "truths" of power.
But the American philosopher Richard Rorty taught that our world was made by the words we use and Harvard's Nelson Goodman said flatly that languages "make worlds." Alasdair MacIntyre from his perches at Vanderbilt and Notre Dame, wrote that human personality was narratively constructed, and German Hans-Georg Gadamer taught the same about history and possibly the universe. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor put forward a version of the same view and continues to do so. None of these people was French, and all of them put forward positions much more straightforwardly related to woke than those of Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault.
Though all these figures were acquainted with FT, they were contemporaries of the French theorists, not their followers, and linguistic idealism of their stripe isn’t at all the same as French postmodernism. Maybe these Americans and Germans came by their puritan streak more organically out of their own cultures.
In Rorty's book Achieving Our Country, published in 1998 but receiving an astonishing revival after the election of Trump as woke exploded, he wrote this: “It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called ‘conservative intellectuals’ deserve this description. For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice.” This amazingly casual piece of implausible and self-serving propaganda entails that getting rid of all conservatives would be no loss. Combined with Rorty's linguistic metaphysics, this gives you essentially all of woke. Deleuze doesn't give you any of it.
So I comfort the French, who have such good food and wine and pretty good theory too. Even if the French failed to hold the Maginot line against woke in 2016, even if Brivael Le Pogam thinks Derrida is wrong, there's no need for him or them to apologize. It's our own damn fault. But by the same token I call on Le Pogam and everyone else to admit the obvious, that "every hierarchy is suspect." Maybe that’s a teaching FT. The alternative, taking hierarchies as sweet and healthy every time out, is just enthusing about oppression.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell