Hegel never developed a systematic philosophy of technology, yet technology remains central to understanding how Spirit transforms the world and itself. In labour, human beings do more than alter nature: thought steps outside itself, taking objective form in tools, machines, and institutions. Technology mediates how the subject encounters the object, and how freedom passes through necessity. But this mediation is not innocent. Machinery may release human beings from physical work, while the modern division of labour simultaneously subordinates them to fragmented functions. The Hegelian question is not simply what machines can do for us, but what they make of us: how they reorganise human agency, reshape social relations, and transform the historical conditions under which freedom becomes possible.

From a Hegelian perspective, contemporary AI cannot be understood merely as a tool serving purposes human users determine in advance. It is a technical mediation through which accumulated social intelligence, including knowledge, language, institutional norms, and economic priorities, assumes objective form in datasets, models, interfaces, and procedures. Once AI enters the field of production, it no longer simply realises predetermined ends. It reorganises the field in which such ends are conceived, transforming what can be recognised as knowledge, competence, authorship, and rational decision.

The means help determine the end, but AI’s lack of self-consciousness and responsibility should remind the audience of its limitations and the importance of human oversight. AI demonstrates how purposiveness arises when recursive mechanisms are embedded within social and institutional practices. For Hegel, purpose goes beyond merely converging on a predictable outcome. It relates to a concept’s self-determination through its objective realisation. While AI can replicate goal-oriented behaviour, this does not mean that it possesses a self-conscious purpose. The apparent purpose of artificial intelligence stems from a broader social system comprising algorithms, institutions, capital and human practices.

Hegel does not rule out tools as means. Still, he insists that this description remains stuck at the level of externality, a view he associates with mechanism, where an end exists in the subject and is then applied to an indifferent object.^[1] According to Hegel, the means functions as the external mediating term in the syllogism of the structure end-means-realisation through which a purpose is realised. In the means, the rationality of the purpose shows itself by preserving itself within what is other than it, and doing so precisely in and through that externality. For this reason, the means ranks above the finite ends of external purposiveness. For example, “the plough is more honourable than are immediately the enjoyments which it procures and which are the purposes.”^[2] Interestingly, Hegel links tool-use to enjoyment: the tool endures even as immediate enjoyment fades. Through their tools, human beings gain power over external nature, even if, with respect to their particular ends, they remain dependent on it.^[3]

In this sense, Hegel’s decisive complication is his account of purpose as mediation. A purpose is not simply an inner aim that later gets “implemented”; it becomes what it is only by taking objective form through the means that realise it. In other words, means are not transparent channels. Hegel maintains that “it is in their tools that human beings possess power over external nature, even though with respect to their purposes they are subjected to it.”^[4] They are the site where an end selects, shapes, and reorganises reality, and where the end itself changes as it becomes actual.

Consider the Reformation, a paradigmatic scene of vernacular scripture, pamphlets, preaching, and the printing press. From a Lutheran perspective, printing appears as a powerful instrument of proclamation and education whose moral value depends on what it circulates and how it is used. From a Hegelian perspective, however, printing is more than a vehicle that accelerates the transmission of a message. It participates in the objectification of a new social world: mass literacy, the formation of publics, the standardisation of language, new networks of circulation, and new institutions of authority and dispute. The purpose of making the Word accessible becomes real only through the construction and inhabitation of these objective forms. Yet once brought into existence, these forms no longer merely serve their original purpose. They transform what access, authority, and even public truth can mean. The tool thus ceases to be something simply at our disposal and becomes part of the environment we inhabit.

Even when a tool is understood as serving good ends, purposive action can sediment into systems of administration, discipline, and evaluation. The user no longer confronts a discrete instrument but a network of mediations that distribute agency and responsibility. Purpose, once objectified, can become an impersonal norm that governs subjects from the outside, not because anyone intended domination, but because the realised end takes the form of institutions, procedures, and standards. In this vein, purposiveness is nothing other than algorithmic recursiveness. What looks like an “end” is produced by the repeated looping of operations that select, correct, and stabilise a pattern over time.

The point is not that an algorithm secretly “has” a purpose in the human sense, but that purposiveness can be explained without appealing to a prior intention. What appears to be freedom from superstition at the level of inward faith can be accompanied by the consolidation of external orders that organise behaviour, recognition, and legitimacy. Teleology, on this view, is not a metaphysical destiny; it is an emergent effect of feedback, in other words, a temporality of “try again” that gradually hardens into direction. In this way, “purpose” is a compressed description of recursive procedures: iteration generates a trajectory, and the trajectory retroactively reads as a goal. The system does not move because it knows the end; rather, the end is the name we give to the stable attractor that recursion keeps returning to. In this way, purposiveness often comes packaged with an illusion of completeness: once the loop reliably converges, the outcome looks as if it were already there from the start. But what is “already there” is only the rule of recurrence, the protocol that keeps re-running, updating, and re-normalising the relation between input, output, and constraint.

In this sense, Hegel does not simply contradict Luther; he shifts the level of analysis. Luther’s archetypal scene stays close to intention, proclamation, and responsibility within vocation. Hegel asks what happens when those intentions are realised, stabilised, and made durable in objective structures. Technology, then, is not only something used; it is a medium in which purposes become worldly and acquire an autonomy of their own. That is the problem Hegel introduces: a tool is never only a means, because the realisation of ends through tools is one way a social world is built, and once built, that world begins to educate, constrain, and redirect the very purposes that gave rise to it.

Here, Hegel’s distinction between mechanism and purpose matters because it loosens the grip of the ordinary instrumental picture in which a subject chooses an end and then applies neutral means to achieve it. In the instrumental picture, the world is basically a set of items and forces standing “outside” one another, and action is conceived as adding an external intention to that already-given field. The end remains private, lodged in the interiority of the agent, while causality is imagined as a sequence of pushes and pulls that transmit the agent’s will into matter. Hegel claims that this misses what purposive action actually is. A purpose is not entirely what it is merely by being intended; it becomes real as purpose only insofar as it is realised, and realisation is not a mere execution but a process in which both the means and the world are formed.

In Hegel, “mechanism” names a form of intelligibility before it names a type of device. Hegel argues that “a mechanical mode of representation, a mechanical memory, a habit, a mechanical mode of acting, mean that the pervasive presence that is proper to spirit is lacking in what spirit grasps or does.”^[5]A mechanical account treats objects as externally related units whose connections are indifferent to their inner determinations. The relations between them are described in terms of efficient causality: impact, transmission, force, constraint, stimulus and response.^[6] This is where the mechanistic attitude is compatible with a strong sense of control: if the world is just a collection of externally connected parts, then the agent can imagine that inserting the right causes will reliably produce the desired effects, without the end being altered by the process. When we interpret a press, a factory, or an algorithm purely as a causal chain operating under external control, we are effectively saying that the system’s form is irrelevant to its end; it is just a conduit for a will that remains unchanged throughout. For Hegel, this is a partial abstraction: it captures something real about how many systems function, but it cannot account for the specificity of purposive formation.

In Hegel’s sense, purpose means a different kind of relation. He emphasises that “purposiveness presents itself from the first as something of a generally higher nature, as an intelligence that externally determines the manifoldness of objects through a unity that exists in and for itself, so that the indifferent determinacies of the objects become essential by virtue of this connection.”^[7] Therefore, the end does not merely stand over against an indifferent world; it selects and shapes its means, and it becomes determinate only through that selection. Means are not interchangeable instruments that leave the end intact. The means mediate how the end enters objectivity and gains reality as an instituted form. Hegel’s point is not simply that we must use means to reach ends, but that the end is articulated in the very structure of its realisation. The purpose is “in” the means in the sense that the means embody a specific order, a specific arrangement, a certain regularity that is appropriate to that purpose. Realisation is formative: it organises materials, practices, and relations into a stable configuration that did not previously exist, and the end becomes objective in that configuration.

Purposive action does not simply use the world; it reconfigures it. Tools become repeatable procedures; procedures become workflows; workflows require standards; standards generate disciplines; disciplines stabilise publics and institutions. An end that begins as a subjective intention is “externalised” into objective structures that can be shared, reproduced, taught, enforced, and inherited. The end thereby becomes more general than the original intention because it is no longer tied to the agent’s interior state; it exists as a social fact, a practice, a system. At the same time, it becomes more durable because infrastructures and institutions carry it beyond any individual. It can also become more coercive because, once objectified, it confronts individuals as an objective order that demands compliance if they want to participate in the practice it sustains. This is not an accidental distortion of the end; it is a structural feature of how ends become real in a social world.

From a Hegelian perspective, “technology” cannot be reduced to a set of apparatuses placed at the disposal of an already-formed will. It is better grasped as the process in which logic comes to work in the world: the movement through which purposes are mediated, differentiated, and stabilised into objective forms. In this sense, technology can be grasped as the practical actuality of concepts. It includes devices and machines, but just as much the norms sedimented in procedures, the temporal rationalisation built into workflows, the classificatory grids of administration, the metrics that render action legible to evaluation, and the infrastructures that organise circulation. These are not external additions to action; they are the very media through which ends become determinate and effective, through which intention is translated, corrected, and often transformed as it passes into objectivity. A Hegelian analysis of technology shows that means are never merely means. Once purposes are processed through technical mediations, in other words, through procedures, schedules, standards, and dispositifs, they acquire a durability and a logic of their own, reshaping not only outcomes but also the very form of willing, acting, and judging.

Hegel does not deny the importance of intention; he argues that “the cause of an act is the inner intention of the subject who is the agent, and this intention is the same in content and value as the existence which it attains through the action.”^[8] However, he claims that intention is not sovereign over its means as the instrumental model presumes. Once the end is realised through mediations, they do not simply carry the end; they structure it, generalise it, stabilise it, and sometimes harden it into an objective order that shapes subsequent agents. The practice of intending is reorganised by the objective systems through which ends are made real. Even when we begin with “good intentions,” technical realisation can yield outcomes that are more expansive and more constraining than the original aim. The end returns the subject to the outside as a world of practices and institutions that the subject must now inhabit, and this is precisely the point at which technology stops looking like a neutral instrument and becomes a formative social power.

Hegel allows us to move beyond the familiar alternative that treats AI either as a neutral instrument or as an autonomous intelligence. Technology is not simply an external means placed at the disposal of an already given human will. The means mediates the end it is meant to realise, giving that purpose an objective existence while transforming its meaning in the process. Contemporary AI dialectically brings this into sharp relief. Systems designed to increase efficiency, predict behaviour, or expand access to knowledge no longer merely serve these ends once they enter education, employment, administration, and cultural production. They reorganise the social field within which knowledge, competence, creativity, and rational judgement acquire their meaning. The means cease to remain subordinate to a predetermined end. It becomes part of the social environment from which new ends emerge.

AI may be grasped as an objectification of collective human intelligence. Its models condense sedimented forms of language, knowledge, labour, cultural memory, and institutional judgement. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that AI is Spirit in the Hegelian sense. Recursive computation can produce the appearance of purposiveness, but recurrence is not self-determination. AI neither recognises itself in what it produces nor assumes responsibility for its decisions. Nor can it enter independently into relations of mutual recognition. Its apparent autonomy is not an intrinsic property of the machine but an effect produced by the conjunction of algorithms, infrastructures, institutions, capital, and human practices within which it operates.

The paradox of AI appears here. It promises to free human beings from repetitive labour while extending surveillance, dependency, and the abstraction of work. It seems to make knowledge universally accessible while concentrating technical authority in the hands of a few corporations and institutions. Its outputs appear as objective results, yet conceal the social assumptions, human labour, and political decisions that produced them. Once collective intelligence is objectified in technical form, it can return to society in an alienated form. What people have created together then stands over and against them as an independent authority whose judgements they are expected to accept.

A Hegelian response cannot therefore be limited to asking whether AI is beneficial or harmful, nor whether individual users employ it responsibly. The more fundamental question is whether society can recognise AI as its own objectified power and bring that power within institutions of collective deliberation and accountability. Freedom does not require eliminating technological mediation, since human freedom is always realised through objective forms. It requires that these forms remain intelligible, contestable, and open to transformation by those whose lives they organise. The decisive question is not whether AI will become human, but whether human beings can recognise themselves in the intelligence they have externalised and prevent it from hardening into an alien system of domination. Bringing Hegel and AI together therefore means treating artificial intelligence as a test of collective freedom: whether society can transform its technological objectifications into shared capacities rather than submit to them as an apparently independent fate.

^[1] G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 663.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid., 631.

^[6] Ibid., 635.

^[7] Ibid., 653.

^[8] Ibid., 495.

Watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I was struck less by the scale of the film than by its insistence that Odysseus is returning to a civilisation whose moral foundations have already collapsed. For this reason, I would argue that Nolan’s Odysseus has not simply lost his memory of Ithaca. More fundamentally, he has lost the motivation to return home. Ithaca may remain somewhere within his memory, but it no longer functions as the object of desire that gives direction to his journey. In this sense, Odysseus becomes an outlaw: not merely someone who has broken the law, but someone for whom the law no longer provides a place, an identity, or a reason to return.

His apparent amnesia is therefore better understood as a symptom of trauma than as a straightforward failure of recollection. Trauma does not merely erase an event from consciousness. It separates experience from intelligibility, leaving the subject unable to recognise the cause of the suffering that continues to shape his actions. Odysseus can remember fragments of this former life without understanding why they no longer possess meaning for him.

When he finally decides to return to Ithaca, this does not signify the recovery of a complete memory or the resolution of his oblivion. His decision is not the end of trauma, but a response to it. Unable to identify the true source of his suffering, Odysseus constructs a reason for movement: he must return because Ithaca is his kingdom and because Penelope and Telemachus are waiting for him. This rationale is not necessarily false, but it is produced retrospectively to give purpose to a journey whose original motivation has disappeared. Home becomes less a remembered destination than a narrative he invents to make action possible again.

Odysseus returns because he needs Ithaca to organise the fragments of a self shattered by war. Yet the home he imagines cannot restore what has been lost, since the violence of Troy has already entered both his psyche and his household. His return is an attempt to conceal its abyss beneath the language of family, duty, and belonging. Odysseus does not remember his way home; he invents home as the reason he must continue living.

Nolan makes “xenia”, the sacred relation between host and guest, the final barrier separating civilisation from uncontrolled violence. The Trojan Horse is therefore more than a military trick. By presenting an instrument of invasion as a gift, Odysseus violates what the film calls the “law of Zeus” and destroys the common trust on which the civilised world depends. Violence then returns across the sea with the Greek armies and eventually reaches the household of the man who devised the deception.

Odysseus does not simply struggle against monsters and natural forces; he wanders through the ruins produced by his own cunning. Yet the more I considered Nolan’s idea of civilisational collapse, the more I felt compelled to ask a basic question: which civilisation has reached its end, and for whom does its destruction appear as the end of the world? Viewed against the present political situation, the film can readily be read as an allegory of the United States, which is systematically destroying the principle of xenia: the obligation to receive and protect the stranger.

However, it is precisely here that I find Nolan’s interpretation problematic, for it remains confined within a land-centred, territorial frame that mistakes the collapse of a palatial order for the end of civilisation itself. He quietly identifies civilisation with a particular political order. Nolan’s elegy presents the end of this order as the end of civilisation itself. What is disappearing is, more precisely, an aristocratic, land-based, and sedentary hierarchical order.

The Sea People occupy an ambiguous place within this vision. Nolan’s revelation that they are not simply mysterious foreign invaders but the returning Greeks themselves prevents the film from establishing a crude opposition between civilised Greeks and external barbarians. The violence comes from within. I appreciate this reversal, since it makes the Greeks confront the barbarism of their own victory. This insight offers a powerful allegorical critique of what is happening in the US today, as the country abandons the principle of xenia and increasingly succumbs to xenophobia.

Yet I do not think Nolan carries the reversal far enough. Maritime existence remains legible only as displacement, piracy, and decomposition. The sea is where civilisation loses its law; it is never where another political order might begin. Nolan gives the sea an immense optical presence, but no political voice.

As I watched the film, I kept returning to Plato’s suspicion of maritime life. Plato’s argument provides the philosophical grammar through which Nolan’s maritime world becomes intelligible. The Athenian Stranger calls the sea a pleasant but “briny and bitter” neighbour.^[1] It fills the city with traders and foreign goods, producing uncertain habits and weakening civic stability. More revealingly, Plato objects that naval power makes the city dependent upon pilots, captains, and rowers, people whom he considers insufficiently respectable to receive political honour.

What interests me here is that Plato’s anxiety is not really about violence alone. It is about the distribution of honour. The land sustains a visible hierarchy of property owners, warriors, and rulers. A ship, by contrast, survives through the coordinated labour of people whom the landed order regards as inferior. The security of the city comes to depend upon rowers, including poorer citizens who possess neither land nor aristocratic rank. The sea unsettles hierarchy because it reveals that collective survival rests on those whom the established order excludes from honour.

This is the sense in which we can describe the people from the sea as a democratic force. I am not claiming that the historical Sea Peoples were democrats, nor do I want to romanticise seafarers as naturally peaceful or egalitarian. Athenian naval power itself became an instrument of empire. By “democratic”, I mean a structural tendency rather than a moral identity. Maritime movement loosens the supposedly natural connection between territory, property, lineage, and political authority. It brings heterogeneous people together and makes power dependent upon collective coordination. The people from the sea threaten the law of the land because they reveal that this law is not universal. It is the law of a particular hierarchy.

For this reason, I found myself returning to Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s reading of Homer remains indispensable because he understands Odysseus as the prototype of the bourgeois subject, who survives through calculation, renunciation, and cunning. The journey does not carry an already formed individual through a dangerous world. It produces the sovereign self by teaching Odysseus to master both external nature and his own desires. Ithaca, fixed property, and the patriarchal household are therefore not neutral destinations. They are the material form of the identity that Odysseus struggles to preserve.

Adorno also notices something that Nolan’s film leaves largely unexplored. He recalls that reactionary interpreters condemned Homer because they detected a democratic element in the epic and branded it a product of “seafarers and traders”.^[2] They suggest that the apparent powerlessness of the navigator, who crosses and measures unknown waters, can undermine established ruling powers.^[3] Even xenia emerges from this maritime condition. The hospitality gift stands between sacrifice and exchange. It functions as a truce among strangers in response to the dangers of travel, settlement, and piracy. In this sense, “even the sacrifice which Poseidon is glad to accept involves deception”.^[4]

Hospitality need not be understood as a divine command descending from above. It can also be understood as a practice developed laterally among mobile and mutually vulnerable people. If xenia is merely the command of a transcendent authority, its violation appears as the destruction of a previously unified civilisation. But if hospitality arises from the practical exposure of strangers to one another, it does not presuppose unity. It becomes necessary precisely because there is no single territory, sovereign, or identity capable of containing everyone. Hospitality belongs to the sea before it belongs to the palace.

For Derrida, in this sense, hospitality is never an innocent possession. The host can receive another only because he claims sovereignty over a home. He selects who may enter, identifies the guest, and reserves the power of exclusion. There is “no hospitality” without sovereignty over one’s home, Derrida argues, but that sovereignty operates by filtering and excluding.^[5] In this sense, the hostility Nolan presents as the consequence of hospitality’s collapse is therefore already internal to hospitality itself.

The Trojan Horse certainly radicalises this contradiction by weaponising the gift. But I would not say that it introduces violence into a previously peaceful law. Instead, it exposes the violence concealed in the sovereignty of the host and in the conditional recognition of the guest. The decisive question is not simply whether a guest obeys the law. We must also ask who possesses the house, who establishes the conditions of entry, and who is recognised as a guest rather than dismissed as an anonymous barbarian. Derrida’s foreigner matters because the stranger places the paternal logos, the father, and the master of the household in question.^[6] Nolan’s Sea Peoples might have performed this critical function. They rather remain primarily the name of the catastrophe that begins when the master’s law loses its authority.

In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt argues that sensus communis does not mean conformity to inherited custom. It is the faculty through which earthbound beings inhabit a world with others. Human beings require one another’s company even to think.^[7] Judgement therefore demands an enlarged mentality, the effort to consider an event from standpoints other than one’s own.^[8] The loss of common sense is not simply the disappearance of social rules. It is the loss of a shared world in which different perspectives can appear and be judged together.^[9]

Nolan’s law of Zeus resembles this common sense, but it lacks Arendt’s plurality. The film’s world remains organised around the standpoint of kings, warriors, fathers, and householders. The maritime stranger appears primarily as the object of their fear or guilt. Nolan may condemn Odysseus’s actions, but he still allows Odysseus’s crisis to determine the meaning of the historical world. For me, an Arendtian judgement would require the story to be seen from the positions of the rower, the displaced traveller, the enslaved woman, the defeated Trojan, and the stranger denied a name. Without these standpoints, “common sense” risks becoming nothing more than the provincial sense of the ruling order.

Nolan’s Odyssey can be viewed as the catastrophe from below. The palace may be collapsing, but those subordinated to it do not necessarily experience its disappearance in the same way. The breakdown of landed authority may release piracy and revenge, but it may also unsettle inherited distributions of rank. Walter Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” reminds us that what appears to rulers as an exceptional emergency may have always been the ordinary condition of those beneath them.^[10] For the enslaved, displaced, and conquered, civilisation may already have been catastrophic long before the arrival of the Sea Peoples.

Adorno makes this point brutally at the end of his discussion of Homer. Odysseus returns as an implacable judge, and the violence of the supposedly civilised order becomes indistinguishable from the primaeval violence it claims to overcome. He draws attention to the mutilation of Melanthius and the execution of the enslaved women, who are thrust towards death “under the aegis of justice and law”.^[11] Nolan omits the hanging of the women, but his massacre of the suitors retains the central problem. Violence carried out in the name of restoring the household cannot prove that civilisation has defeated barbarism. It may show that civilisation has always served the right to call its own violence justice.

I would therefore prefer to read The Odyssey not as the restoration or extinction of a single civilisation, but as an archipelagic conflict between different ways of organising life. The land fixes identity through borders, inheritance, and property. The sea disperses identity through travel, encounter, and dependence upon strangers. Neither term is innocent. Maritime mobility can produce conquest as readily as freedom. Yet the sea also prevents the law of one territory from presenting itself as the universal law of civilisation.

For all the oceanic grandeur of his images, Nolan finally remains a terrestrial thinker of the sea. His film makes water sublime, dangerous, and historically destructive, while orienting every voyage towards the recovery of the sovereign home. The sea is something Odysseus must cross, master, or escape. It is never allowed to become a political world in its own right.

This is why I want to reverse the question posed by Nolan’s film. I do not want to ask only what happens when the law of Zeus collapses. I want to ask whose house that law protects, whose violence it authorises, and whose movement it defines as lawless. The people of the sea are democratic not because they are inherently virtuous, but because their movement contests the monopoly of the land over law, honour, and political existence. From this perspective, Nolan does not show the end of civilisation. He shows the end of one territorial hierarchy, and its ruins do not mean the end of all worlds.

For me, Nolan’s film is most revealing at precisely the point where its interpretation falters. It criticises the transformation of xenia into xenophobia in the US, while retaining the territorial logic that makes this transformation possible. The political question raised by The Odyssey is therefore not how civilisation can defend itself against those who arrive from the sea. It is how we might imagine a civilisation that no longer depends upon the opposition between land and sea, host and stranger, lawful citizen, and outlaw.

^[1] Plato, Laws, trans. R. G. Bury (Harvard University Press, 1926), 257.

^[2] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 36.

^[3] Ibid., 38.

^[4] Ibid., 40.

^[5] Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2000), 53-55.

^[6] Ibid., 3-5.

^[7] Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27.

^[8] Ibid., 42.

^[9] Ibid., 70.

^[10] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400, 392.

^[11] Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 61- 62.

Communism is generally presented as a solution to the contradictions of capitalism. However, understanding communism itself through the concept of paradox may offer greater insight. This does not mean that communism is logically contradictory. A contradiction is the simultaneous assertion of two incompatible propositions in the same respect. A paradox, on the other hand, reveals that assumptions which appear rational at first glance can result in the very framework upon which they are based being overturned. Communism is paradoxical precisely in this sense. It refers to a politics of the subject that succeeds only by disappearing; to a commons that belongs to everyone precisely because it belongs to no one exclusively; and to a specific class whose liberation becomes universal only by abolishing all classes, including itself.

The first paradox concerns the proletariat. Most political classes seek power to ensure their own survival. The ruling class succeeds by consolidating its position, expanding its authority, and reproducing the institutions that underpin its rule. However, the proletariat cannot realise communist emancipation by becoming a permanent ruling class. Their emancipation requires the abolition of the class relations that make them the proletariat in the first place.

Conventional political victory merely reproduces the victorious class at a higher level of power. Communist emancipation follows a different logic. The proletariat transforms the social system so that the relationship between capital and labour no longer produces the proletarian class.

This does not mean that workers physically disappear. It means that the proletariat, as a social category, ceases to exist. Those who previously existed as workers will continue to exist, but they will no longer be compelled to sell their labour power to those who monopolise the means of production. What disappears are the social relations that constituted them as a subjugated class.

Therefore, the success of the proletariat is achieved not when everyone becomes part of the proletariat, but when there is no longer any proletariat left. That victory cannot be measured by the permanence of identity. Instead, it must be measured by the ability to abolish the conditions that made that identity necessary. Thus, communist politics is a self-abolishing process. Its successful outcome eliminates its own conditions of origin.

This is analogous to a reflexive mathematical operation acting upon a system that includes the very element that triggered it. Whilst the proletariat is situated within class society, its political action alters the rules by which society is divided into classes. Consequently, the output of this operation eliminates the very categories required to describe its input. This is not a formal contradiction, since the proletariat exists as a class at one historical moment only to disappear as such at another. It is a temporal paradox in which the political subject realises itself by rendering its own continued existence superfluous.

This distinction sets communist emancipation apart from a mere overthrow of domination. If the proletariat had simply replaced the bourgeoisie as the ruling class whilst preserving the existing apparatus of property, labour and state power, the positions within the structure might have changed, but the structure itself would have remained intact. Communism does not merely entail a replacement of the subject; it demands a transformation of relations. The proletariat does not become universal by imposing its particular identity on everyone else. The proletariat becomes universal by abolishing the system that organises society through antagonistic class identities.

This leads to the second paradox, namely the paradox of ‘commons’. Private property is defined through exclusion. The reason something is mine is that I possess the recognised power to prevent others from using it. Communism transforms the meaning of ‘ownership’. The commons belongs to everyone precisely because it does not belong exclusively to anyone. If (C) denotes a community that depends on resource (r) for its livelihood, the ‘commons’ can be expressed as follows:

CommonC​(r)⟺(∀x∈C, x may participate in r)∧(∄x∈C, x does not exclusively own r)

Here, ‘participation’ encompasses not only the right of access to the common good but also participation in the decision-making processes governing its use. Therefore, the common good is not an object left to unrestricted consumption. Furthermore, the absence of an exclusive owner does not imply a lack of rules, institutions or accountability. The commons must be organised and managed. What distinguishes it from private property is that no participant can convert their participation into a permanent monopoly over the conditions of participation for everyone else.

This paradox arises because conventional logic regarding ownership dictates that something must necessarily belong to a specific owner. The commons overturns this logic. The commons belongs to everyone without being property in the conventional sense. It is maintained through use, cooperation and collective responsibility, yet cannot be reduced to the ownership of an individual, a corporation or a state.

This distinction is of the utmost importance, for state ownership cannot automatically be equated with communism. The state may own resources in the name of the people, whilst simultaneously excluding those very people from the decision-making process regarding the use of those resources. Consequently, collective ownership can reproduce the logic of private ownership at a higher institutional level. Whilst the state becomes the sole owner, the population remains separated from the material conditions that sustain its existence. Consequently, communist commons must be distinguished from both private ownership and centralised state ownership. This refers to social relations in which the producers and users of shared resources participate in their management without gaining the right to exclusive possession.

The third paradox concerns the relationship between particularity and universality. The proletariat is merely one class amongst others and thus occupies a specific position within capitalist society.

Nevertheless, the emancipation of the proletariat has potentially universal significance, for the proletariat cannot abolish its own subjugation without abolishing the class structure of society as a whole. Their political action begins at a specific point but transforms the rules that govern the whole.

The proletariat is not universal simply because, empirically, it encompasses everyone. Nor is it universal on the grounds that its culture, identity or interests should serve as a model for humanity. The proletariat is universal because the social relations it must abolish cannot be abolished for the sake of the proletariat alone. It is impossible to put an end to the exploitation of the proletariat whilst maintaining the separation between those who own the means of production and those who have no choice but to sell their labour power. Therefore, the emancipation of the proletariat requires a transformation that renders class relations themselves null and void.

This is a universality created not through the extension of a particular identity, but through the abolition of privilege. The bourgeoisie, too, presents its own interests as universal. It portrays private property, market exchange and freedom of contract as expressions of human freedom itself. Yet this universality conceals the specific power of those who control capital. The communist universality of the proletariat is structurally different. It can only be realised if the proletariat refuses to position itself as a new privileged class.

Communism must therefore constantly contend with a lurking political danger. An organisation established to abolish domination may itself become fixated on its own perpetuation. Political parties, states, or revolutionary leaderships may claim to represent the universal interests of the proletariat, whilst simultaneously transforming this representation into a new monopoly on power. The paradox of communist organisations is that, whilst they must possess sufficient power to transform the existing order, they must also prevent that power from degenerating into a new, permanent sovereignty. Communist institutions must ultimately be judged not by their capacity for indefinite self-preservation, but by whether they expand people’s ability to govern their shared circumstances themselves, without being subordinated to those institutions.

In Hegelian terms, this structure can be understood as ‘decisive negation’. The negation of the proletariat is not the destruction of the people who constitute it. It is the abolition of the social relations that reduce their activity to wage labour. Furthermore, there is something that is preserved through this negation: namely, the collective productive capacity that capitalism developed but subordinated to accumulation. Communism negates capitalist property rights whilst simultaneously liberating cooperation from the private appropriation of its products.

Thus, the proletariat is realised through this negation, but what is realised is not the identity of the proletariat. It is the capacity for collective self-determination, which had previously been constrained by class relations. The negative movement gives rise to a positive transformation. In other words, the withering away of the proletariat as a class becomes the emergence of individuals in solidarity who organise their material lives collectively.

However, one must not imagine the ‘community’ as a homogeneous whole in which individual differences disappear. Communism does not demand that everyone become the same. Equality is not sameness.

Different individuals and communities possess different abilities, desires, histories and ways of life. Communist equality means that these differences do not serve as grounds for domination or exclusion. Therefore, the ‘community’ is not a unified entity managed from a single centre, but rather an open pluralism. What the participants share is not an identical identity, but an equal capacity to participate in shaping the conditions of their coexistence.

The mathematical language used here does not serve to prove communism. Politics cannot be derived from an equation, nor can historical contradictions be resolved through formal symbols. Rather, mathematics clarifies the structural form of this argument. It demonstrates that communist emancipation cannot be expressed as a mere accumulation of power by an already constituted subject. It is a transformation in which the subject alters its own identity by acting upon the system that constitutes it.

Communism can therefore be understood as the paradoxical politics of abolition, non-ownership and universalisation. The proletariat triumphs by abolishing itself as a class. The ‘commons’ belongs to everyone because no one can possess it exclusively. A particular political subject becomes universal by refusing to make its particularity the foundation of a new form of domination. Equality is realised not by eliminating difference, but by preventing difference from solidifying into a hierarchy.

The paradox of communism ultimately lies in the fact that its success cannot take the form of permanent ownership. Communism cannot be owned by any class, party, state or doctrine, provided it does not degenerate into yet another structure of exclusion. Communism can remain communism only as long as its institutions prevent the appropriation of the ‘commons’, refuse to allow political subjects to become a new ruling class, and maintain an open attitude towards forms of life that transcend any established identity. Communism is not a final state in which all contradictions have vanished. It is an ongoing collective practice that transforms the relationships through which property, class and exclusion are reproduced.

Communism became a “philosophical question” again after Stalinism because the historical experience of state socialism exposed a paradox at the heart of the communist project as it had been institutionalised in the twentieth century. Communism had presented itself as a politics of emancipation: the overcoming of exploitation, the abolition of class domination, and the creation of a collective form of life based on equality. Yet under Stalinism, this emancipatory promise was translated into the authority of the party-state, the repression of dissent, the elimination of political plurality, and the subordination of democratic life to the logic of historical necessity. Socialism, in this form, did not simply fail to realise communism; it produced a new problem for communist thought itself. How could a politics founded on liberation become a system of domination? How could equality be defended through authoritarian means? And how could the collective ownership of society coexist with the destruction of democratic participation?

For this reason, Stalinism did not merely represent a political deviation or a historical accident. It forced communism to confront its own philosophical conditions. After Stalinism, communism could no longer be understood simply as the future fulfilment of history, the scientific resolution of capitalism’s contradictions, or the administrative management of social equality. It had to be rethought in relation to freedom, democracy, and the dangers of state power. The question was no longer only how communism might overcome capitalism, but also how communism might avoid reproducing new forms of domination in the very name of emancipation.

“Western Marxism” can be understood as a philosophical response to the contradiction produced by communism without democracy. After Stalinism, Marxism could no longer be treated simply as a science of history, a theory of economic exploitation, or a revolutionary doctrine destined to realise itself through the party-state. The historical experience of state socialism revealed that a politics founded on emancipation and equality could also become a machinery of domination, censorship, bureaucratic command, and the suppression of political plurality. Western Marxism emerged from this wound. Its central question was no longer only how capitalism exploits labour, but how domination is reproduced through culture, ideology, subjectivity, and everyday life.

This is why Western Marxism turned so strongly toward philosophy. In Lukács, the problem became reification and class consciousness; in Gramsci, hegemony and civil society; in the Frankfurt School, instrumental reason, authoritarian personality, mass culture, and the administered world; in Sartre, praxis and historical responsibility; in Althusser, ideology and the reproduction of social relations. These thinkers did not abandon Marxism, but they displaced its centre of gravity. They sought to understand why revolution had failed in the West, why the working class did not automatically become a revolutionary subject, why fascism could mobilise popular desire, and why socialism itself could become authoritarian.

In this sense, Western Marxism arose from a double crisis: the failure of capitalism to collapse as classical expectations had predicted, and the failure of state socialism to realise democratic emancipation. It was therefore not simply a regional or “Western” variation of Marxism, but a philosophical attempt to rescue communism from its statist deformation. Its task was to rethink communism beyond the party-state, beyond economic reductionism, and beyond the belief that historical necessity could substitute for democratic practice.

In an academic context, Western Marxism can be understood as a tradition that made it possible to discuss Marxist approaches to culture, ideology, and everyday life within an academically mediated theoretical framework. For this reason, it has sometimes overlapped with what might be called Marxist cultural theory. However, in contemporary far-right discourse, “Cultural Marxism” is not a serious conceptual term for Western Marxism. It functions instead as a polemical and conspiratorial label, used primarily to target the Frankfurt School, feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism, and progressive politics more broadly. The ideological genealogy of this label lies less in Marxist theory than in the older reactionary fantasy of “cultural Bolshevism,” which Nazi propaganda used to denounce modernism, Jewish intellectual life, communism, and democratic culture as symptoms of civilisational decline. For this reason, Western Marxism should not be equated with “Cultural Marxism”; the latter is better understood as a distorted right-wing caricature of the former (Wood, pp. 1-2)

In this sense, Gabriel Rockhill’s hostility toward Western Marxism is curious, as it mirrors far-right sentiment. Rather than engaging the historical context from which Western Marxism emerged, it appears to reproduce the very caricature of Western Marxism advanced by its reactionary opponents. Despite the polemics directed against Western Marxism, the collapse of the socialist bloc only intensified the philosophical question of the relationship between communism and democracy. In the post-1989 conjuncture, the radical French philosophy of the 1960s came to inherit the role once played by Western Marxism: it reopened the communist question outside the framework of the party-state, placing emancipation, desire, subjectivation, and democratic plurality at the centre of political thought.

Alain Badiou’s discussion of politics and philosophy turns on a contradiction that remains unresolved in modern political thought: the contradiction between communism and democracy. Yet this contradiction should not be understood too quickly as a simple opposition. Badiou does not reject democracy in the name of communism. Nor does he reduce communism to the negation of democracy. Democracy itself is divided. On the one hand, it names a form of state: elections, representatives, constitutional procedures, parliamentary institutions, and the formal freedom of opinion. On the other hand, democracy can also be understood as a form of active popular intervention: meetings, movements, uprisings, occupations, and the collective emergence of those who were previously uncounted. The contradiction between communism and democracy, therefore, begins inside democracy itself.

For this reason, Badiou refuses to identify democracy with liberal parliamentarism. Liberal democracy presents itself as the neutral space of freedom: the freedom to vote, to speak, to choose, to express an opinion, and to compete within the rules of the constitutional state. But for Badiou, this form of democracy remains tied to the state. It manages social differences without necessarily transforming them. It permits the circulation of opinion without producing truth. It protects freedom in a formal sense, but it does not guarantee equality. From this standpoint, democracy as a state form can coexist perfectly well with property, hierarchy, exploitation, racism, imperial violence, financial domination, and the persecution of people with low incomes.

Communism enters Badiou’s argument as the name of the problem that liberal democracy cannot solve. If democracy means only the formal equality of citizens before the law, then democracy leaves untouched the material inequalities that structure social life. Everyone may possess the same formal right to speak, but not everyone speaks from the same position of power. Everyone may possess the same right to vote, but not everyone has the same capacity to shape the world in which voting takes place. For this reason, Badiou shifts the emphasis from freedom to equality. Democracy becomes politically meaningful only when an egalitarian truth reorganises its formal freedom.

This is the point at which communism and democracy both contradict and require one another. Democracy, in its formal sense, is necessary because philosophy itself depends on a space in which anyone can think, speak, argue, and intervene. Philosophy has no sacred speaker. It is not the discourse of the king, the priest, the prophet, or the expert. It presupposes the equality of intelligences. But this formal equality remains incomplete unless an actual politics of emancipation sustains it. Communism, for Badiou, names the attempt to give real political content to this democratic condition. It is not the abolition of democracy, but the transformation of democracy from a form of state into a practice of equality.

For this reason, Badiou can say that democracy is not itself political truth, but one of the means through which political truth may be found. This formulation is decisive. It prevents us from treating democracy as a sacred name. Democracy is not automatically emancipatory. It depends on what kind of collective subject it produces. A democratic procedure can serve equality, but it can also serve reaction. It can open a space for universal emancipation, but it can also become the instrument through which resentment, nationalism, racism, and authoritarian desire are organised. Democracy, in itself, does not decide the question of truth.

MAGA makes this contradiction visible in a contemporary form. It operates within democratic forms: elections, rallies, public speech, media platforms, constitutional rhetoric, and the claim to represent “the people.” Yet its democratic form does not make it egalitarian. It mobilises the language of freedom, but this freedom is often directed toward restoration rather than emancipation. It claims to defend the people, but the people it invokes are not universal. It is a restricted and wounded people, imagined against migrants, racial minorities, feminists, socialists, cosmopolitans, intellectuals, and other figures of internal or external threat. In this sense, MAGA demonstrates exactly why Badiou separates democracy from political truth.

From Badiou’s perspective, the problem with MAGA is not merely that it is conservative or populist. The deeper problem is that it transforms democracy into a vehicle for anti-egalitarian passion. It uses the formal openness of democracy to intensify hierarchy. It turns freedom of opinion into the circulation of resentment. It converts the people’s idea into a fantasy of national restoration. It claims to oppose elites, but it does not break with domination as such. Rather, it seeks to redistribute domination in favour of those who imagine themselves dispossessed of their rightful power.

Liberal democracy can say that MAGA is simply one opinion among others, one electoral force among others, one legitimate expression of popular will among others. Badiou would reject this relativism. The equality of intelligences does not mean the equality of all opinions. To say that anyone can think is not to say that every political passion participates in truth. Philosophy must therefore ask what kind of politics a democratic movement produces. Does it universalise equality, or does it restrict people to a particular identity? Does it open a future, or does it bind collective desire to a myth of return? Does it break with the state, property, and hierarchy, or does it demand a stronger state in the name of national restoration?

Communism, in Badiou’s sense, is the name for a democracy that has passed through the test of equality. It does not mean state ownership of society, the rule of a party-state, or nostalgia for twentieth-century socialist regimes. It names a hypothesis: that collective life can be organised without the inevitability of property, hierarchy, inherited privilege, financial domination, and state violence. It names the possibility that the democratic axiom, i.e., anyone can think, can become a real political practice: anyone can participate in constructing a common world.

Badiou’s communism is inseparable from philosophy. Philosophy begins from the formal democracy of thought: arguments must be open to anyone, regardless of social position. Communism seeks the realisation of this democratic condition in politics: equality must not remain an abstract right but must be verified in collective practice. The contradiction between communism and democracy is therefore not resolved by choosing one at the expense of the other. It is solved, or rather continually worked through, by transforming democracy itself. Democracy must cease to be merely the state form of opinion and become the collective practice of equality.

In this sense, MAGA appears as the negative image of the communist hypothesis. It shows how democracy can be detached from equality and captured by restoration. It produces mobilisation without emancipation, a people without universality, freedom without justice, and revolt without truth. It reminds us that not all popular politics is emancipatory and not every challenge to liberal democracy points beyond capitalism. Some challenges merely intensify capitalism’s authoritarian, racial, patriarchal, and nationalist tendencies.

Badiou’s argument, therefore, forces us to be more precise. The task is not simply to defend democracy against communism, nor to defend communism against democracy. The real task is to distinguish between democracy as a state form and democracy as an emancipatory practice. Communism names the point at which democracy becomes faithful to its own egalitarian promise. MAGA names the opposite possibility: democracy emptied of equality and filled with resentment. Between these two possibilities lies the philosophical problem of politics today.

What interests me in Badiou is the way he reopens the relation between philosophy and politics through the question of political truth. For him, politics is not simply a matter of government, elections, representation, or the circulation of public opinion. Politics becomes philosophically significant only when it touches upon truth. This is why he can say that “if there exists something like a political truth, this truth is an obligation for any rational spirit” (Badiou, p. 19). Political truth, in this sense, is not the correctness of a policy or the legitimacy of a regime. It is the appearance of something universal within a concrete political situation.

This distinction becomes especially important today, when political passions often present themselves as truth while remaining trapped within opinion, resentment, and identity. MAGA is a useful example here again. It is not simply a party slogan or an electoral brand. It is a political affect, a mode of collective identification, and a fantasy of restoration. It mobilises people by claiming that something has been lost and must be recovered: greatness, sovereignty, national purity, masculine authority, economic security, or cultural dominance. In this sense, MAGA undoubtedly shows that politics cannot be reduced to rational administration. It demonstrates the force of belief, attachment, and collective mobilisation. Yet precisely for this reason, it also shows why philosophy must ask whether a political mobilisation produces truth or merely organises opinion around a myth of lost unity.

Badiou’s point is not that every mass movement is therefore a truth procedure. On the contrary, he gives us criteria for distinguishing political truth from reactive mobilisation. A politics worthy of philosophy must be universal, egalitarian, and emancipatory. It must be capable of addressing anyone, not only those who belong to a nation, race, religion, class fraction, or wounded identity. MAGA, by contrast, tends to turn universality into exclusion. Its “people” is not humanity in its egalitarian capacity, but a particular people imagined as dispossessed, humiliated, and entitled to restoration. It therefore converts the language of collective emancipation into the language of national revenge. From Badiou’s standpoint, this is not political truth but the capture of political energy by a particularistic fantasy.

This is also why Badiou insists on the paradoxical relation between democracy and philosophy. Democracy is necessary for philosophy because it creates a space where anyone may speak, question, and intervene. As he puts it, “philosophy assumes that the search for truth is open to all” (p. 20). There is no sacred origin of philosophical speech: no king, priest, prophet, or god guarantees it. “The philosopher can be anyone” (p. 20). I find this formulation important because it returns philosophy to its democratic condition. Philosophy begins from the possibility that thought is not the private possession of a particular class, institution, or authority.

Yet this democratic condition immediately produces a difficulty. If philosophy is open to anyone, it does not follow that every opinion has the same value. Badiou is very clear on this point: “The axiom of the equality of intelligences is far from constituting an axiom of the equality of opinions” (p. 21). This sentence is crucial for thinking about MAGA. Liberal democracy allows MAGA to appear as one opinion among others within the marketplace of political expression. But philosophy cannot stop there. It must ask whether this opinion participates in a truth or whether it merely amplifies resentment, conspiracy, nostalgia, and the demand for domination. The equality of intelligences means that anyone can think; it does not mean that every political passion is equally true.

In this sense, philosophy is born from democracy, but it is never fully at home in democracy. Badiou formulates this beautifully when he writes: “Democracy, one might say, is a necessity at the source of philosophy and a difficulty at its far end” (p. 19). The Athenian agora made philosophy possible by providing Socrates with a public space to speak, question, and disturb the young. Yet this same philosophical speech also threatened the democratic city, because Socrates did not merely offer another opinion. He questioned opinion itself. Philosophy, therefore, emerges from the democratic space of free speech, but it also introduces into that space the demand for truth.

MAGA clarifies this paradox in a contemporary form. It thrives within democratic procedures, yet its democratic appearance does not by itself make it emancipatory. A movement can use democratic forms while directing political desire toward hierarchy, exclusion, and authoritarian restoration. This is exactly the point at which philosophy must intervene. It must not merely defend the formal right of expression; it must examine the truth-content of what is expressed. The question is not simply whether MAGA has the right to speak, but what kind of political subject it produces, what form of universality it denies, and what conception of equality it destroys.

Here, Hannah Arendt might remind the philosopher that they, too, are only a citizen among citizens, a speaker among other speakers, someone who participates in public opinion rather than someone who stands above it. I understand the force of this warning. It protects politics from being subordinated to the philosopher’s claim to possess truth. A similar argument can be found in François Laruelle’s critique of Badiou. But Badiou’s point is different. He does not want philosophy to dominate politics. Rather, he wants to show that politics itself can become a site of truth when it breaks with the ordinary logic of interests, representation, and state administration.

For this reason, Badiou redefines the relation between freedom and equality. Liberal democracy often understands itself in terms of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, freedom of choice, freedom of representation. But Badiou asks whether this freedom has any political value if it is not oriented toward equality. For him, justice names precisely this orientation: “Justice means examining any situation from the point of view of an egalitarian norm vindicated as universal” (p. 64). Equality is therefore not simply one democratic value among others. It is the content that can transform formal freedom into a political truth.

MAGA shows what happens when freedom is detached from equality. It claims freedom from the state, elites, political correctness, globalism, and liberal institutions. But this freedom is often articulated as the freedom of some to recover power over others. It is not freedom as egalitarian participation in a common world, but freedom as restoration of hierarchy. A politics of freedom that refuses equality remains within the logic of privilege. It may be democratic in form, but it is anti-democratic in its consequences.

In this way, Badiou distinguishes between democracy as a form of state and democracy as a form of collective action. In the first sense, democracy is the parliamentary state, with elections, representatives, and constitutional government. In the second sense, democracy is active popular intervention: assemblies, demonstrations, occupations, insurrections, and collective experiments. Democracy in the first sense does not necessarily produce justice. Democracy in the second sense can become one of the means through which political truth is discovered. This is why Badiou writes that “democracy is not the political truth itself, but one of the means for finding the political truth” (p. 27).

The most important formulation comes when Badiou says: “We cannot pass in any self-evident way from philosophy to democracy, and yet democracy is a condition of philosophy” (p. 27). I take this sentence as the central paradox of his argument. Philosophy cannot simply identify truth with democratic opinion, electoral legitimacy, or majority consensus. Yet philosophy cannot do without democracy, because democracy names the opening in which anyone can think and speak. Philosophy depends on this egalitarian opening, even when it refuses to reduce truth to the plurality of opinions.

This is the point at which Badiou introduces communism, not as a state programme or nostalgic reference to the twentieth century, but as a hypothesis concerning the unity of thought and emancipation. He calls communism “the subjective existence of the unity” of the formal and real meanings of democracy (p. 28). In other words, communism names the space in which an actual emancipatory politics sustains the philosophical equality of intelligences. It is the place where the democratic condition of philosophy is no longer merely formal, but becomes materially and politically real.

This is what I find most compelling in Badiou’s argument. The communist hypothesis is not a doctrine to be imposed. It is a truth to be verified. It must be demonstrated in practice: in the streets, in movements, in classrooms, in writing, in institutions, in artistic work, and in everyday forms of collective life. Equality is not simply declared; it is enacted. One acts as if equality were true, and through that action, one attempts to make its truth appear.

This also explains Badiou’s striking formula: “If all are together, then all are communists! And if all are communists, then all are philosophers!” (p. 29). I do not read this as a slogan in the ordinary sense. I read it as the most condensed expression of his philosophical politics. If politics creates a collective space in which equality is practised, then philosophy is no longer the privilege of a few. It becomes the name of a shared capacity for thought.

From this perspective, MAGA appears as the negative example of Badiou’s hypothesis. It shows the power of collective mobilisation, but it does not universalise equality. It produces a people, but not a people open to anyone. It invokes freedom, but not freedom grounded in justice. It creates political passion, but not political truth. For this reason, it helps us understand why Badiou refuses to identify democracy with opinion, elections, or representation. Philosophy must remain attentive to politics, but it must also ask whether politics is capable of producing a universal truth or whether it merely organises the passions of a wounded identity.

For me, this is the final destination of philosophy’s long odyssey after its birth alongside democracy. Philosophy has repeatedly fled from and returned to the city. It has appeared in the form of practical philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of state governance. It has tried to advise rulers, educate citizens, criticise democracy, and defend it. Yet it has never fully reconciled itself with politics and democracy, because the tension between truth and opinion, universality and plurality, equality and freedom has never disappeared.

Philosophy must accept democracy as the condition of its appearance, but it must also insist that democracy becomes politically meaningful only when freedom is oriented toward equality. The communist hypothesis names this unresolved passage. It is the attempt to demonstrate, in the scattered spaces of action, that equality is not simply a value to be proclaimed, but a truth to be practised. MAGA, as a reactive politics of restoration, makes the urgency of this distinction clear: not every politics that mobilises the people produces a truth, and not every democratic form deserves the name of emancipation.

References

Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso, 2011.

Woods, A. J. A. The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. London: Verso, 2026.

After writing my review of Gabriel Rockhill’s book, I received a great deal of correspondence and engaged in some fruitful discussions. These exchanges brought Evald Ilyenkov back to mind, a thinker whom I had studied only briefly before. Returning to him made me realise that the question raised by Rockhill’s critique of Western Marxism cannot be settled simply by exposing the institutional conditions under which certain theories circulated during the Cold War. It is for this reason that I have written this piece: as a follow-up to my review, but also as an attempt to think more carefully about the fate of Marxist philosophy across the division between East and West.

The enthusiasm and criticism that Rockhill’s argument has generated among sectors of the so-called “Western Left” have made me increasingly uneasy about the conventional map of Marxist thought. According to that map, Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism are usually positioned in moralised opposition. For some, Western Marxism appears as a betrayal of Soviet Marxism: a retreat from revolutionary politics into academic theory, cultural criticism, philosophical abstraction, and, in Rockhill’s terms, the institutions of the imperial theory industry. For others, the opposite is true: Soviet Marxism appears as the betrayal of Marxism itself, a reduction of revolutionary thought to dogma, state ideology, bureaucratic orthodoxy, and philosophical repression. This division is too simple. It reproduces, within Marxist intellectual history itself, a familiar Cold War geography: the West thinks, the East repeats; the West produces theory, the Soviet Union produces orthodoxy.

In a sense, Rockhill is right to remind us that Western Marxism did not develop in an innocent space. His central claim is that “ideas are not separate from reality, hovering above it in a pristine realm of conceptual purity” and are produced within concrete circumstances and within the social organisation of intellectual production (Rockhill, p. 25). For this reason, he insists that the struggle over theory must be understood as part of class struggle itself. In his account, imperial war is inseparable from ideological warfare, and the intelligentsia, such as journalists, writers, artists, pundits, and professors, plays a crucial role in this struggle over hearts and minds (Rockhill, p. 33).

This is a necessary intervention. However, as I discussed in my previous review, Rockhill’s critique paradoxically reveals the ambivalence of Western Marxism. If, as he argues, ideological warfare is an essential component of imperialist war, and if the intelligentsia plays a decisive role in that warfare, then the reverse must also be considered. Could Western Marxism not, in fact, be understood as a strategic reorientation intended to counter the ideological manoeuvres of imperialism itself? The problem is that Rockhill proceeds to criticise Western Marxism only after having already made a priori judgements about “the role of the intelligentsia.” As a result, his critique not only loses a measure of objectivity; it also exposes the ideological presupposition that underlies his own position. What emerges here is a form of anti-intellectualism, one that shadows his argument even as he claims to unmask the ideological function of intellectuals.

Of course, we must distance ourselves from the naïve belief that theory circulates freely within a pure republic of letters. Ideas are never detached from their material conditions of production and circulation. Universities, foundations, publishing houses, journals, conferences, cultural diplomacy, intelligence agencies, and the professional intelligentsia all form part of the apparatus through which theory is produced, authorised, legitimised, and disseminated. To recognise this is not to reduce theory to conspiracy, nor to deny the autonomy of thought. Rather, it is to insist that intellectual production is always embedded in institutions, funding structures, geopolitical pressures, and class relations.

Rockhill’s critique of Perry Anderson deserves attention here. Anderson famously described Western Marxism as a “product of defeat,” arising from the failure of socialist revolution to move westward after 1917. For Anderson, the displacement of Marxism from revolutionary parties and mass organisations into universities and philosophical discourse marked a historical retreat: Marxism became increasingly abstract, speculative, and distant from political practice. Rockhill accepts that this captures something important but argues that Anderson does not go far enough (Rockhill, p. 177). What remains underdeveloped in Anderson’s account is the broader apparatus through which Western Marxism was institutionalised, circulated, and rendered legitimate within the cultural and academic spaces of the capitalist West.

In this sense, the question is not simply why Marxism became philosophical after defeat, but how certain forms of Marxism came to be promoted, translated, funded, taught, and canonised, while others were marginalised or dismissed. Drawing on Losurdo, Rockhill asks how certain Marxists came to be represented as acceptable within Western academia, while other traditions were excluded as dogmatic, vulgar, or merely ideological. The crucial question, then, is what role Cold War cultural politics played in producing and stabilising these distinctions (Rockhill, p. 178). Viewed from a non-Western context, particularly that of Asia, Rockhill’s intervention raises several important questions, for it is undeniable that Western Marxism was introduced into many Asian intellectual contexts not only as a political theory, but also as a form of cultural enrichment, or Bildung. Even today, it is often consumed in this manner: as a sign of theoretical sophistication, cosmopolitan education, and intellectual distinction.

Yet I remain unconvinced that the political meaning of a theory can be fully determined by its institutional origin. To expose the apparatus that funded, promoted, or circulated a body of thought is not yet to exhaust what that thought became in different contexts. Theory travels. It mutates. It is mistranslated, appropriated, weaponised, and sometimes used against the very forces that helped to circulate it. This is where my disagreement with Rockhill begins. As I pointed out, his account risks becoming too production-centred if it assumes that the origin or sponsorship of a theory fixes its meaning once and for all. This is where Evald Ilyenkov becomes crucial. His presence disrupts the rigid distinction between Western Marxism and Soviet Marxism that some figures of the Western Left, including Rockhill, still presuppose. Ilyenkov shows that Soviet Marxism was never simply reducible to official doctrine, just as Western Marxism was never a homogeneous ideological formation.

David Bakhurst’s Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy allows us to challenge the assumption that Soviet philosophy was reducible to official Marxism-Leninism. His book shows that beneath the frozen language of orthodoxy there existed a serious and original tradition of critical Marxism. This tradition was concerned with Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, consciousness, language, labour, social practice, and the formation of the self. At the centre of Bakhurst’s account stands Ilyenkov, perhaps one of the most important “critical Marxists” in Soviet philosophical tradition (Bakhurst, p. 3). Against the familiar caricature of Soviet Marxism as “an ideology peddling a crude and dogmatic Marxism,” Bakhurst shows that critical Marxists in Moscow drew deeply on “the philosophy of Hegel and the German classical tradition.” For these thinkers, the recovery of a “genuine” Marxism within Soviet political culture was not a merely academic matter, but “an essential prerequisite of the rejuvenation of Soviet society” (Bakhurst, p. 3).

Ilyenkov’s work asks many of the questions we normally associate with Western Marxism: What is consciousness? How is the subject formed? How does social labour become embodied in things? How do objectified forms return to shape human beings? How can Marxism resist both positivism and idealism? These are not marginal questions. They are the very questions through which Western Marxism defined itself after the defeat of revolution in the West.

But Ilyenkov asked them from another historical position. He was not writing from the defeated West, but from inside the Soviet Union, where revolution had succeeded and then hardened into bureaucracy. This difference matters. Western Marxism often begins from the failure of revolution; Ilyenkov’s Marxism begins from the deformation of revolution. His question is not simply why the revolution failed to happen, but how a revolution that did happen could turn into dogma, administration, and ideological control.

This is why I think we can speak of an inner Western Marxism in Soviet philosophy. I do not mean that Soviet thinkers were secretly imitating Western Marxists. Rather, I mean that the philosophical problematic of Western Marxism, i.e., Hegel, alienation, consciousness, praxis, totality, the critique of positivism, was also present inside Soviet Marxism itself. It existed as a suppressed or marginalised current, struggling against Stalinist orthodoxy and crude scientific materialism.

The early Soviet debates between the Mechanists and the Deborinites are crucial here. The Mechanists tried to align Marxism closely with the natural sciences. They tended to see philosophy as a generalisation of scientific results. The Deborinites, by contrast, defended Hegelian dialectics and insisted that Marxism could not be reduced to empirical science. This debate was not just a local Soviet quarrel. It reiterated a fundamental tension within Marxism: is Marxism a science modelled on the natural sciences, or a dialectical theory of social totality, practice, and historical transformation?

This tension also runs through Western Marxism. Lukács and Korsch, for example, resisted the positivist reduction of Marxism and returned to Hegel to recover the active, historical, and practical dimensions of Marxist theory. In that sense, the Soviet debates of the 1920s belong to the same wider history. They show that the division between positivist Marxism and Hegelian Marxism was not simply a Western problem. It was internal to Marxism as such. Bakhurst himself suggests that the Mechanist-Deborinite controversy recalls the opposition, discussed by Sebastiano Timpanaro, between positivist and Hegelian tendencies within Western Marxism (Bakhurst, p. 56).

As I have discussed elsewhere, Yehoshua Yakhot’s The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR provides the tragic historical background to this story. Yakhot shows how the relatively open and intellectually vibrant philosophical debates of the 1920s were gradually closed down in the 1930s through Stalinisation. Philosophy became a “front,” a site of ideological struggle, and eventually a weapon of discipline. The defeat of both the Mechanists and the Deborinites was not simply the result of better arguments. It was produced through political intervention, denunciation, and the transformation of philosophy into an instrument of state power. The suspension of the debate between the two groups “signalled the beginning of the dictatorship on the ideological front,” which would become one of the defining features of the Stalin cult. (Yakhot, p. 83).

This point is essential for my critique of Rockhill. One can criticise the Cold War manipulation of Western Marxism without romanticising Soviet orthodoxy. The problem is not simply “West bad, Soviet good.” The more difficult problem is how Marxism, in both East and West, was captured by different apparatuses of power. In the West, Marxist theory could be absorbed into universities, foundations, cultural diplomacy, and anti-communist intellectual networks. In the Soviet Union, Marxism could be transformed into state doctrine, bureaucratic language, and a disciplinary ideology. These are different forms of capture, but both raise the same question: how can Marxist thought survive its own institutionalisation?

The problem, then, is not that Soviet Marxism naturally became dogmatic. The problem is that a living philosophical field was suppressed. Stalinism did not simply continue Marxism; it reorganised Marxism into an ideology of authority. This is precisely why Ilyenkov believed that the tensions between the Mechanists and the Deborinites should not be prematurely resolved. Instead, those tensions had to be worked through and systematised as the basis for a social theory of consciousness in its own right (Bakhurst, p. 56). In this sense, Stalinist ideology inverted material reality and obscured social relations in the very name of Marxism. For Yakhot, the history of Soviet philosophy is therefore also the history of a lost possibility (Yakhot, p. 197).

Ilyenkov belongs to this lost possibility. His work can be read as an attempt to recover Marxism after its Stalinist deformation. He returns to Hegel and Marx, but not to produce abstract speculation. He wants to understand how human beings become thinking, social, historical beings. His central concept, the ideal, is decisive for this project. For Ilyenkov, the ideal is not a private mental image. It is not simply something inside the head. Nor is it a spiritual substance existing beyond the material world. The ideal exists in socially produced material forms.

It is present in tools, language, money, artworks, institutions, customs, laws, and forms of education. A human object is never merely a physical thing. It is a crystallisation of social activity. A table is not only wood; money is not only paper or metal; a word is not only sound. These things carry social meanings because they embody collective human practice. Ilyenkov’s point is not to spiritualise matter, but to show how social activity becomes embodied in objective forms (Bakhurst, p. 202). Ilyenkov remains more directly attached to a materialist theory of social practice. He does not oppose the ideal to the material. He shows that the ideal is material when materiality is understood socially, historically, and practically.

This is where Ilyenkov’s thought comes into striking proximity with Western Marxism. Like Lukács, he is concerned with the objectification of human activity in social forms. Like Gramsci, he understands consciousness as something historically and collectively formed through education, culture, and social practice. And, like the Frankfurt School, he resists the reduction of reason to technical calculation, insisting instead on its embeddedness in forms of life, labour, and social mediation.

This also allows us to criticise a certain genealogical reductionism. Rockhill’s critique is strongest when it reveals the institutions, networks, and political interests that shaped the Cold War circulation of theory. He describes Western Marxism as better understood as “imperial Marxism,” produced through the dialectical relation between the objective forces of the imperial superstructure and the subjective agency of intellectuals (Rockhill, p. 178). Yet Ilyenkov’s history suggests that the so-called Western Marxist problematic was not merely a product of Western institutions. It was also alive inside Soviet philosophy as an internal struggle against Stalinist dogmatism and positivist reductionism.

This is why Ilyenkov’s critique of reductionism matters. Ilyenkov opposed theories that reduced consciousness to the brain, biology, cybernetics, or innate ability. He thought such theories were not only philosophically wrong but politically dangerous. If consciousness is simply a biological function, then education becomes a matter of identifying pre-given capacities. Some children are supposedly born for mathematics, others for music, others for manual labour. Such a view naturalises social division. It justifies hierarchy by presenting it as nature. Bakhurst discusses this as part of Ilyenkov’s broader polemic against reductionist accounts of mind and individuality (Bakhurst, p. 217-18).

Against this, Ilyenkov insists that the individual is socially constituted. Human beings become thinking subjects through language, labour, education, and participation in shared forms of life. This is a deeply Marxist claim. It is also a deeply anti-Stalinist claim because it refuses to treat people as fixed units to be administered by the state. The human being is not a machine, not a brain mechanism, not an object of bureaucratic classification. The human being is a historical and social possibility.

Ilyenkov’s philosophy is not only a theory of consciousness but also a theory of communist human formation. He wants to know what kind of society could produce fully developed individuals. This question goes back to Marx’s critique of the division of labour, but in Ilyenkov it acquires a specific Soviet urgency. A socialist society that reproduces specialisation, bureaucracy, and passive obedience has not overcome alienation. It has merely changed its form.

In this sense, Ilyenkov’s Marxism is both orthodox and radical. It is orthodox because it returns to Marx, Hegel, Lenin, and the classical problems of dialectical materialism. But it is radical because it uses this inheritance against Soviet orthodoxy itself. It shows that a genuinely Marxist philosophy cannot simply serve the state. It must criticise the forms of alienation that persist even under socialism.

Rockhill is also right that much Western Marxism became theory-centred, detached from organised progressive politics, and absorbed into the symbolic economy of the academic world. He describes this as a commodified version of anticommunist Marxism, a product of the imperial theory industry that often misdirects those searching for a guide to understanding and transforming the world (Rockhill, pp. 334–37). Ilyenkov’s work, however, disrupts the neat distinction presupposed by this critique. If the supposedly Western Marxist problematic, i.e., Hegel, alienation, praxis, consciousness, and the critique of positivism, also emerged inside Soviet philosophy, then these problems cannot be reduced to the imperial theory industry alone.

The phrase inner Western Marxism is therefore not merely descriptive. It is polemical. It asks us to revise the intellectual history of Marxism. We should no longer say that Western Marxism was philosophical while Soviet Marxism was dogmatic. Rather, we should distinguish between official Soviet ideology and critical Soviet Marxism. Ilyenkov belongs to the latter. So do the suppressed debates reconstructed by Yakhot. These traditions show that the Soviet experience contained its own philosophical struggle over alienation, consciousness, praxis, and freedom.

The difference between Western Marxism and this Soviet inner current is therefore not theoretical alone; it is historical. Western Marxism emerged from defeat in the West. Soviet critical Marxism emerged from betrayal in the East. Western Marxism asked why the proletariat had not become revolutionary. Soviet critical Marxism asked why a revolution carried out in the name of the proletariat had produced new forms of domination. These are different questions, but they belong to the same Marxist problematic.

For this reason, Ilyenkov should not be treated as a provincial Soviet thinker. He should be read alongside Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Lefebvre, and the Frankfurt School. But he should also be read against them. His work reminds us that the problem of Marxism was never only about capitalism. It was also the problem of Marxism’s own institutionalisation, its conversion into doctrine, its capture by the state, and its transformation into an ideology of mastery.

To speak of inner Western Marxism in Soviet philosophy is therefore to name a paradox: the questions of Western Marxism were never simply Western. They appeared wherever Marxism confronted the failure of its own promise. In the West, this failure appeared as defeat, commodification, and cultural integration. In the Soviet Union, it took the form of Stalinisation, bureaucracy, and the suppression of philosophical life.

Ilyenkov’s importance lies in his refusal to accept this closure. He reopened the question of Marxism from within the Soviet system itself. In his examination of the Mechanists and the Deborinites, Ilyenkov regarded this conflict as rooted in a tension already present in Marx’s own thought. He therefore interpreted the schism not simply as a dispute between rival schools, but as the manifestation of an internal contradiction within the Marxist tradition itself.

This is why I see Ilyenkov as a figure of inner Western Marxism: not Western by geography, but Western in the sense of belonging to that philosophical Marxism which refuses positivism, resists dogma, and insists on the unresolved question of human emancipation. Yet perhaps even this formulation remains too Western. What Ilyenkov ultimately teaches us is that Marxism’s most powerful philosophical questions were never the property of one region. They were internal to the global fate of revolution itself.

References

Bakhurst, David. 1991. Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rockhill, Gabriel. 2025. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry, Volume I. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Yakhot, Yehoshua. 2012. The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR: The 1920s and 1930s. Translated by Frederick S. Choate. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books.

This is an image currently being circulated by MAGA supporters in South Korea. What is happening to Starbucks in South Korea?

In South Korea, Starbucks has long functioned as a sign of the commodification of American liberal culture: urban, middle-class, cosmopolitan, and seemingly apolitical. It sells not only coffee but also a lifestyle associated with global mobility, individual choice, and liberal consumer modernity. Yet this image has recently undergone a striking ideological reversal. Paradoxically, Starbucks Korea has become entangled with the symbolism of the far right, even though the far right often defines itself through hostility to liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and the very cultural values that Starbucks appears to embody.

The controversy surrounding Starbucks Korea’s “Tank Day” campaign makes this contradiction especially visible. The campaign coincided with the anniversary of the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Uprising, a foundational event in South Korea’s struggle against military dictatorship. Its language and imagery were widely condemned as evoking the violence of the state against pro-democracy citizens, as well as the infamous rhetoric surrounding the torture and death of student activist Park Jong-chul in 1987. The backlash was immediate: Starbucks Korea apologised, the local CEO was dismissed, and public criticism extended beyond a simple marketing failure to questions of historical memory, democratic legitimacy, and corporate responsibility.

This incident therefore cannot be understood merely as an insensitive advertisement. It touched a traumatic nerve in modern Korean history. Gwangju is not simply one historical episode among others; it is the symbolic ground of South Korea’s democratic identity. To trivialise it, or to appear to mock its memory, is to intervene in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy itself. In this sense, the campaign became legible as part of a wider political atmosphere in which authoritarian nostalgia, anti-communism, and hostility toward liberal-democratic memory are being reactivated.

The connection to Chung Yong-jin gives this controversy a broader geopolitical significance. Chung is the chairman of Shinsegae Group, which operates Starbucks in South Korea through E-Mart, and he has been publicly associated with Rockbridge Network Asia. Rockbridge Network itself is an American conservative political advocacy group co-founded by J.D. Vance and Christopher Buskirk, and it has been described as closely aligned with the Trumpist political ecosystem. Reports have also linked its Asian expansion to South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, with Chung playing a leading regional role.

For this reason, critics see the Starbucks Korea incident not as an isolated corporate error, but as a symptom of a deeper ideological realignment. Even if one cannot simply prove that the campaign was directly orchestrated by Chung himself, the controversy unfolded within a corporate and political environment already marked by his proximity to MAGA-aligned networks. The point, therefore, is not only one of individual intention, but of political structure: how American far-right networks, corporate capital, and East Asian anti-communist sentiment are beginning to converge.

This convergence is dangerous because it transforms consumer culture into a vehicle of ideological normalisation. Starbucks, once a banal emblem of American liberal capitalism, becomes a site where far-right affect can circulate under the cover of branding, lifestyle, and marketing. The contradiction is revealing: MAGA politics attacks liberalism at the level of discourse, yet it operates perfectly well through the infrastructures of global capitalism. It does not reject commodification; it weaponises it.

Against this backdrop, the Starbucks Korea controversy should be read as part of the growing intervention of MAGA-style politics in East Asia. Its influence does not simply reproduce American domestic politics abroad; rather, it attaches itself to local historical wounds, especially anti-communism, Cold War memory, territorial disputes, and hostility toward democratic movements. In South Korea, this means reopening the symbolic battlefield around Gwangju. In Taiwan and Japan, it may take other forms, especially through militarised anti-China discourse and the reorganisation of conservative business-political networks.

The danger is that East Asia, which has maintained a fragile but relatively stable geopolitical balance, could be drawn into a new architecture of confrontation. If MAGA forces succeed in linking Korean anti-communism, Japanese remilitarisation, Taiwanese security anxiety, and American strategic rivalry with China, the region may be pushed toward permanent crisis. In this sense, the Starbucks Korea incident is not only a scandal about a tasteless campaign. It is a small but telling sign of a larger transformation: the entry of American far-right political capital into the ideological and geopolitical terrain of East Asia, with the potential to destabilise the region and turn it into a second Middle East.

What interests me most in Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe is not simply his critique of Europe, but the difficulty of escaping Europe even when one declares the need to think after it. Hui’s book is important because it refuses two easy positions: the defence of Europe as the privileged bearer of universal civilisation, and the anti-European return to cultural essence or tradition. His central claim is that thinking today must begin from Heimatlosigkeit, or homelessness, rather than from the nostalgic desire to recover Heimat. I find this argument powerful because it speaks directly to our present condition: we can no longer return home, yet we also cannot live without some sense of locality, orientation, and belonging.

Hui defines the task as one of “post-European thinking,” neither through the neutralisation of differences nor through a return to tradition, but through an “individuation of thinking between East and West.” I am sympathetic to this ambition. At the same time, I think the book’s strength also reveals its limits. The question for me is whether Hui’s attempt to move beyond Europe remains caught within the conceptual structures it seeks to overcome.

My first hesitation concerns Hui’s reliance on Heidegger. Hui draws on Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, technology, and uprootedness to develop the concept of Heimatlosigkeit. His originality lies in transforming this concept. Instead of following Heidegger’s desire for a return to Heimat, Hui asks us to think from homelessness itself. This is an important displacement. Yet I still wonder whether genuinely post-European thinking can begin so decisively from Heidegger.

Heidegger is not merely one European thinker among others. He provides much of the vocabulary of home, destiny, rootedness, world-historical decline, and technological danger that Hui wants to rethink. Even when Hui reverses Heidegger’s nostalgia, he still accepts Heidegger’s framing of modernity as a crisis of homelessness. In this sense, Post-Europe may not fully escape Europe. It may repeat Europe at the level of the question itself. Europe remains the wound, the point of departure, and the philosophical horizon from which the problem is posed.

For me, Hui’s most provocative move is to turn homelessness into a standpoint. Rather than treating Heimatlosigkeit only as loss, he presents it as an opening: a way to rethink locality, world history, and planetarity without returning to nationalism or cultural purity. I find this persuasive, but also politically ambiguous. Homelessness is not experienced equally. The homelessness of the refugee, the migrant worker, the colonised subject, the academic intellectual, the digital nomad, and the cosmopolitan philosopher are not the same.

This is where I think Hui’s argument risks becoming too elegant. Heimatlosigkeit can become a philosophical metaphor before it becomes a material condition. In the contemporary world, homelessness is produced by border regimes, war, housing speculation, debt, ecological destruction, racial capitalism, and state violence. Hui does mention the housing crisis, war, technological acceleration, AI, and ecological-economic catastrophe. But I would like to see a stronger account of the specific structures of power that cause people to become homeless. The political question should be: who is made homeless, by whom, and through what institutions?

This question becomes sharper when we compare Hui’s project with the Japanese wartime discourse of “overcoming modernity.” That debate also criticised Western modernity, rationalism, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, and cultural fragmentation. Yet, as the history of the Kyoto School and the 1942 symposium shows, the critique of Western modernity became entangled with Japanese nationalism and imperial ideology (Calichman, pp. vii–xvi, 1–40; Stevens, pp. 229–30). The desire to overcome Europe could become the justification for a new imperial mission (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

Hui is clearly aware of this danger. He does not propose Asia as Europe’s successor, nor does he replace European universalism with an East Asian counter-universalism. This is one of Post-Europe’s strengths. Still, once one begins to speak of Europe, Asia, East, West, tradition, and locality, one is already moving within a field of civilisational categories. Hui wants to pluralise these categories through individuation, but he does not always show how such individuation avoids being reabsorbed into cultural essentialism.

This does not mean that Hui repeats the Kyoto School’s politics. But the historical lesson is severe: a critique of European modernity is never politically innocent. It can open a path toward pluralisation, but it can also become the language of reaction, civilisational resentment, or authoritarian cultural politics.

This is why I remain uneasy about the East-West frame. Hui does not want a universal philosophy that subsumes all traditions into a single European model. Nor does he want a simple return to tradition. Yet his formulation still depends on the East-West binary. Even when Hui complicates the binary, it remains the main stage on which the drama of post-European thinking unfolds. Europe is provincialised, but Asia is still summoned as Europe’s privileged interlocutor.

For me, the problem is that neither Europe nor Asia exists as a stable civilisational substance. Europe is not simply the origin of reason, universality, or technology. Asia is not simply the bearer of relationality, spirituality, locality, or alternative cosmotechnics. Both Europe and Asia are modern historical constructions, produced through colonialism, capitalism, translation, war, nationalism, migration, and global comparison. Hui himself cites Françoise Dastur’s warning that discourses on Europe are ideological constructs bound to colonial conceptions of the world. But this insight must also be applied to Asia.

For this reason, the modern Asian discourse of “the people” is crucial. I want to treat both “Asia” and “the people” as political inventions rather than natural realities. Liang Qichao’s “new citizen,” Okakura Kakuzō’s “Asia is one,” Tagore’s ethical universalism, and Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” all show that Asia was not simply discovered. It had to be imagined, narrated, and politically fabricated. The old civilisational order is replaced by a global map of nation-states, forcing China to imagine itself as a nation among nations and to refashion its population into a modern citizenry (Tang, pp. 9, 23). Liang’s “new citizenry” required a new collective consciousness and a rhetoric of national crisis through which the people could become the foundation of a modern state (Tang, p. 194).

In this sense, Asia is a strategic abstraction. It gathers immense differences, such as languages, religions, classes, regions, histories, and political struggles, into a single image. This image can be emancipatory when it resists Western imperial domination, but it can also become dangerous. Okakura’s claim that “Asia is one” turns Asia into a spiritual and aesthetic unity, a “united living organism” and “Great Mother” bearing a civilisational destiny (Okakura, The Ideals of the East, p. 9). His Book of Tea even identifies Teaism with the “true spirit of Eastern democracy,” displacing democracy from institutional politics to taste, sensibility, and everyday cultivation (Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 4). This produces an Asia that appears morally and aesthetically unified, but it also risks erasing internal divisions of class, caste, gender, empire, and nation.

The history of Pan-Asianism clearly shows this ambiguity. What begins as anti-imperial solidarity can become civilisational nationalism; what begins as a critique of Western domination can become a justification for Japanese imperial expansion. The debate on “overcoming modernity” demonstrates precisely this danger. Bernard Stevens describes the 1942 symposium as a project that aimed to surmount modern Western civilisation, but one whose ideological consequences were disastrous in the context of the Japanese imperial regime during the Fifteen Year War (Stevens, pp. 229–30). His crucial point is that the Kyoto School’s philosophical and humanistic message must be separated from its political misadventures, especially because the critique of modernity could be redirected toward neo-fascist or ultranationalist ends (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

The Kyoto School is important here because it offers both a resource and a warning. Its thinkers did not merely import Western philosophy. They transformed it through Buddhist and Japanese concepts such as nothingness, emptiness, place, self, world, and historical existence. The Kyoto School was constituted by a rigorous commitment to East-West dialogue rather than by a dogmatic creed (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 1–2). They also stress that its thought is inherently dialogical, moving between Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 2–4).

But this political ambiguity also shows that philosophical dialogue between East and West can be absorbed into nationalist or statist projects. Hui is aware of this danger. In his discussion of Nishitani, he shows how the experience of Heimat, even something as bodily and intimate as the taste of Japanese rice, can mediate the relation between body, land, and homeland. Yet this experience also leads toward the problematic history of “overcoming modernity,” in which European modernity is seen as a fragmenting force and East Asian thought appears as a possible alternative to European decadence.

This is where I would push Hui’s argument further. The task is not simply to think “post-Europe.” Nor is it enough to individuate thought between East and West. We must also ask how the very opposition between Europe and Asia was produced, and how it continues to shape our imagination. Asia is not outside Europe. It is one of the effects of European planetarisation, but also one of the sites where that planetarisation is resisted and transformed. Europe and Asia are not two separate worlds that later encounter one another. They are co-constituted within planetary modernity.

For this reason, the subject of post-European thinking cannot simply be “Asia.” Nor can it be “Europe after Europe.” What is needed is the invention of a new people. These people would not be defined by ethnicity, nation, civilisation, or homeland. It would be a political collectivity formed through shared struggles over technology, ecology, migration, labour, memory, and planetary inequality.

Here, Étienne Balibar’s concept of fictive ethnicity becomes useful. The people are never given; they are fabricated through narratives of origin, continuity, and belonging. In Balibar’s terms, populations are retrospectively represented as if they possessed a common origin, culture, and destiny that transcends their actual divisions (Balibar and Wallerstein, pp. 102–3). My point is that “the people of Asia” should be understood in this way too. They are not discovered in history. They are called into being as the possible subject of a world still to be made.

This is why I find Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” more useful than a simple opposition between Europe and Asia. Takeuchi does not treat Asia as a fixed identity. Asia is a method, a critical standpoint from which Europe’s incomplete universalism can be transformed. He argues that European equality was never universal, since Europe’s history of colonial exploitation in Asia and Africa shows that its own values remained restricted and incomplete. The task of Asia, then, is not to imitate the West, but to “re-embrace” and transform it so that its universal values may be realised on a greater scale (Takeuchi, p. 165).

But I would also push Takeuchi further: if Asia is a method, then it must also be a method for overcoming “Asia” itself. Asia should not become the final name of the new subject. It should function as a transitional and critical device, a means of forcing universality beyond Europe without reducing Asia to a new essence. Hui’s Post-Europe opens the question of thinking beyond European universality, but it does not fully dismantle the Europe-Asia frame within which the question is still posed.

A genuinely planetary philosophy cannot remain confined to an East-West dialogue. It must also think with Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Indigenous worlds, archipelagic worlds, diasporic worlds, and the internal colonies of both Europe and Asia. Otherwise, planetarity risks becoming a conversation between Europe and East Asia rather than a real transformation of the philosophical map.

One of Hui’s strongest insights is that technology is not culturally neutral. Technologies carry forms of world-making, models of individuation, modes of production, and assumptions about human beings, nature, and social order. I agree with this. But I also think his critique of technological universalism remains underdeveloped at the institutional and practical levels. What would it mean to organise AI, logistics, agriculture, urban planning, or digital infrastructure according to the principle of post-European individuation? What legal, economic, ecological, and pedagogical forms would make technodiversity possible?

Without such mediation, technodiversity risks remaining a philosophical ideal rather than becoming a political-economic project. Technology today is not simply an abstract planetary force. It is owned, financed, patented, militarised, standardised, platformised, and governed. A critique of technological planetarisation must therefore also be a critique of corporations, states, infrastructures, standards, supply chains, and military systems.

This points to another concern. Hui sometimes gives philosophy a privileged role in responding to planetarisation. The task is presented as a reorientation of thinking, a transformation of standpoint, an individuation of thought. I value this, but I also think it may overestimate philosophy’s autonomy. The history of “overcoming modernity” shows that philosophy does not stand outside political forces. Philosophical concepts can be appropriated by the state, empire, nationalism, cultural institutions, and technological power.

For this reason, post-European philosophy must ask not only, “How should we think?” but also, “What protects thinking from becoming ideology?” Hui criticises the “state thinker,” but I think the book could go further in explaining how thought can remain politically effective without becoming attached to state power, civilisational mission, or cultural identity.

The unresolved question, for me, is universality. Hui rejects European universalism, but he also rejects simple relativism. His answer is individuation: different traditions must develop their own modes of thought in relation to one another. This is promising, but from a Simondonian perspective, it also raises a problem. Individuation, for Simondon, does not begin from already constituted individuals, cultures, or traditions. It begins from a preindividual field of tensions, potentials, and unresolved problems. An individual is not a fixed unit that later enters into relation; it is the temporary result of a process of becoming. Relation is not secondary to identity. The relation is constitutive of individuation itself.

This creates a difficulty for Hui’s formulation. If “Europe” and “Asia” are treated as already individuated traditions that must then enter into dialogue, the concept of individuation risks being culturalised. It becomes a way of pluralising civilisational identities rather than transforming the field from which such identities emerge. A Simondonian critique would therefore ask whether Hui’s “individuation of thinking between East and West” still presupposes East and West as relatively stable poles. If so, individuation is being used to mediate between inherited categories rather than to undo their very conditions of formation.

This also changes the question of universality. Planetary problems such as climate change, AI governance, war, migration, and ecological collapse cannot be solved by locality alone. But the answer is not simply to restore universality at a higher level, even in a non-imperial form. From Simondon’s perspective, universality should not be understood as a norm imposed from above, nor as a consensus among pre-existing traditions. It should be understood as a transindividual process: a collective individuation that emerges through shared problems, technical mediations, and common transformations.

In this sense, the planetary is not a universal framework into which localities must be inserted. It is a metastable field in which localities, technologies, institutions, bodies, and environments are co-individuated. Climate change, for example, is not merely a global problem requiring universal norms; it is a problematic field that forces new forms of collective and technical individuation. The same is true of AI, migration, and ecological collapse. These problems do not simply demand agreement between local traditions. They require the invention of new transindividual forms of life.

This is where Hui’s appeal to locality and technodiversity remains underdeveloped. If technologies are embedded in cosmological and cultural worlds, as Hui argues, then the task is not only to defend different technological traditions against Western technological universalism. The deeper task is to ask how new associated milieus can be formed: how technical systems, social institutions, ecological conditions, and collective subjects can be reorganised together. Simondon’s concept of the associated milieu is useful here because it shows that technology is never merely an instrument of a culture. A technical object individuates together with its milieu. It transforms the conditions in which it operates, just as it depends on those conditions for its functioning.

A Simondonian critique would therefore say that Hui’s post-European thinking still risks remaining too cultural-philosophical. It speaks of traditions, localities, and cosmotechnics, but it does not fully explain how new transindividual collectivities and associated milieus are produced. The problem of universality after Europe cannot be solved by multiplying local cosmotechnics alone. It requires an account of how shared planetary problems generate new processes of collective individuation.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between European universalism and plural localities. Nor is it enough to call for an individuation of thought between East and West. The more radical Simondonian question is: what new transindividual subject can emerge from the metastable tensions of the planetary condition? Universality would then no longer mean the expansion of one civilisation’s values, nor the abstract agreement of many cultures. It would name the open-ended process through which new people, new technical milieus, and new forms of collective life are individuated in response to planetary problems. The challenge, then, is to think a non-imperial universality: a universality that does not erase difference, but also does not abandon the possibility of common struggle. Hui gestures toward this, but I do not think the concept is fully developed.

For these reasons, I read Post-Europe as an important beginning rather than a final answer. Its strength is that it opens the question of thinking after Europe. Its limitation is that it does not fully ask how “Asia” itself must also be overcome as Europe’s mirror image. A truly post-European thinking must also become post-Asian in this specific sense: not by abandoning Asia, but by refusing to let Asia remain trapped as Europe’s other.

To sum up, Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe offers a powerful critique of European universalism and the reactionary desire to return home. But the project remains partly bound to the civilisational opposition between Europe and Asia. Since both Europe and Asia are historical constructions produced within planetary modernity, Asia cannot simply serve as the alternative to Europe. The task is not to replace Europe with Asia, nor even to pluralise Europe through Asia, but to dismantle the Europe-Asia dichotomy itself. What must be invented is a new people capable of carrying a non-imperial universality beyond both European universalism and Asian essentialism.

References

Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991.

Calichman, Richard F., ed. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Davis, Bret W., Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, eds. Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Hui, Yuk. Post-Europe. Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2024.

Liang, Qichao. Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World. Translated by Peter Zarrow. London: Penguin, 2024.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan. New York: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.

Saaler, Sven, and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, eds. Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.

Stevens, Bernard. “Overcoming Modernity: A Critical Response to the Kyoto School.” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, edited by Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, 229–246. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Takeuchi, Yoshimi. What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Translated and edited by Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Tang, Xiaobing. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Back in the 1980s, when I was involved in the Korean student movement, a rumour circulated among activists that “the Frankfurt School and the postmodernism it influenced were reactionary ideologies funded by the US CIA.” It was never clear where this rumour originated, nor whether those who repeated it had access to any concrete evidence. It functioned less as an archival claim than as a political slogan, a shorthand for distinguishing revolutionary theory from what was perceived as compromised, bourgeois, or revisionist thought. Yet the rumour was not without historical meaning. It emerged within a very specific conjuncture: the Soviet Union still existed, the Cold War remained the dominant geopolitical horizon, and Korean student activists were intensely engaged in theoretical debates over the socialist models of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Within that atmosphere, the category of “Western Marxism” was often treated with suspicion. The Frankfurt School, existential Marxism, structural Marxism, and later postmodernism were frequently measured against more orthodox revolutionary traditions. For many activists, theory had to prove its practical relevance to anti-dictatorship struggle, anti-imperialism, national liberation, reunification, and socialist transformation. Anything that appeared too philosophical, too cultural, too pessimistic, or too detached from revolutionary organisation could easily be dismissed as “revisionism”. The Frankfurt School, with its critique of instrumental reason, culture industry, authoritarianism, and damaged subjectivity, seemed to some activists insufficiently militant, insufficiently proletarian, and too distant from the urgent political questions of the Korean peninsula.

I did not entirely subscribe to such rumours, but I understood the conditions under which they circulated. South Korea in the 1980s was not a neutral intellectual space. It was shaped by military dictatorship, anti-communist state violence, censorship, the memory of the Gwangju Uprising, and the unresolved division of the peninsula. The student movement sought theoretical weapons adequate to this situation. In that context, the accusation that Western Marxism was a CIA-sponsored ideology served a political function: it policed the boundaries of acceptable radicalism and defended a more orthodox, militant Marxism against what was perceived as theoretical deviation.

However, the collapse of the socialist bloc radically altered this intellectual landscape. After 1989 and 1991, the authority of Soviet-style Marxism declined sharply, and the theoretical certainties of the 1980s lost much of their persuasive force. In South Korea during the 1990s, this crisis opened the way for a remarkable renaissance of Western Marxism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural studies, and postcolonial thought. The very bodies of theory that had once been dismissed as revisionist or reactionary returned as resources for rethinking capitalism, subjectivity, ideology, desire, culture, and democracy after the exhaustion of the old revolutionary models.

It was against this personal and historical background that I read Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? His argument struck me with the force of déjà vu. It seemed to revive, in a much more archival and sophisticated form, the rumours I had heard in the Korean student movement of the 1980s. Of course, Rockhill’s work is not simply a repetition of those rumours. He provides documentation, reconstructs institutional networks, and situates Western Marxism within the political economy of the Cold War intellectual apparatus. Nevertheless, the affective structure of the argument felt familiar: Western Marxism appears once again as a compromised formation, a domesticated critique, a theoretical deviation whose radical appearance conceals its compatibility with imperial power.

This recognition is important for my critique of Rockhill. My objection is not that he is entirely wrong. On the contrary, the history of CIA cultural operations, foundation funding, and Cold War intellectual management must be taken seriously. The problem is that Rockhill’s argument risks returning us to a position that many non-Western intellectuals had to work through and eventually move beyond: the assumption that the institutional contamination of a theory determines its entire political meaning. The Korean experience suggests otherwise. Theories dismissed in the 1980s as revisionist or CIA-compatible later became, in the 1990s and after, important resources for critically analysing neoliberalisation, authoritarian residues, cultural commodification, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and the failures of both liberal democracy and orthodox socialism.

In this sense, Rockhill’s book recalled for me not only the Cold War history of Western Marxism but also its non-Western reception. What returns in his argument is not merely an archival truth, but also an old structure of suspicion. The task, therefore, is not to reject his critique, but to complicate it. The Korean case shows that even if a body of theory is institutionally entangled with imperial networks, its reception outside the West may exceed those conditions. A theory may be promoted for one purpose and used for another; it may be introduced as anti-communist ideology and later become a resource for radical critique. The afterlife of theory cannot be deduced solely from the conditions of its production.

Thus, my encounter with Rockhill’s book was also an encounter with my own intellectual past. It brought back the atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s, when the boundaries between Marxism, revisionism, anti-imperialism, and Western theory were fiercely contested. But it also reminded me why the non-Western reception of critical theory must be analysed in its own right. The question is not only who funded or promoted Western Marxism, but how it was read, mistranslated, appropriated, rejected, revived, and transformed in places such as Asia. That is where Rockhill’s argument, despite its importance, remains incomplete.

I shall present the Korean and Thai cases in order to construct a counter-argument to Rockhill’s view of Western Marxism. As Rockhill emphasises, the history of the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, philanthropic foundations, university networks, and Cold War cultural policy clearly shows that theory was never immune from imperial management. However, the Korean and Thai cases allow us to ask a different question: what happens to Marxism when it is received, translated, commodified, and politically refunctioned outside the Western core?

To develop this counter-argument, Kasian Tejapira’s Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1958 will serve as my primary reference. Tejapira’s book is especially useful because it does not treat Marxism as a pure doctrine transmitted from Europe to Asia, nor as a foreign ideology simply imposed upon Thai society. Instead, it analyses Marxism as a set of cultural artefacts, translations, printed commodities, political signs, and contested practices that became entangled with Thai nationalism, anti-communism, Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant networks, print capitalism, student radicalism, and state repression.

This review will therefore take the form of a comparative analysis of Rockhill’s and Tejapira’s books. Rockhill focuses on the production of Western Marxism within the imperial intellectual apparatus. Tejapira, by contrast, foregrounds the reception and transformation of Marxism within a non-Western political field. The comparison between Rockhill and Tejapira will enable me to develop a broader argument about Marxism’s afterlife in Asia: theory may be produced within imperial structures, but its reception can exceed, displace, and even invert the purposes for which it was circulated.

Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a necessary materialist correction to idealist histories of critical theory. Against the tendency to treat theory as the autonomous work of great minds, Rockhill insists that ideas are produced, circulated, financed and institutionalised within concrete structures of power. His claim that ‘psychological warfare’ combined with militant actions is ‘the one-two punch of empire’ (Rockhill, 2025, p. 15) establishes the central premise of his book: theory is never innocent, and the struggle over ideas must be understood as part of political, economic and military strategy.

Rockhill’s title and method clearly echo Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper?, published in the United States as The Cultural Cold War. Saunders argues that the CIA secretly managed a cultural propaganda programme through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose mission was to move Western European intellectuals away from Marxism and communism towards ‘the American way’ (Saunders, 2000, p. 1). Saunders’s central claim is very close to Rockhill’s starting point, and Rockhill explicitly acknowledges Saunders’s importance, stating that her work demonstrated the role of ruling-class foundations and intelligence services in funding anti-communist culture and the ‘compatible left’ (Rockhill, 2025, p. 62).

However, Rockhill’s argument is broader and more polemical than Saunders’s. Saunders mainly reconstructs the Cultural Cold War: CIA patronage, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter, Der Monat, Abstract Expressionism, literary networks, foundations and anti-communist liberal intellectuals. Rockhill uses this as a foundation, but then shifts the target towards the Frankfurt School, Western Marxism, French Theory, and the imperial theory industry. His contents show that he frames the project as a study of “Imperial Knowledge”, the “Imperial Intellectual Apparatus”, the “Imperial Theory Industry”, and then the Frankfurt School as “Compatible Critical Theory” .

Meanwhile, Tejapira’s Commodifying Marxism begins from a premise that already complicates any straightforward account of ideological defeat. Although Marxism-communism was politically defeated in Thailand, he argues that the ‘Specter of Communism is still haunting us’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 1). What matters, therefore, is not simply whether Marxism succeeded as party doctrine, but how it entered Thai culture, reorganised the meaning of dissent and helped form a radical culture that survived its institutional defeat.

This differs from Rockhill’s tendency to divide the field into two opposing camps: imperial Marxism and anti-imperialist Marxism. For Rockhill, Western Marxism became ‘an ideological construct aimed at transforming the greatest theoretical weapon of class struggle from below into an ineffectual philosophical position that is accommodationist toward capitalism, and even imperialism’ (Rockhill, 2025, p. 62). This is a powerful criticism of the Western academic market. But the Thai case suggests that the circulation of Marxism in the non-West cannot be reduced to passive consumption of imperial commodities.

Tejapira’s key methodological move is to grasp Marxism-communism and national culture in their ‘actual moments of articulation’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 2). This is precisely what Rockhill’s framework tends to underdevelop. Rockhill asks who funded theory, who promoted it and what geopolitical function it served. Tejapira asks what happens when a foreign-derived discourse enters a national-cultural field and becomes entangled with language, ethnicity, print capitalism, state repression and popular desire. Rockhill privileges production; Tejapira foregrounds articulation.

The Thai case is especially important because Marxism did not enter Siam primarily from the European West. It arrived through the Asiatic East: Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant networks, anti-colonial movements, regional revolutionary circuits and the political activities of lookjin communists. Tejapira states that communism was introduced into Siam from the ‘Asiatic East rather than the European West’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 6). This disrupts Rockhill’s implicit geography of theory. Marxism in Thailand was not simply Western Marxism exported to the periphery. It was regional, diasporic, multilingual and anti-colonial from the beginning.

At the same time, anti-communism in Siam often preceded communism. Tejapira notes that anti-communism ‘predated communism’ in both its arrival and its articulation with Thai culture (Tejapira, 2001, p. 13). Royal anti-socialism, Western advisers, British and French colonial anxieties, and later American Cold War strategy helped define communism as foreign, dangerous and un-Thai before Marxism had fully developed as a Thai political language. Yet this attempt to exclude Marxism had an unintended effect. By naming socialism in Thai terms, anti-communism helped naturalise the very signifier it sought to expel. Tejapira’s discussion of Uttarakuru is important here: King Vajiravudh’s anti-socialist text sought to discredit socialism before it could take root in Siam, but it also gave socialism a Thai cultural form (Tejapira, 2001, p. 17).

This produces the first major correction to Rockhill. Anti-communism does not simply repress Marxism from outside. It can also produce the conditions of Marxism’s intelligibility. In Thailand, communism became the constitutive outside of official Thainess. Because the label khommunit was applied broadly to dissidents, radicals, leftist intellectuals, labour organisers and opponents of authoritarian rule, it created a space in which heterogeneous political actors could recognise their shared antagonism to the state. Tejapira argues that ‘khommunit in Thailand did not really signify a distinctive, particular ideology; anyone who stood in the way of the Thai official nationalist project was, in effect, a khommunit’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 190).

This contradiction becomes clearest in Tejapira’s discussion of the American Embassy and the ‘manufacture of communist spectres’. As part of an effort to inculcate the communist threat into Thai authorities, the Embassy brought English-language communist books into Thailand (Tejapira, 2001, p. 130). Under Ambassador William J. Donovan, the former chief of the OSS, it even commissioned William J. Gedney to translate Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto into Thai. Gedney’s assistant was the young Jit Poumisak, who would later become one of the most important figures in Thai radical intellectual culture (Tejapira, 2001, p. 131).

A comparable case can be found in South Korea, where the Cold War politics of translation shaped the reception of French theory long before the radical theoretical moment of the 1980s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Sartre was not introduced simply as an existentialist philosopher or as a fellow traveller of Marxism. Rather, he was selectively translated through an anti-communist cultural apparatus that sought to detach Marxism from revolutionary politics and redirect it towards anti-Stalinism. The study of Sartre’s Korean reception argues that, in Sasanggye and other intellectual venues of the period, Sartre was translated less as a Marxist thinker than as a practical intellectual who had once sympathised with Marxism but then turned against Stalinism; this translation politics was carried out with the aid of the U.S. Information Service and state policy (Park, 2011, p. 96).

This Korean case also complicates Rockhill’s model in a way similar to the Thai case. The United States did not simply ban Marxist thought; it also helped circulate carefully selected forms of anti-communist Marxism, existentialism, and liberal humanism. Sartre’s critique of Stalin could therefore be useful to the Cold War state: it allowed the anti-communist cultural apparatus to present itself as intellectually sophisticated, even “left”, while isolating Stalinism as the true enemy. In this sense, Sartre became a weapon in the ideological struggle against communism, not because his thought was inherently anti-communist, but because particular fragments of his work could be extracted, translated, and placed within a South Korean anti-communist frame.

This was part of a wider institutional structure. The USIS in Korea supplied foreign books and materials as part of its cultural programme, and it also supported the reconstruction of post-war academic culture by providing paper for journals. The point, then, is not only that the United States financed anti-communist propaganda in a crude sense. It also helped organise the material conditions of intellectual life: books, journals, paper, translation networks, libraries, and cultural authority. Translation became one of the decisive fronts of the Cold War.

Of course, the fact that the United States provided financial support for the translation and circulation of Sartre’s criticism of Stalin does not necessarily mean that Sartre himself was involved in a CIA operation. The crucial distinction is between authorial intention and institutional appropriation. Sartre’s anti-Stalinist writings emerged from his own political and philosophical trajectory, especially his attempt to defend intellectual freedom, revolutionary commitment, and Marxism against the bureaucratic violence of Stalinism. However, once these writings entered the Cold War cultural apparatus, they could be selectively detached from Sartre’s broader project and redeployed for anti-communist purposes. In other words, Sartre did not have to be a conscious agent of US policy for his work to be used by US cultural diplomacy.

This distinction is important because it prevents the argument from collapsing into conspiracy. The issue is not whether Sartre was secretly working for the CIA, but how an imperial cultural apparatus could appropriate particular elements of his work. His criticism of Stalinism was useful because it allowed anti-communist institutions to present themselves as intellectually sophisticated and even sympathetic to the Left. Rather than rejecting Marxism outright, they could promote a version of radical thought that condemned Soviet communism while remaining compatible with liberal anti-communism. Sartre’s authority as a left-wing intellectual made this strategy especially effective.

The Korean case, therefore, shows how Cold War cultural policy operated through selection, translation, and framing. It did not need to invent anti-communist content from nothing; it could take existing debates within Marxism and existentialism and reorganise their meaning within a local anti-communist context. Sartre’s critique of Stalinism could thus be translated not as part of a wider argument about revolutionary responsibility, colonial violence, or committed literature, but as evidence that even the radical European Left had rejected communism. The political function of the translation was therefore not identical with the author’s own intention.

This point also strengthens the critique of Rockhill. If we simply identify the institutional sponsor of a translation, we risk assuming that the meaning of the translated work is already fixed by that sponsorship. But reception is more unstable than that. A text funded for anti-communist purposes may later be read against liberal anti-communism; a critique of Stalinism may become a path towards renewed Marxist debate; a cultural weapon may be turned in another direction. The problem is not Sartre’s direct complicity, but the contradictory afterlife of his work within the Cold War machinery of translation.

Furthermore, as in Thailand, this manipulation did not amount to mastery. Sartre’s Korean reception could not be fully controlled by the anti-communist state or by U.S. cultural policy. The very act of introducing Sartre also opened a space for later Korean readers to encounter Marxism, existentialism, commitment, revolution and intellectual responsibility in ways that exceeded the original anti-communist intention. A text selected because it criticised Stalin could later be read as a text about the political responsibility of intellectuals, the crisis of bourgeois humanism, or the limits of liberal democracy. The anti-communist apparatus tried to use Sartre against communism, but it inadvertently helped prepare the conceptual terrain on which later Korean intellectuals would rethink Marxism, democracy and radical politics.

These episodes almost parody Rockhill’s thesis. The US anti-communist apparatus literally helped to produce a Thai version of a foundational Marxist text. The intention was not revolutionary education but psychological warfare: to manufacture evidence of the communist threat. Yet the operation failed to perform its intended function. Jit Poumisak was drawn into the orbit of radical thought, marked by the state as a communist spectre, and later incorporated into Thai radical memory. In Tejapira’s sharp formulation, the project ‘over-accomplished its goal’ by contributing to the manufacture of two effectively real communist spectres (Tejapira, 2001, p. 133).

These cases should be situated within the broader regional architecture of US anti-communist operations in Asia, including Indochina and Southeast Asia. Rockhill’s account of doctrinal warfare is useful here because it shows that the US state did not merely seek to suppress Marxism from the outside. It also sought to reorganise Marxism from within. Citing Psychological Strategy Board documents, Rockhill notes that US ideological warfare aimed to produce ‘attacks against Communist ideology developed in Marxist terms’ and even a ‘defence of Western society in Marxist terms’ (Rockhill, 2025, p. 43). The aim was not simply to denounce Marxism, but to cultivate ideological forms that could be turned against communism itself.

Yet Asia shows that this strategy did not unfold in a controlled intellectual field. It unfolded in a region marked by war, national liberation, exile, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Tejapira emphasises that post-war Thailand was surrounded by revolutionary movements in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines (Tejapira, 2001, pp. 67–68). Under Pridi Banomyong, Bangkok became a meeting point for Southeast Asian national liberation projects. The Southeast Asian League, founded in Bangkok in September 1947, brought together figures connected to Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines, including Tran Van Giau and Prince Souphanouvong (Tejapira, 2001, pp. 69–70). Thai Marxism was shaped less by Western academic Marxism than by the living proximity of the Indochinese revolution.

After Phibunsongkhram returned to power, however, Thailand was increasingly incorporated into the US-led anti-communist order. Tejapira writes that Phibun committed Thailand to the anti-communist cause of the Western capitalist nations in exchange for political recognition, military aid, economic assistance, and cooperation. His government exchanged intelligence and anti-communist techniques with Laos, South Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines; invited US military bases; concluded a military assistance agreement; restricted Vietnamese communities; closed down the DRV delegation in Bangkok; and co-founded SEATO in 1954 as part of the US global containment strategy (Tejapira, 2001, pp. 70–71).

This matters because the ‘imperial theory industry’ in South-east Asia cannot be separated from military infrastructure. In Europe and North America, US anti-communism often operated through foundations, universities, journals, conferences, and cultural fronts. In Thailand and Indochina, it operated through embassies, military aid, police forces, covert operations, border security, paramilitary training, and regional treaty systems. The theory industry was therefore embedded in a war machine.

Rockhill himself provides the conceptual bridge for this point when he describes the institutional continuity between the OSS and the CIA. He writes that the CIA was ‘the mirror image of OSS’ and that it ‘took over the intelligence and covert psychological warfare activities of the OSS’ (Rockhill, 2025, p. 243). This is significant because Donovan, the former OSS chief, appears in Tejapira’s Thai narrative as the US ambassador under whom the American Embassy commissioned the translation of The Communist Manifesto into Thai. The Thai episode belongs to the broader transformation of wartime intelligence into post-war anti-communist statecraft.

The Indochinese War in Laos offers an even clearer example. A CIA historical account states that ‘the largest paramilitary operations ever undertaken by CIA’ took place in Laos, where the Agency directed local forces against North Vietnamese units for more than thirteen years. Air America, ‘an airline secretly owned by the CIA’, operated out of Laos and Thailand and became central to US operations there (Leary 1999-2000). Vietnam’s Phoenix Programme further demonstrates this fusion of intelligence, counter-insurgency, and ideological war.

A 1969 National Security Council memorandum described Phoenix as the basic anti-Viet Cong Infrastructure programme, operating through committees and centres that supplied intelligence and directed anti-infrastructure operations by police, regional forces, Provincial Reconnaissance Units, and military security services. The same memorandum also links Vietnam directly to Thailand, stating that the CIA had contributed more than one million dollars a year to the Thai Border Patrol Police and had been ‘heavily involved in training and advising the force’, especially its paramilitary arm, PARU.

Indonesia adds another dimension to the regional argument. A CIA memorandum from November 1965 described requests from Indonesian military leaders for covert assistance in their struggle against the PKI, while noting that the army intended ‘to break the organisational back of the PKI’ and eliminate it as an effective political force. National Security Archive documents further show that US officials closely tracked the mass killings, with one consular report describing a ‘widespread slaughter’ of PKI supporters in East Java (‘INR/IL Historical Files’). The Indonesian case shows that anti-communism in Southeast Asia was not only a discursive operation. It could become an infrastructure for mass violence.

However, this regional history further intensifies Rockhill’s critique. Rockhill is right to expose the role of the CIA, foundations, universities and cultural fronts in producing compatible critical theory. But the Thai and Southeast Asian cases show that imperial knowledge never functions as a closed system of ideological control. The same apparatus that manufactured communist spectres also produced unpredictable effects. The American Embassy could introduce communist books as props in an anti-communist drama, but it could not determine how those books would be read, who would translate them, what desires they would awaken or how they would enter local struggles. The imperial apparatus could summon the spectre, but it could not command the ghost.

Tejapira’s title, Commodifying Marxism, also complicates Rockhill’s treatment of theory as commodity. For Rockhill, the commodification of theory often appears as a form of ideological capture. But Tejapira shows that commodification can also be contradictory. In post-war Thailand, Marxism circulated through bookshops, journals, translations, advertisements, libraries, newspapers and private collections. These were capitalist forms of circulation, but they did not simply neutralise Marxism. They helped make Marxism available to new readers and publics.

This is why Tejapira refuses to treat Marxism and communism either as a pure universal doctrine or as a mere foreign intrusion. He describes it instead as a set of particularised cultural artefacts and discourses, transmitted through concrete objects such as books, bookshops, words, neologisms, advertisements, and prisons (Tejapira, 2001, p. 2). Thai Marxism was not simply corrupted by the market. It was reproduced through the market, against the market, and beyond the market.

The spread of Thai Marxism was therefore not linear. It moved from bilingual lookjin communists and Thai leftist bureaucrats to politicians, writer-journalists, university students, rural teachers, monks, and peasants. It moved linguistically from Chinese and English into Thai, and then into local languages and dialects. It moved generically from leaflets and party statements to theoretical translations, sociological analyses, fiction, poetry, songs, essays, reviews, and handbooks (Tejapira, 2001, pp. 196–201). This was not mere ideological transmission. It was a cultural mutation.

The translation process was especially transformative. Tejapira argues that once Marxist words crossed linguistic boundaries and entered Thai cultural forms, they became ‘free-floating radical signifiers’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 201). This is perhaps the strongest theoretical challenge to Rockhill. If Marxism is transformed in this way through translation, then its political meaning cannot be deduced solely from its institutional origin or its manipulation by imperial agencies.

The Thai case thus allows us to formulate a more dialectical position. Rockhill is right that theory must be analysed materially. But material analysis must include not only production but also reception, translation, reproduction, and unintended effects. If we stop at production, we risk imagining imperial power as too complete. Thailand shows the opposite. Manipulation can backfire. Anti-communist fabrication can create communist desire. Commodification can produce radical publics. Translation can transform doctrine into culture.

This does not mean that Thai Marxism was pure. It was shaped by Chinese and Vietnamese communism, Thai nationalism, Buddhism, anti-monarchism, print capitalism, prisons, American Cold War strategy, state repression, and market circulation. But this impurity was not a failure. It was the very condition of its political life. Marxism became Thai not by remaining faithful to its doctrinal origins, but by undergoing contamination.

This is why the Thai case demands a revision of Rockhill’s binary between imperial Marxism and anti-imperialist Marxism. In Thailand, Marxism was both anti-imperialist and commodified. It was manipulated by US anti-communism, but it also inspired radical movements. It was foreign-derived, but it became part of Thai political culture. It was defeated as an organised communist project, but it left what Tejapira calls ‘residual nuts and bolts of cultural resistance’ (Tejapira, 2001, p. 202).

The question, then, is not simply Rockhill’s question: who paid the pipers of Western Marxism? The Asian cases ask another question: who heard the music differently? Who translated it into local languages? Who turned a manufactured spectre into a language of dissent? Who used a commodity against capitalism, a foreign doctrine against official nationalism, and a manipulated text against the manipulator?

In this sense, Asia reveals the weakness of imperial knowledge. The empire can manufacture spectres, but it cannot guarantee that they will remain fake. Marxism in Asia became powerful not despite manipulation, but partly through the contradictions it opened. This is the lesson that Rockhill’s critique does not fully grasp: the imperial apparatus may pay the piper, but it cannot always control the dance.

References

Department of State, ‘INR/IL Historical Files, Indonesia, 1963-1965’. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d172

Leary, William M.‘CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974’. Studies in Intelligence, winter (1999-2000). https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/studies-in-intelligence-winter-1999-2000/cia-air-operations-in-laos-1955-1974/

Park, Ji-young. ‘Translated Cold War and Revolution: Sartre, Marxism, Existentialism and Revolution (번역된 냉전, 그리고 혁명; 사르트르, 마르크시즘, 실존과 혁명)’. Seoganginmunnonchong 33, 2011.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. London: Granta Books, 1999.

Tejapira, Kasian. Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1958. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press; Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001.

Rockhill, Gabriel. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry, Vol. 1. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025.

As Hobsbawm understood, the Second World War did not simply end in 1945; it was prolonged in a displaced form, reappearing as the wars of the Third World. The very term “Cold War,” taken from Orwell’s cynical vocabulary, names an ideological lie: cold for whom? For those inhabiting the metropolitan centres of power, perhaps, but for Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine, Angola, and later Iran, it was a sequence of infernal heat, counterinsurgency, proxy war, massacre, partition, and national liberation. This is why Foucault’s thesis retains its force: the truth of war is civil war. What the postwar order called peace was merely the management of antagonism by exporting it to the periphery. There, total war returned in a displaced guise, as “people’s war,” insurgency, and revolutionary struggle.

The victories of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh were therefore not merely national events. They were signals of a global mutation in the political form of war itself. Anti-colonial struggle became generalisable; guerrilla warfare became the mobile grammar of revolution; martyrdom, sacrifice, and ideological mobilisation became the weapons of those excluded from conventional state power. This historical sequence did not stop in East Asia. It traversed the entire Third World and sedimented itself in the Middle East, including Iran. To confront Iran as if it were simply another object of technocratic management, another regime awaiting external correction, is already to miss the entire historical field. Iran is not a blank screen for imperial projection. It is one of the sites where the unfinished contradictions of the twentieth century remain intensely alive.

This is why Trump and his entourage failed in a way that is not merely strategic but ideological. Ideology is not simply a false representation of reality; it is the very frame that structures what one cannot see. Trump’s camp, intoxicated by fantasies of easy victory and inflated by the illusion of success elsewhere, acted as though history itself had been neutralised. This is ideology at its purest: not ignorance of facts, but blindness to the historical antagonism inscribed in the situation. Iran appears to them as an empirical problem to be solved by superior force, covert destabilisation, and spectacle. But the Real returns precisely where ideology imagines itself most secure. Iran condenses memories of coup, revolution, war, sanctions, anti-imperial struggle, and theological-political mobilisation. One does not simply “manage” such a formation. One awakens in its forces that exceed the fantasy of mastery.

Here, the category of fantasy becomes decisive. Trump does not merely miscalculate; he stages power through fantasy. He acts as if the big Other, i.e., the symbolic guarantor of American legitimacy, global order, and historical destiny, still exists. Yet the scandal is that it no longer does, or at least no longer functions in the old way. The United States can still strike, threaten, and destroy, but it can no longer convincingly embody universality. Its violence has become increasingly naked, detached from the liberal-humanitarian fictions that once masked it. What Trump reveals, in his vulgarity, is not a deviation from the system’s truth but the truth of the system itself: the empire no longer even believes in its own civilising alibi.

This is why Trump may appear as a grotesque, inverted Cyrus the Great. He imagines himself as the restorer of imperial grandeur, yet he risks becoming the figure through whom global capitalism loses even its last ideological breath. In a paradoxical way, the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism seem to be fulfilling themselves. This is the dialectical reversal par excellence: the subject who seeks to save the order by an excessive assertion of force becomes the one who discloses its internal decomposition. In trying to make America “great” again, he stages the spectacle of a sovereignty that is already hollow. The more violently he asserts it, the more obvious it becomes that the universal order once called “the West” survives only as a ruin sustained by military inertia, technological superiority, and theological fantasy.

Lacan’s formula applies here with full brutality: we always get what we want. Or, more precisely, desire is realised only in a distorted, catastrophic form. The Christian fascists surrounding Trump fantasise about apocalypse, purification, and redemption through fire. They want a final confrontation that would restore moral clarity through destruction. But what if the realisation of this fantasy is precisely the collapse of the symbolic framework that sustained their world? What if the fire they invoke no longer purifies but only reveals the void beneath the fantasy? Then the nightmare is not external to desire; it is desire come true. What appears as triumphant restoration reveals itself as terminal disintegration. What appears as liberation reveals itself as the openly nihilistic violence of an order that can no longer justify itself except by invoking destiny, civilisation, and God.

In this sense, the lesson is brutal: the greatest illusion is not that the rulers misread reality, but that they can continue to act as though the symbolic order still believes in them. Their mistake is not that they are too cynical; it is that they are not cynical enough about their own fantasy. They think they are wielding history, while in truth they are merely enacting the death drive of a system that survives only by compulsively repeating its founding violence. And this is perhaps the most terrifying possibility: not that they will fail to realise their fantasy, but that they will realise it, and in doing so bring to completion the catastrophe already inscribed within it.

I decided to write this review because one of my friends read Byung-Chul Han’s The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism and recommended it to me. Half doubtful, half curious, I followed that recommendation, yet the book did not change the judgement I had already formed about Han. That judgement is simple: his arguments repeatedly reproduce the intellectual prejudice they appear to diagnose, above all the habit of thinking through a separation between “the West” and “the East.” Rather than deconstructing Europe’s posture toward other regions, the book often reinforces it by staging Zen as the philosophical “other” of a predominantly German itinerary.

Han is transparent about his procedure. In the preface, he acknowledges Zen’s scepticism toward words and conceptual thought, then proposes to “philosophize about and with” Zen by “linguistically circl[ing] silence,” turning the difficulty of conceptualisation into a set of rhetorical strategies.^[1] He also declares the book “comparative,” explicitly confronting Zen with a canonical roster that includes Plato, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. At the same time, haiku serve as “neighbours” and “beautiful frames” meant to put the reader “in the mood,” not as texts to interpret. These admissions are vital because they reveal both the book’s genuine strengths and its central limitation: Zen becomes less a historically constituted tradition than a philosophical device, an atmospheric counter-image set against European metaphysics.

As a philosophical essay, the book is often lucid and elegantly organised. In my view, this is Han’s most outstanding achievement, though it is an ambivalent one. His success has helped shift philosophical publishing away from the established model of weighty, complex monographs dense with specialised vocabulary and toward shorter, essayistic volumes designed for rapid circulation. Whether this should be described as the popularisation of philosophy or its commercialisation is open to debate. What is undeniable is the material consequence: philosophical books have quite literally become thinner, smaller, and more readily consumable.

Han’s best pages in the book insist that “emptiness” is not a negative substance, not a hidden ground, and not a covert metaphysical foundation. He argues that “the emptiness of Zen Buddhism negates every form of a narcissistic return to oneself.”^[2] This yields a coherent anti-foundational motif: Zen appears as a critique of inwardness, of the desire for a centre of certainty, and of the metaphysical reflex that equates meaning with depth. The confrontation with Hegel is a representative case. Han shows how Hegel assimilates Buddhism to a familiar theological grammar by equating the Buddhist “nothing” with God and reading it as negative theology, which Han treats as symptomatic of Europe’s tendency to translate the unfamiliar back into its own categories.^[3]

There are also moments of real comparative friction rather than mere contrast. For instance, Han claims that “Heidegger uses emptiness to characterise the fundamental figure of his thought, ‘being.’”^[4] Han contrasts Heidegger’s emptiness, shaped by an inward, gathering “tip of the spear” that draws everything toward itself, with Zen emptiness, which has no ruling centre. Because Zen emptiness lacks that inward gravity, it is “friendlier,” even “emptier”: without soul or voice, and more dispersed than gathered. In this way, his engagement with Heidegger pressures the reader to ask whether European critiques of metaphysics still retain a logic of localisation, gathering, or centred disclosure. Even when one finds Han’s rhetoric excessive, the book can be read as a disciplined attempt to make “emptiness” felt as a different structure of relation rather than as a vague mysticism.

Yet the book’s philosophical neatness depends on a decisive bracketing: the history through which Indian Buddhism becomes Chinese Chan and later Korean and Japanese Zen is mainly absent from the analysis. Han states at the outset that Zen is a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism that “originated in China,” and he cites the famous verse attributed to Bodhidharma on “no dependence upon words and letters.” He also notes that Bodhidharma is said to have come as the “twenty-eighth Indian patriarch” to found the Chinese line of the tradition. But these acknowledgements function as prefatory signals rather than as methodological commitments. They do not become an account of translation practices, doctrinal contestation, institutional formation, or political entanglement. Zen is historically Chinese, but treated as if it could be extracted from the historical work that made it Chinese.

This omission matters because it allows “China” or “the Far East” to slide from being a historically specific site of transformation into an explanatory essence. In one telling passage, Han asserts that Zen’s “radical turn towards immanence” is “a reflection of the Chinese, or Far Eastern, character of Zen Buddhism,” and he generalises further into claims about a “Far Eastern model of being” that allegedly does not involve transcendence or the “wholly other.” Here, the book crosses a line: it no longer compares philosophical positions so much as it reproduces a civilisational metaphysics, i.e., West versus East, where each side is made to stand as a coherent, homogeneous block.

This is the deeper critical point: the habitual comparison between “European philosophy” and “Eastern philosophy,” as if either were internally unified, is not an innocent method. It can function as a renewal of Orientalism at the level of philosophical form. The East becomes legible insofar as it plays a role in a drama authored elsewhere: Zen appears as the antidote to German metaphysics, the rescue of Europe from its own inwardness, the external supplement that clarifies the European canon by contrast. Even when the comparison is sympathetic, indeed, especially when it is sympathetic, it can reinstall the authority to define the other by staging it as Europe’s conceptual counter-image.

Han’s own method makes this risk acute. Because haiku are used primarily as mood-setting frames rather than as historically situated texts, and because Zen is treated as fundamentally hostile to “theory and discourse” while nevertheless being rendered philosophically through European categories, the book sometimes substitutes atmosphere for argument, exactly the condition under which civilisational binaries can flourish without being demonstrated. The result is a familiar choreography: Europe is “analysed” and “criticised,” while the East is “evoked” as a luminous elsewhere, immanent, non-centred, untheological. When this happens, the book does not deconstruct Europe’s posture toward other regions; it refines it.

What is missing is not “more information about Buddhism” in a general sense, but a different epistemic frame: attention to the transformative exchanges through which traditions are made, rather than comparisons between supposedly self-identical wholes called “the West” and “the East.” Here, a striking methodological counterpoint is C. Pierce Salguero’s A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine. Although Salguero’s subject is medicine, his historical model directly challenges the essentialist presuppositions that comparative philosophy often smuggles in. He stresses that historians agree “no Buddhist text anywhere unproblematically reflects a pristine, original form of Buddhism”; across Asia, Buddhist texts are products of centuries of “translation, adaptation, synthesis, and cross-cultural influence.”^[5]

Importantly, Salguero treats translation as transformative in both directions. Not only do Buddhist materials change as they cross linguistic boundaries; indigenous vocabularies and frameworks “infiltrate” Buddhist writing in translation, sometimes so thoroughly that origins become difficult to trace. This is the sort of account that makes it impossible to speak responsibly of a stable “Far Eastern character” as the cause of Zen’s immanence. “China” is not an essence; it is a field of domestications, rewritings, accretions, anthologisations, and institutional pressures. Salguero’s broader point is methodological: comparison is valuable when it helps trace the movement of texts and practices across time and space rather than when it stages an opposition between two philosophically homogeneous continents.

From this perspective, what matters is not “Buddhism versus German philosophy,” but the uneven, multi-directional exchanges through which philosophical and religious vocabularies are made and remade across regions. The world is not divided cleanly into West and East; it is composed of multiple, overlapping histories of circulation and reconfiguration. A comparative method adequate to that reality must be genealogical, infrastructural, and attentive to translation, rather than civilisational.

A second corrective comes from Matthew J. Moore’s Buddhism and Political Theory, which begins by noting that Western political theory has curiously neglected Buddhism despite its global scale and the fact that several Asian polities identify themselves as guided by Buddhist principles. Moore then insists on Buddhism’s internal diversity and warns that asking what “Buddhism” says about politics is as unwieldy as asking what “Christianity” says about politics.^[6]

This matters for evaluating Han because Han’s book tends to slide from a metaphysical portrait of emptiness as non-centred immanence into broad ethical-political implications, while bypassing the plural institutional histories that would be necessary to support such moves.^[7] Moore’s work does not merely add “politics” as an extra topic; it demonstrates that Buddhism has long generated arguments about governance, citizenship, and the role of political life, arguments that shift historically and differ across traditions. In other words, the political cannot be derived cleanly from ontology; it must be argued through texts, institutions, and historical transformation. Without that, one risks mistaking a philosophical mood for an ethical proof.

This is where my initial judgement of Han is confirmed rather than challenged. Across his work, Han’s critique often adopts the posture of diagnosis, e.g., capitalism, digital life, “the West,” but too frequently leaves the conceptual frame intact. In The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, the critique of European metaphysics is conducted by re-staging the very opposition that has historically licensed Europe’s authority to classify the other: the West as depth, inwardness, transcendence; the East as immanence, surface, centrelessness.

The reliance on atmosphere is not incidental to this effect; it is part of the mechanism. When haiku are positioned as frames that “put the reader in the mood,” and when the method is openly described as “linguistically circl[ing] silence,” the book risks turning philosophy into a rhetoric of attunement that can too easily substitute for historical and conceptual responsibility.

I call this tendency a form of anti-intellectual nihilism: a post-metaphysical mode of critique that substitutes atmosphere and civilisational contrast for genealogy and institutional analysis, and that often allows critique to conclude in attunement rather than in determinate historical or conceptual accountability.

Han’s book is not without philosophical interest. It offers a clear anti-foundational motif and some sharp confrontations with European thinkers, especially where it exposes the assimilationist reflex by which European philosophy translates Buddhism back into its own theological grammar. But its comparative architecture is structurally compromised. By bracketing Zen’s formation-history, its emergence through the translation and transformation of Indian materials in Chinese contexts, it grants itself the right to speak of “Chinese-Far Eastern character” as if it were an explanatory essence, and it thereby risks renewing an Orientalist partition in philosophical form.

Read alongside Salguero and Moore, the limitations become unmistakable. Salguero supplies the methodological vocabulary of translation, adaptation, and cross-cultural exchange that dissolves the fantasy of pristine origins and homogeneous civilisations. Moore supplies the political-theoretical and pluralist caution that prevents metaphysical portraits from being mistaken for ethical or institutional truth. In that combined frame, the critical imperative shifts: not “Zen versus German philosophy,” but the transformative exchanges, uneven circulations, and multiple world-formations through which traditions travel, fracture, and recompose, across many worlds, not two.

^[1] Byung-Chul Han, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, trans. Dainel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), vii.

^[2] Ibid., 17.

^[3] Ibid., 2.

^[4] Ibid., 40-41.

^[5] C. Pierce Salguero, A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 123.

^[6] Matthew J. Moore, Buddhism and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 15.

^[7] Han, ibid., 89.

Until quite recently, pairing the words “America” and “fascism” felt like a category mistake, less because the United States was immune to authoritarian temptations than because its self-image and historical role seemed to foreclose the association. “Fascism” belonged, in the common sense of the term, to defeated European regimes: a pathology of interwar crisis and a cult of the Leader. The United States, by contrast, narrated itself as the guarantor of liberal constitutionalism and, after 1945, the principal architect of an anti-fascist world order. Even when scholars pointed to American traditions of racial domination, anti-labour violence, or Cold War securitisation, the word “fascism” still appeared too heavy, too European, too historically specific.

That hesitation is itself historically produced. The victory mythology of the Second World War did not simply place the United States on the “right side” of history; it became a civil religion. Anti-fascism was folded into national identity, into the legitimacy of American power, into the moral grammar of foreign policy. For over seventy years, that narrative acted like a conceptual prophylactic: if America is the champion of anti-fascism, then fascism must be something that happens elsewhere, an external enemy or a foreign contagion. The shock today is not only that illiberal tendencies have intensified, but that the old narrative no longer stabilises the situation. When the symbolic immunities fail, the repressed category returns: one finds oneself reaching for “fascism” not out of rhetorical excess, but because other terms, such as polarisation, populism, and democratic backsliding, begin to feel descriptively insufficient.

This is where the Weimar analogy becomes difficult to avoid. The point is not to claim identity between situations, nor to indulge in historical theatre. It is to notice a recognisable sequence: a legitimacy crisis of institutions; the normalisation of extraordinary measures; an opposition re-coded as an internal enemy; the conversion of legal mechanisms into instruments of personal rule; and the transformation of politics into a permanent plebiscite of loyalty. Weimar’s collapse was not simply the product of street violence; it was a process in which elites and institutions repeatedly miscalculated, believing they could “use” the radical right, contain it, bargain with it, or instrumentalise its energy against the left, until the radicals became the state. The lesson is not “history repeats,” but that democratic forms can be hollowed out by legalistic means, and that the line between constitutional procedure and constitutional sabotage is often crossed gradually, through a succession of “temporary” exceptions.

If the post-1945 order once made “America” and “fascism” appear incompatible, the present shift forces a rethinking of fascism itself. Fascism in the twenty-first century rarely arrives in the iconography of the twentieth: it is less likely to demand a total party-state in the classical sense than to operate through media ecosystems, juridical improvisations, and a fused apparatus of security, platform power, and moral mobilisation. It is not necessarily a revolution against the system; it can be a reconfiguration within the system, where elections persist but become rituals of humiliation for opponents, where courts are selectively revered or denounced, where the state’s coercive capacities are imagined as the Leader’s personal property. In this sense, “fascism” names not only brutality, but a kind of political transubstantiation: grievance is converted into transcendence, and transcendence into permission.

What is emerging can be described as an American variant of fascism: rooted in American exceptionalism, yet increasingly transnational in organisation and influence. This American version of fascism, long simmering beneath the surface, has now broken through at precisely the moment when its underlying contradictions have sharpened into seeming insolubility, i.e., contradictions long masked by the tides of neoliberalism. The genealogy of today’s fascist move in the United States must begin with its theopolitical foundations, which are inseparable from the long arc of its exceptionalism. Unlike the fascist movements of interwar Europe, which often mobilised Christianity only as an instrument for nationalist myth-making, or even turned against it in favour of neopagan or racialist cults, the American variant arises from within a specifically Protestant, Puritan tradition.

From the seventeenth century onward, the Puritan settlers imagined their polity as a “city upon a hill,” a covenantal community chosen by God and tasked with manifesting divine sovereignty in the New World. This founding myth fused religious identity with political legitimacy and cast the American experiment as a redemptive project for all of humanity. The theological structure of this covenantal exceptionalism had two decisive political consequences. According to Perry Miller, “protestant political thinking had never doubted … that God instituted government among men as a means toward their temporal felicity—or, at least toward their ‘safety’”(Miller 104). In this way, it sacralised the state’s sovereignty by rooting it in a prior covenant with God rather than in historical contingency or human consent. It also instilled a missionary orientation: the belief that America’s destiny was to serve as the vanguard of a universal order. This differs from European fascisms, which had to invent new political religions to fill the void left by secularisation.

Such a self-understanding made it possible for later movements, from Manifest Destiny to Cold War anti-communism, to interpret expansionism and even militarism as the fulfilment of divine mandate. In this sense, Christian nationalism in the United States is not a recent aberration but the culmination of a centuries-long theological-political formation. It draws upon the Puritan legacy in which the line between the ecclesial and the political was never sharply drawn. American exceptionalism was not merely a geopolitical doctrine; it was a millenarian narrative of national election, and it continues to furnish the cultural and symbolic resources for the American variation of fascism, one that frames authoritarian politics not as a betrayal of the nation’s origins but as a return to its sacred covenant. This exceptionalist theology hardened into a myth of America as a “New Israel,” a nation uniquely favoured by God, destined to bring light to the world. From the beginning, then, the American nation was conceived as both religious and political, both providential and territorial. This fusion of covenantal theology with statecraft is the seed of American Christian nationalism.

By the nineteenth century, Puritan exceptionalism had grown into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The expansion of U.S. territory westward was sacralised as divine will. Political leaders and preachers alike depicted the conquest of Indigenous lands as the fulfilment of God’s plan. Settler colonial violence was thus framed not only as a political necessity but as a sacred duty. Seen from this perspective, Trump’s proposal to take over Greenland becomes intelligible as part of a broader logic of exceptionalism and territorial appropriation. The phrase “Manifest Destiny” was coined in 1845 by the Democratic journalist and politician John L. O’Sullivan in the context of the debate over the annexation of Texas (Horsman 219). O’Sullivan invoked the term to describe what he saw as the inevitable expansion of the United States across the North American continent. In his editorials for the New York Morning News at the end of 1845, O’Sullivan argued that

Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc. ... [The American claim] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self government entrusted to us. It is a right such as that of the tree to the space of air and earth suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth—such as that of the stream to the channel required for the still accumulating volume of its flow. (O’Sullivan, qtd. in Merk 32).

For him, westward expansion was not an act of conquest but the fulfilment of a divine mission that fused the ideals of liberty and federated self-government with a sense of historical inevitability. A central feature of Manifest Destiny was its providential justification. O’Sullivan portrayed the United States as entrusted with a sacred mission. Expansion across the continent was thus cast not as imperial ambition but as the natural and moral outworking of this divine plan. This framing provided a powerful ideological foundation for U.S. territorial claims, rendering the annexation of Texas, and, soon after, the push for Oregon and California, as the realisation of a historical destiny rather than aggressive conquest.

At the same time, Manifest Destiny carried a distinct civilisational and racial dimension. O’Sullivan often contrasted the dynamic growth of the Anglo-American settlers with the perceived stagnation of Spanish America, the incapacity of Indigenous nations for “improvement,” and the fragility of European colonial footholds in the New World. Marx’s famous image of the “irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration…armed with the plough and the rifle” reveals how expansion was imagined as both demographic inevitability and cultural superiority (Marx 9). Further, O’Sullivan wrote that “yes, more, more, more! .. . till our national destiny is fulfilled and . . . the whole boundless continent is ours” (O’Sullivan, qtd. in Merk 46). Although O’Sullivan was more optimistic about human progress than many of his contemporaries, he nonetheless regarded the spread of Anglo-American institutions, e.g., schools, courts, representative assemblies, mills, and meeting houses, as the mark of historical advancement.

Another defining aspect of Manifest Destiny was its challenge to foreign powers and to the European notion of a balance of power on the American continent. O’Sullivan rebuked European attempts to limit U.S. territorial growth, insisting that North America had been providentially given to the United States for its own expansion (Merk 41). Surprisingly, we heard the same words from Trump in the context of Venezuela, following his administration’s efforts to delegitimise and remove its president. O’Sullivan predicted that Canada would inevitably break away from Britain to join the United States and that no European power could resist the “simple, solid weight” of hundreds of millions of Americans destined to live under the Stars and Stripes.

Manifest Destiny is not merely a domestic programme of settlement but a hemispheric imagination of American pre-eminence that Trump now appears to reactivate. His claim that Canada should be incorporated into U.S. territory reads less as an offhand provocation than as a reprise of this foundational rhetoric. From its first appearance, the phrase entered political debate, attracting both praise and condemnation. Proponents used it to justify westward expansion, especially during the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War, presenting territorial growth as a benign historical necessity. Critics, by contrast, saw it as a cloak for imperialism and as a means to extend the reach of slavery into new territories (Horsman 211). The dual character of Manifest Destiny, as an ideal of liberty and progress, and as a rationalisation for conquest, made it one of the most contested concepts of the mid-nineteenth century.

In retrospect, Manifest Destiny can be understood as a theopolitical ideology that joined together ideas of providence, progress, and racial hierarchy to legitimate territorial expansion. It laid the ideological groundwork for a distinctive form of American exceptionalism, portraying the nation not as an empire among empires but as the chosen agent of a universal historical mission. This vision would shape U.S. policy in the nineteenth century and leave a lasting imprint on its political culture, reappearing in later doctrines of expansion and intervention. The phrase coined by O’Sullivan thus captured more than a moment of territorial ambition; it crystallised a narrative of national destiny that has remained central to today’s political imagination. The genocidal logic of Manifest Destiny illustrates one of fascism’s enduring traits: the myth of decline and rebirth, which requires the purification of the nation through the elimination of internal and external enemies. Here, Indigenous peoples were marked as obstacles to America’s divine destiny, to be displaced or annihilated in the name of providential sovereignty.

In the twentieth century, evangelical Christianity was mobilised as an ideological weapon in the Cold War. Under President Eisenhower, the phrase “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, and “In God We Trust” was adopted as the national motto (Kruse xvi). Evangelist Billy Graham became the unofficial pastor to the nation, preaching a fusion of Christianity and anti-communism. Here again, the American project fused religion and politics, this time against a global enemy. Communism was not only a political adversary but an anti-Christian force, depicted as atheistic, immoral, and satanic.

In this context, evangelical Christianity became an instrument of state power, reinforcing the view that America’s political mission was inseparable from its religious destiny. The religious rhetoric that had once unified Americans became a source of conflict by the Nixon era. Efforts to revive the Eisenhower model of public religiosity, by recruiting the same religious leaders, conservative donors, civic groups, and even patriotic entertainers, failed in a changed political climate. Instead of fostering unity, slogans like “one nation under God” highlighted and deepened the country’s internal divisions, as exemplified by local battles over school prayer (Kruse 274).

The Cold War consolidated the view that the nation’s survival required religious faith. This fusion of religiosity and geopolitics laid the groundwork for later forms of Christian nationalism, which would translate anti-communism into culture wars against feminism, secularism, and multiculturalism. Running alongside these historical developments was the persistent thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture. Richard Hofstadter famously traced this tradition back to the populist rejection of elites, intellectuals, and universities, which were seen as alien to the common sense of “the people” (Hofstadter 15). For Christian nationalism, this anti-intellectualism translated into suspicion of secular knowledge. Universities, scientists, and critical thinkers were cast as corruptors of faith and enemies of the nation. Revelation and biblical literalism took precedence over reasoned debate. This cultural disposition made American populism particularly receptive to authoritarian religion, where obedience to scripture and leadership replaced deliberation and critique.

The late twentieth century saw the crystallisation of these genealogical currents in the rise of the Moral Majority. Founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority emerged initially as a reaction to desegregation. Evangelical leaders had opposed federal mandates to integrate Christian academies, framing their resistance as a defence of “religious liberty” (Balmer 25). Though abortion and family values soon became the movement’s public rallying cries, its origins lay in a defence of white supremacy under theological cover. The Moral Majority and later organisations such as the Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson in 1989, transformed evangelical religion into a powerful political bloc. Their agenda targeted abortion, LGBTQ rights, feminism, and secular education, framing each as evidence of national decline. Here, the logic of fascism became more apparent: a myth of cultural degeneration caused by internal enemies, demanding rebirth through moral purification and authoritarian politics.

Evangelical leaders did not shy away from political elitism. They claimed a direct mandate from God, positioning themselves as intermediaries between divine will and national destiny. The masses were mobilised through populist rhetoric, but always subordinated to the authority of charismatic religious elites. This fusion of populist mobilisation and elitist sovereignty mirrors the immanent multiplicity of fascism itself. In the twenty-first century, Christian nationalism has only intensified. The post-9/11 climate of fear, combined with the polarisation of American politics, provided fertile ground for apocalyptic rhetoric. Evangelical leaders framed the “War on Terror” as a battle between Christianity and Islam, good and evil. Domestically, culture wars deepened as evangelical groups fought against same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and secular education.

By the 2010s, figures such as Franklin Graham and younger activists like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA advanced an explicitly nationalist theology, framing America as a Christian nation under siege. The 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection exposed the full extent of this convergence. At the “Jericho March” preceding the Capitol riot, pastors invoked biblical warfare, blowing shofars and calling for the walls of tyranny to fall. For participants, storming the Capitol was not merely a political protest but a spiritual battle, a defence of God’s nation against satanic enemies. Taken together, these genealogical elements, Puritan covenant theology, Manifest Destiny, Cold War anti-communism, anti-intellectual populism, and the Moral Majority, formed the conditions of possibility for today’s transformation of fascism in the United States.

Unlike its European counterparts, which often subordinated religion to politics, the fascist movement in the country sacralises politics through religion itself. Its theological core gives it an apocalyptic temporality: compromise is heresy, pluralism is sin, and politics is spiritual warfare. At the same time, its populist rhetoric conceals its elitist structure: the masses are mobilised but ultimately subordinated to the authority of charismatic leaders, whether pastors, prophets, or political figures. Christian nationalism, then, is not simply a conservative subculture. It is the theological engine of American fascism, preparing the ground for the fusion of populism, elitism, and authoritarianism that defines fascist politics.

Central to the fascist logic of Christian nationalism is its apocalyptic temporality. Politics is framed not as negotiation or compromise but as a battlefield between good and evil. The language of “spiritual warfare” saturates evangelical political discourse, casting opponents not as legitimate adversaries but as demonic forces (Gorski and Perry 7). This eschatological worldview makes democratic pluralism impossible. One cannot compromise with evil; one can only defeat it. Evangelical leaders frequently invoke biblical battles, e.g., Jericho, Armageddon, and the Exodus, as analogies for contemporary politics. The Jericho March in December 2020, preceding the storming of the Capitol, exemplified this logic. Protestors blew shofars, prayed for walls of tyranny to fall, and demanded the divine restoration of Trump to office.

In their imagination, the election was not a contest of votes but a cosmic struggle between God’s will and satanic corruption. This apocalyptic framing transforms political opponents into existential enemies. Democrats, feminists, secularists, and immigrants are not simply wrong but evil. In fascist terms, this logic echoes the myth of national decline and rebirth: the nation has fallen into sin and must be reborn through purification, which often entails violence. The paradox of Trump’s popularity among evangelical Christians has been widely noted. A thrice-married casino magnate hardly fits the mould of pious leadership. Yet within the theological-political logic of Christian nationalism, Trump could be reimagined as a messianic figure.

Evangelical leaders frequently described Trump as a “Cyrus” figure, an imperfect but divinely chosen ruler who nonetheless advances God’s plan. Evangelical support for Trump was neither an aberration nor simply a matter of political expediency. Their enthusiasm for Trump was “the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad” (Du Mez 3). His personal flaws became evidence of divine providence: only God could have chosen such an unlikely vessel. In this way, Trump became not only a political leader but a quasi-biblical figure, sanctified by his role in defending Christian America against its enemies.

This fusion of charismatic leadership and divine election resonates with fascism’s elitist structure. The masses are mobilised through populist rhetoric, “the forgotten men and women,” but their energy is directed toward submission to a transcendent leader, portrayed as the sole bulwark against national collapse. The paradoxical messiah is at once populist and elitist, ordinary in speech but extraordinary in mandate. American Christian nationalism thus exhibits all the structural features of fascism, translated into a religious register: America is portrayed as having fallen into decadence through feminism, secularism, multiculturalism, and globalism. Its rebirth requires purification through Christian sovereignty. Evangelicals believed themselves “custodians of morality” and “worried that the sexual revolution, civil rights movement, second­ wave feminism, and gay rights movement signalled a society in collapse” (Dowland 54).

Political opponents are recast as demonic forces. “Globalists,” “liberal elites,” immigrants, and secular educators are not adversaries but existential threats to Christian America. For this agenda, politics is aestheticised liturgically, sacralising collective passion. Rallies resemble revival meetings, with music, prayer, and ritualised chants. Alongside this, conspiracy serves as a myth. From QAnon to election denial, conspiratorial narratives provide the unifying mythos. They transform scattered grievances into a coherent cosmic battle, giving meaning to resentment and legitimising violence.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, these practices reveal how fascism operates not only as a political regime but as a micro-political investment of desire. It captures affects, e.g., fear, resentment, and ecstasy, etc., and binds them to authoritarian projects. In the American case, these effects are coded religiously, turning worship into political mobilisation. At its core, the theocratic turn of Christian nationalism is a rejection of secular democracy. Liberal constitutionalism rests on the separation of church and state, the plurality of beliefs, and the negotiation of difference. Christian nationalism, by contrast, insists that the nation can only be legitimate if it recognises Jesus Christ as sovereign. Democracy is acceptable only insofar as it delivers biblical outcomes. When it does not, it is cast as illegitimate, corrupt, even satanic.

This rejection became evident in the 2020 election and its aftermath. For millions of Christian nationalists, Trump’s loss could not be real; it had to be fraudulent, because God could not allow His chosen leader to be defeated. Here, electoral legitimacy was subordinated to theological legitimacy. The January 6, 2021, coup attempt was not merely political extremism but the expression of a deeper theopolitical conviction: that divine sovereignty overrides democratic procedure. The American case thus illustrates a distinctive form of fascism: theopolitical fascism. The American derivation of fascism draws centrally on theology. It sacralises the nation as God’s chosen people, aestheticises politics as revival liturgy, and legitimises authoritarian sovereignty through apocalyptic temporality.

This is not to deny the role of race; indeed, Christian nationalism remains deeply intertwined with white supremacy. But its structure is theological before it is biological. It is not only the racial nation that must be purified but the Christian nation. If we describe today’s U.S. political movement as a form of fascism, articulated in a distinctly Christian key, it should be understood as a mutation of the fascist form, and thus as further evidence of fascism’s capacity to adapt to new historical conditions. It fuses populism and elitism, desire and discipline, myth and sovereignty, into a theocratic politics that prepares the ground for authoritarianism. Reconfigured fascism in the United States through evangelical Christianity and fused with the residues of Cold War anti-communism, helped supply an ideological warrant for last year’s coup attempt in South Korea. As European fascism once did, this American variant now projects itself outward, shaping international politics on a global scale.

My contention is that Trump’s emergence is not a rupture in American history but the endpoint of a trajectory embedded from its very inception. From the outset, the dream of a theocratic order rooted in Puritan Christianity animated significant strands of Anglo-Protestant settlement and state formation; today’s Christian nationalists read Trump as the figure destined to fulfil that long-standing aspiration. Even where Democrats oppose Trump’s particular methods, they often remain aligned with key premises of this deeper trajectory, above all, the civilisational myth of American exceptionalism and the fusion of national destiny with moral providence. It is this paradoxical delusional grandiosity, sustained by Christian nationalist movements, that threatens to unravel what postwar America constructed and to push the country into systemic turbulence.

References

Balmer, Randall H. Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Eerdmans, 2021.

Dowland, Seth. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright, 2020.

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In the seminar “Appareils d’État et machines de guerre,” Deleuze maintains that “the State apparatus does not derive from the war machine,” but rather confronts a force that is exterior to it and seeks to capture and convert it into State form. Deleuze’s concept of the war machine can be read as a radicalisation of Engels’ thesis on the State as “public power,” composed of specialised bodies of armed men. Engels’ decisive insight is that the State is not simply the coordination of a community but the institutionalisation of coercion as a separate, continuous capacity: force is detached from the self-organised, armed population and reorganised as a standing apparatus, supported by prisons and by the fiscal means of taxation and debt.

However, Engels does not simply continue his earlier account of the state as a coercive “public power” separated from society; in Anti-Dühring, he gives that concept a transitional logic. Because the state concentrates the organised means of coercion, the proletariat must seize political power and thus the coercive apparatus only in order to convert the socialised means of production into public property “in the first instance.” Engels simultaneously warns that state-ownership under bourgeois rule is merely “national capital.” The point of seizure is therefore to undo the class relation itself, so that, as class antagonisms disappear, the state ceases to be a special repressive force and “dies out,” giving way to the administration of things.

Here, Engels’ formulation tends to treat “armed men” as the internal organ of the State and thus leaves less explicit the problem of how organised force relates to the State as a matter of form: what kind of force is this, where does it come from, and how does it acquire “war” as its object? It is precisely here that Deleuze displaces Engels’ thesis. The war machine is not simply the army. It designates a diagram of collective capacity, including mobility, tactic, coordination, and invention, that is, in principle, external to the State apparatus. Its primary object is not war. In Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, war is a contingent task that emerges at a specific point in the relation between the war machine and the State. That clarification is the radical move: it identifies the threshold at which an exterior capacity, organised around movement and autonomy, comes to target war itself because of the State-form it encounters.

This shift matters because it prevents two common reductions. On the one hand, it avoids treating war as a natural destiny of organised force. On the other hand, it avoids treating the State’s armed bodies as the origin of force. Rather, it allows us to think of the State as an apparatus of capture that continuously seeks to appropriate an exterior capacity and convert it into a standing institution. When the war machine is captured, it becomes the army: disciplined into hierarchy, integrated into administration and logistics, and subordinated to sovereignty. But when it is not captured, when it remains external, mobile, and irreducible to the State’s organisational grammar, it may become war-directed in a much more literal sense. War appears, then, not as an essence but as an outcome of a structural antagonism: the war machine comes to target war because the State compels that confrontation, either by attempting capture or by foreclosing the conditions under which the war machine could remain a different kind of collective capacity.

Deleuze’s contribution is to specify the point of conversion at which organised force becomes war as such. Engels gives the anatomy of the State’s coercive core: coercion separated from society and stabilised as public power. Deleuze provides the morphology of the relation that produces “war” as a task: the war machine is external to the State, the State seeks to capture it, and it is within this relation, this struggle over capture, conversion, and exteriority, that the war machine can be driven to take war itself as its object. This claim refuses the usual picture of war as a conflict between sovereign peoples and instead treats war as a process that turns against the very social body it claims to defend. If the assumption holds that modern war is organised through a public power separated from the people, a monopolised apparatus of coercion rather than the self-armed community, then war no longer expresses the will of a nation. It is conducted in the name of the nation but at its expense. The population appears not as an active subject of war, but as a resource: mobilised, disciplined, taxed, surveilled, sacrificed. In this sense, war is waged on the nation before it is waged for it.

This is why the distinction between external war and internal conflict collapses. Even when the enemy is foreign, the decisive operations of war are directed inward. War reorganises social life through exceptional measures that fracture the population, producing divisions between governable and expendable lives and between loyal and suspect subjects. The “front” thus runs through society itself. For this reason, every war is structurally a civil war: not necessarily a war between factions openly fighting each other, but a war in which the state’s public power asserts itself against the social body, reshaping it through coercion. The nation becomes the terrain of war, not its agent. What appears as international conflict is, at a deeper level, a conflict over the internal ordering of society.

This formulation also explains why wars so often outlive their declared enemies. Once public power is mobilised in the name of war, it acquires a momentum of its own, continuing to discipline and reorganise society even after hostilities end. The war does not simply return home; it was always already there. If war presupposes a separation between power and people, then all wars are, in essence, wars against the nation itself. In short, all wars are civil wars! The radicalisation lies not in abandoning Engels, but in sharpening the dynamics by which public power is formed and by which war becomes thinkable as the product of a specific encounter between a mobile capacity and an apparatus of capture.

In this way, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the war machine does not abandon Engels’ materialist insight into the State’s coercive core; rather, it displaces it into a more dynamic morphology. Engels shows that the State stabilises domination by separating coercion from the population and installing it as an autonomous public power. Deleuze and Guattari reconceptualise the instability that haunts this separation: the very field in which “the people” might be armed is also the field in which an exterior capacity, i.e., the war machine, can be captured, institutionalised, and turned back against those people. The war machine thus articulates the ambivalence Engels confronted: collective arming can be the condition of emancipation, yet it can also be the pathway by which the State reproduces itself as a specialised apparatus.

What makes the Coupang scandal in South Korea feel bigger than “just another breach” is the way it lays bare the political economy that the company has always tried to conceal behind the sheen of Korean Big Tech. The scandal grows not only because something went wrong, but because the company’s response can be read as dismissive of Korean consumers. When a platform becomes part of everyday life, people expect a different level of seriousness: clear information, timely disclosure, and a sense that the firm recognises its dependence on public trust. If the response rather comes across as slow, minimal, or managerial in tone, it easily registers as contempt. In that situation, anger is not only about the incident itself but also about the feeling that consumers are being treated as if they will return anyway.

That attitude is enabled by a widespread belief that big tech represents the most advanced form of capitalism: efficient, innovative, data-driven, and therefore somehow exempt from the ordinary moral and civic expectations placed on older corporate forms. Innovation becomes an alibi. Convenience becomes a substitute for accountability. And because platforms benefit from lock-in effects, network scale, and the difficulty of switching, they can behave as if consumers have few meaningful alternatives. The result is a kind of structural arrogance: not merely a personal tone from executives, but a market position that encourages the firm to treat public criticism as background noise.

The paradox is that this posture looks less like a “future economy” and more like a return of the industrialisation-era corporation. The outward image is modern and frictionless, but the underlying conduct can resemble the older model of aggressive accumulation: opacity until forced to disclose, symbolic compensation rather than full responsibility, reliance on market dominance rather than consent, and a readiness to treat public institutions as obstacles rather than legitimate arbiters. In the Korean context, this evokes a familiar memory of companies that grew quickly by aligning themselves with national modernisation narratives while acting with impunity in practice.

That is why the scandal feels amplified. It is not only a question of technical failure or legal compliance. It becomes a cultural and political flashpoint because it activates a historical resonance: the sense that the new language of advanced capitalism can mask the same old corporate habits, only now backed by data infrastructures and platform dependence that make the imbalance between company and consumer even harder to correct. This reality mercilessly tramples the dreams of megalomaniacs who style themselves as Silicon Valley ideologues. They try to evade criticism by portraying Coupang as a homegrown “Korean” success story, but in reality, it is heavily financed and ultimately accountable to American shareholders.

The reported theft of user data doesn’t merely indicate a failure of cybersecurity. It exposes a general corporate rationality in which speed, scale, and financial trust matter more than public accountability, and in which “trust” is treated as a PR variable to be adjusted after the fact rather than as a structural obligation. Even Coupang’s attempt to close the story with compensation, widely reported as vouchers usable inside Coupang’s own ecosystem, reads less like restitution than an effort to convert crisis into retention.

That is why the CEO/founder’s posture became part of the story. When a firm is effectively embedded in everyday national life, its refusal to submit to democratic scrutiny appears to be a form of corporate sovereignty. In South Korea, criticism intensified because the company’s chair/founder issued public statements while repeatedly declining to appear at parliamentary hearings on the breach. This is the “US-listed, Korea-made” contradiction in miniature: profit is accumulated through Korean infrastructure and labour, while responsibility is displaced through corporate geography, legal jurisdiction, and the protective opacity of transnational governance.

But the more profound intrigue is its management style. Coupang’s branding depends on the fantasy that it is South Korea’s Amazon-like avatar of the future: frictionless convenience, AI-optimised logistics, “customer obsession.” Yet critics repeatedly return to the claim that the “future” is built on an aggressively old logic: discipline, surveillance, and command. The novelty lies not in exploitation itself, but in how digital systems enable it to become continuous, granular, and automated. If 19th-century capital extracted value by watching the worker’s body in the workshop, platform logistics extracts value by watching the worker’s body and their time, route, pace, micro-pauses, and compliance, turning the labour process into a stream of metrics that can be punished, gamified, or optimised in real time.

This is precisely where Cédric Durand’s analysis of the so-called California ideology helps. In Technoféodalisme, he argues that digitalisation has not delivered the emancipatory “new economy” promised by the Silicon Valley consensus; rather, it produces a regression marked by the return of monopolies, deep dependence on platforms, and a blurring of economic and political power. The ideology says: innovation, creativity, decentralisation, entrepreneurial freedom. The material reality is closer to: infrastructural choke points, rent capture, and a workforce governed by algorithmic command. In this sense, “Silicon Valley fantasy” functions as a symbolic justification: it launders coercive labour relations through the moral vocabulary of progress.

Seen from that angle, the data-breach episode is not an accident at the margins of an otherwise “innovative” system. It is almost symptomatic. The platform’s core asset is not simply a marketplace; it is an apparatus that assembles and controls data flows (about customers, space, addresses, routines) and labour flows (about bodies, time, movement). When such a firm mishandles personal data, it reveals the priority order that was already present in normal times: extraction first, safeguards later; expansion first, accountability negotiated only when forced. And when the public response centres on reputational repair. At the same time that lawmakers press for hearings and accountability, we see a clash between two regimes of legitimacy: shareholder time (quarterly, forward-looking) versus democratic time (answerable, retrospective, punitive when necessary).

Such confrontations are rarely “new.” What changes is the costume. Across the long history of humankind, you can see the same recurring scene: a powerful actor accumulates wealth or authority by enclosing a common space (land, labour, time, information), and then a counter-force emerges, such as workers, citizens, rivals, lawmakers, or insurgents, demanding limits, recognition, and accountability. The confrontation becomes a spectacle because it is not only a struggle over material interests but also a struggle over legitimacy. Each side must appear as the rightful guardian of order: the ruler claims necessity (“without us, there is chaos”), and the governed claim justice (“without limits, there is tyranny”).

That is why these conflicts repeat with almost ritual regularity. Empires stage parades and trials to dramatise sovereignty; churches stage heresy hearings to define orthodoxy; monarchies stage punishments to make authority visible; modern states stage elections and commissions; corporations stage apologies and “internal investigations.” The forms differ, but the function is familiar: to convert a crisis of power into a public narrative that stabilises power.

In the contemporary platform economy, the spectacle is sharpened by speed and media saturation. A scandal unfolds as a choreography of statements, hearings, leaks, hashtags, press conferences, and carefully timed “remedies.” The point is not only to resolve the issue but also to control the frame: Is this an unfortunate exception or evidence of systemic abuse? Is the firm a national champion, or a transnational extractor? Is the CEO a visionary, or an unaccountable sovereign? So when you say “Such confrontations are a spectacle,” you’re naming something crucial: conflict is rarely allowed to remain purely conflict. It is staged, narrated, and aestheticised because public perception is itself a field of power. History teaches that the outcome is often decided not just in courts, streets, or workplaces, but in the battle over what the confrontation means.

The Coupang case is a concrete demonstration of the broader claim: platform capitalism often rebrands 19th-century domination through 21st-century interfaces. The warehouse returns as the factory; the foreman returns as the dashboard; Taylorist time-motion discipline returns as “productivity indicators.” Meanwhile, the public is told to read this as “innovation.” Durand’s contribution is to insist that we treat that storyline not as an innocent misunderstanding but as ideology in the strict sense: a story that makes domination appear as inevitability, and exploitation appear as modernisation. The scandal merely tears back the curtain, revealing the machinery of command that has always been there.

1. Introduction

The aftermath of World War II delivered severe criticism to the European Enlightenment, as exemplified by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ironically, it was French philosophy, rather than German thought, that mounted the most forceful critique of the German critical philosophical tradition in the name of science, the very foundation of the Enlightenment itself. This critique, however, did not entail a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values, but rather a reexamination from a global perspective. I propose that structuralism catalysed this paradigm shift. This essay will argue that structuralism provided the conceptual basis for the displacement of French phenomenology. Furthermore, it will demonstrate that the rise of structuralism was essentially associated with post-war American efforts to restructure capitalism.

A key moment in French theory occurred when Claude Lévi-Strauss encountered Roman Jakobson in New York in 1940. Rather than merely a meeting between a linguist and an anthropologist, this historical episode stands for a dramatic collaboration formed by specific post-World War II conditions and furthered by the proceedings of the Cold War. As poststructuralism rose to prominence, Lévi-Strauss faded into obscurity, reduced to an overlooked and dismissed figure. Still, his contribution to the history of French theory would be difficult to underestimate, and his connection to Jakobson and the legacy of Russian Formalism was fundamental to the new intellectual movement.

After 1928, Russian Formalist concepts flourished most prominently beyond the Soviet Union, with Jakobson emerging as a prominent figure in the movement. Widely acknowledged for his influential contributions, the Russian-born linguist played a central role in developing Formalist ideas, particularly in Prague, where he fostered Czech structuralism, and later in New York, where he introduced Lévi-Strauss to structuralist linguistics. A vital element of this is Jakobson’s proficiency in organising and promoting scholarly exchange through scholarly circles. He co-founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915, the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926, and the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1944. Indeed, this historical origin of structuralism in Russian Formalism is well known and draws little attention.

However, what if, concealed within the textbook history of 20th-century French theory, lies an absorbing and intriguing historical truth? History tends to fade into oblivion and crumble into ruins. Yet, these remnants echo an unwritten past, vanquished and obliterated in the throes of power struggles. I have long believed that theory is nothing less than the embodiment of such ruins. Far from a purely intellectual movement, structuralism reveals a surprising entanglement with the postwar order and the Cold War’s icy grip. The Marshall Plan, wielding pragmatism and technocracy as weapons against communism’s expansion, served as an unexpected catalyst for the birth of structuralism. A collaborative effort between the Rockefeller Foundation and “a worldwide fraternity of scientists” steered this effort behind the scenes (Geoghegan 2011, 102).

Jakobson’s and Lévi-Strauss’s growing interest in cybernetics and information theory coincided with their affiliation with the Rockefeller Foundation, a staunch supporter of scientific research in those fields. The foundation viewed these disciplines as interrelated components of a broader initiative for global scientific reform. This reform addressed social and political issues by applying expert-led, rational solutions to replace partisan disagreement with objective scientific analysis using impartial tools and methods. The “Great American Mission” had many aspects, with interpretations varying by historical background, and the Marshall Plan was one of the projects tied to the wider mission. A key motivation was to contain Soviet dominance in Western Europe. With war-torn countries at war, they were seen as vulnerable to communist ideologies. This process aligned with the Establishment’s ambition to consolidate its push ahead in the postwar period.

2. The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation

The postwar Establishment’s historical roots and cohesion can be traced to its achievements in winning World War II, formulating and executing the Marshall Plan, establishing NATO, and dealing with the Soviet Union. Their collective policy aimed to oppose isolationism and endorse a form of liberal internationalism. They discouraged national chauvinism while advocating for American power, supported restraint but admired the application of advanced military technology, and acted conscientiously without letting it hinder robust action. Their shared ambition was nothing short of assuming “the moral and political leadership of the world,” a goal aimed at filling the void left by the decline of the British Empire (Parmar 2012, 17).

On the surface, the Marshall Plan aimed to create stability and foster liberalism, making them less susceptible to communist appeals. The plan provided aid to recuperate infrastructure, revive industries, and modernise economies, facilitating economic growth and prosperity, seen as essential for democratic institutions to flourish. By assisting European countries in adopting free-market principles, the U.S. hoped to establish them as reliable trading partners and allies in a global capitalist system. Through this process, they expected a strong, economically interconnected Europe to serve U.S. interests by creating a stable international order conducive to trade and global prosperity. In this way, the Marshall Plan helped solidify American leadership in this new order, displaying its economic and political power and building diplomatic and economic partnerships with Western European nations.

With the Cold War in full swing, financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, guided by mathematician and anti-communist Warren Weaver, a director of the foundation’s Natural Sciences Division, became crucial for the U.S. to advance its international agenda. Weaver’s influence transcended theory (e.g., The Mathematical Theory of Communication with Claude Shannon). It profoundly shaped the postwar restructuring of global knowledge production, making him an essential figure in historical analysis. He sincerely believed that the scientific mind effectively stabilises misplaced political passions, prejudices, and the havoc they cause. In his famous memorandum in 1933, Weaver stated that “science is a leading influence in the development of a factual outlook, of a healthy and flexible scepticism, and of objectivity and tolerance in the appraisal of evidence.” Therefore, “there is the contribution to international friendliness and understanding that results from a worldwide fraternity of scientists with their unifying bond of impersonal and unselfish interest and understanding” (Weaver 1933).

Fuelled by Weaver’s Enlightenment-inspired scientific optimism and the broader liberal trend of technological faith, the Rockefeller Foundation cast social challenges as engineering puzzles. They envisioned social scientists not as scholars or activists but as “apolitical technicians” shaping legal systems, media, and social programmes like welfare and hygiene into instruments of social control (Parmar 2012, 201). In 1936, the Rockefeller Foundation redirected its focus to humanities research, prioritising cold scientific methods and technology over conventional areas such as language studies and interpretation. Funding for disciplines like philology, exegesis, and hermeneutics ceased, with a shift towards practical applications associated with mass media and communication technologies. Rockefeller Foundation programmes funded researchers like I.A. Richards, Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodor W. Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer to build film and photography archives, analyse broadcasts, introduce micro-photography in libraries, and design public education via film and radio. They also welcomed European scientists fleeing World War II, aiming to create a lasting interdisciplinary network abroad. However, the focus on “new media gadgetry” sometimes clashed with scholars’ intellectual preferences. The publication of Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947 would shed light on how this tension manifested.

Lévi-Strauss was an ambivalent figure, both a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for this liberal revival and at odds with its ethos. His adept navigation between political administration and social science caught the attention of the U.S. Federal government. Before he arrived in the United States, an unidentified individual from Poughkeepsie, New York, sent a postcard to J. Edgar Hoover, labelling Lévi-Strauss as part of a group of “Jewish international communists,” bringing him to the FBI’s notice. As Lévi-Strauss assumed the centre’s management at the École Libre, the FBI began monitoring his mail and conducting inquiries in New York. They meticulously documented Lévi-Strauss’ pre-war activities in Latin America, his role at the École Libre, and his various engagements in advising and delivering speeches for the U.S. government. Hoover expressed concern in a memo, citing an informant’s recent claim that Lévi-Strauss and his colleague, Surrealist André Breton, were “closely connected with a group in Mexico which is very bad, having something on their minds different from what the rest of us have on our minds” (Geoghegan 2020, 61).

Against the FBI’s suspicion, Lévi-Strauss arrived in New York in late May 1941, carrying a crate filled with ethnographic materials, personal belongings, and a modest amount of currency. The protracted journey into exile, which had commenced a year earlier in the seemingly peaceful woods behind the Maginot Line, had finally concluded. He registered at the New School for Social Research, which had assumed the role of a welcoming hub, aiding disoriented exiles in finding their footing. By his arrival, approximately thirty thousand French individuals had sought refuge in New York. Among them were affluent émigrés avoiding the disruptions of war, as well as impoverished artists and academics (Mehlman 2000, 181-196). A burgeoning scene of French newspapers, journals, and a modest book publishing industry was emerging, accompanied by concerts, exhibitions, and plays featuring French artists. André Breton was a conduit through which he could get into the group of Surrealists from Europe, and his welcome opened New York’s artistic underground to Lévi-Strauss (Mehlman 2000, 190). Just as he seemed to have found a new home in this exile of avant-garde art, he met Jakobson, who set him on a new path.

3. Jakobson and Cybernetics

Fluent in a dozen languages and a prominent member of both the Moscow and Prague linguistic schools, Jakobson had recently immersed himself in New York, a milieu that had for a long time been his natural habitat. This environment blended academia and modern art, lecture halls, bohemia, avant-garde poetry, and the emerging field of structural linguistic analysis. During his time in revolutionary Moscow, Jakobson associated with futurists, and in Prague, he engaged with Czech surrealists and modernist cabaret artists. He even engaged in anthropology, exploring folklore in and around Moscow alongside the Russian ethnologist Petr Bogatyrev. Further, the actual encounter between Lévi-Strauss and cybernetics occurred through Jakobson. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, both Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss found inspiration in the emerging fields of cybernetics and information theory, pioneered by Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, respectively.

Lévi-Strauss explicitly acknowledges this influence in his work, particularly in “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws,” a symposium presentation in 1949 that was later published in 1951, and in “The Mathematics of Man” in 1954. In the former, he outlines his model of social life, depicting it as composed of systems of exchange and interplay across kinship, the economy, and language. At the 1952 Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists in Bloomington, Indiana, Lévi-Strauss presented a paper titled “Toward a General Theory of Communication,” and his overview of the conference from the anthropological perspective appeared in Structural Anthropology under the title “Linguistics and Anthropology.” To quote:

We find that in the Indo-European case we have a very simple structure (marriage rules), but that the elements (social organisation) which must be arranged in this structure are numerous and complicated, whereas in the Sino-Tibetan case the opposite prevails: We have a very complicated structure (marriage rules), with two different sets of rules, and the elements (social organisation) are few. And to the separation between the structure and the elements correspond, on the level of terminology – which is a linguistic level – antithetic features as to the framework (subjective versus objective) and to the terms themselves (numerous versus few). Now it seems to me that if we formulate the situation in these terms, it is at least possible to start a useful discussion with the linguists. While I was making this chart, I could not but remember what R. Jakobson said at yesterday’s session about the structure of the Indo-European language: a great discrepancy between form and substance, a great many irregularities in relation to the rules, and considerable freedom regarding the choice of means to express the same idea. Are not all these traits similar to those we have singled out with respect to social structure? (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 79)

This quote shows that Lévi-Strauss establishes Jakobson’s linguistics as a scientific foundation for general theories of social structure. He was fascinated by Jakoson’s theory of language. In an interview with Didier Éribon, Lévi-Strauss confessed that he was a naïve structuralist doing structuralism without knowing it. For him, Jakobson revealed the solid ground of doctrine already established in a discipline: linguistics, which he had never practised (Éribon 1991). From this perspective, he adopted the term “structural anthropology,” borrowing “structural” directly from linguistics rather than from the “structural-functional” approach of British anthropology. In doing so, he asserted the existence of expansive new domains for Saussurean linguistics. Lévi-Strauss, drawing heavily from linguistic methods, aimed to establish a common framework.

However, Lévi-Strauss’s acceptance of structuralism was singular. It was that he saw structuralism as a kind of extension of naturalism, a view that diverged from many structuralists at the time. While the extension of linguistic structuralism to all human sciences was welcomed eagerly by many, the naturalistic perspective was generally regarded as improper, a kind of intellectual misstep best left unacknowledged. Without explicitly mentioning Lévi-Strauss but referencing him, François Wahl, in the introductory chapter of Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? In 1968, he cautioned against what he saw as a threat to structuralism: a return to naturalism (Wahl 1968, 334). Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss persisted resolutely, consistently emphasising a naturalistic viewpoint throughout his work. In La Pensée sauvage in 1966, he contemplated the reintegration of “culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico-chemical conditions” (Lévi-Strauss 2021, 281). In The View from Afar in 1985, while distancing himself from the naïve and simplistic naturalism of sociobiology, he conceived a potential convergence of the sciences of nature and culture, from the most fundamental mechanisms of life to the most intricate human phenomena. He argued:

Today, advances in neurology give hope of resolving very old philosophical problems, such as the origin of geometric notions. But if first the eye and then the lateral genicular bodies do not photograph objects but react selectively to abstract relationships – a horizontal, a vertical, or an oblique direction; the contrast between a figure and its background; and other such primary data from which the cortex reconstructs object – it therefore no longer makes sense to ask whether geometric notions belong to a world of Platonic ideas or are drawn from experience: these notions are inscribed in the body. Likewise, if the universality of articulate speech in man is due to the existence of certain cerebral structures peculiar to our species, then, like these structures themselves, the aptitude for articulate speech must have a genetic basis. (Lévi-Strauss 1985, 31-32)

These statements depict the logical development of Lévi-Strauss’s adoption of cybernetics and information theory as an integrated discipline that combines linguistics and anthropology. The two books that formalised the theory of cybernetics are Wiener’s Cybernetics and Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structure cannot be separated from the notion of communication in the latter. In the book, Shannon and Weaver defined communication as “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another,” including “not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behaviour” (Shannon 1963, 3).

Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualisation of structure was initially inspired by Jakobson’s linguistics and further influenced by Shannon’s information theory. According to Shannon and Weaver, information “must not be confused with meaning” (Shannon 1963, 8). In their communication theory, “information” is more closely linked to what one can express rather than what one does express. In essence, information serves as a measure of one’s freedom of choice when selecting a message. When faced with a basic situation requiring a choice between two messages, it is arbitrarily stated that the information associated with this situation is unity. It is essential to recognise that describing one or the other message as conveying unit information can be misleading, although it is often convenient. The concept of information does not apply to individual messages as the concept of meaning would; instead, it pertains to the entire situation. Unit information signifies that, in this particular situation, one possesses a degree of freedom of choice in selecting a message, which is conventionally treated as a standard or unit amount.

4. French Theory and Cybernetics

Recollecting his memory in New York in 1941, Lévi-Strauss himself clarified that “I learned that Claude Shannon had also lived there, but on an upper story and facing the street,” and then “only a few yards apart, he was creating cybernetics and I was writing Elementary Structures of Kinship” (Lévi-Strauss 1985, 260). Although he did not know it then, the strange man’s theory about creating an “artificial brain” would later shape Lévi-Strauss’s path when he met Jakobson. According to their correspondence, Jakobson sent Lévi-Strauss Shannon and Weaver’s book. In the letter, Lévi-Strauss wrote that “I literally devoured the Mathematical Theory, etc,” and emphasised that

The immense interest of the book is precisely to give a theory of thought from the point of view of the machine, i.e., for the first time, I think, considered as an object. Under these conditions, it is normal for everything to be upside down, but it is pretty hard to get used to. In any case, I have learnt a lot from it and come up with a lot of suggestions, particularly for applying these methods to the study of mythical thought; and if I could find an understanding mathematician here, I think I would manage to make some very curious progress in the study of myths. (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss 2018, 129: my translation)

Lévi-Strauss sought to establish a unified science by introducing cybernetic theory into anthropology. Interestingly, this aligns with the thinking of Wiener, who wrote Cybernetics, where the author argued that “the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man’s land between the various established fields” (Wiener 1965, 4). Wiener envisioned a theory of cybernetics as a general theory that could communicate with each other across the scientific jargon that was locked in the narrow confines of this specialisation; Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was setting the same goal.

Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory was further clarified in “The Mathematics of Man,” which was published as an introductory piece for a special edition of the International Social Science Bulletin, sponsored by UNESCO, dedicated to the intersection of mathematics and the social sciences. The article discusses how Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication serves as a cohesive element across disciplines, not only by encouraging data extrapolation and quantitative analysis in the social sciences, but also by incorporating Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “qualitative mathematics.” This “mathematics of man” involves representing social mechanisms as equations akin to the objective formulas found in fields such as macroeconomics and demography.

According to him, the past challenge in studying qualitative aspects required either intricate manipulation or excessive simplification when approached quantitatively. Contemporary mathematics addresses this by establishing precise relationships among classes with discontinuous values. The emerging mathematics specific to human phenomena aims to diverge from the traditional social sciences’ reliance on “great numbers” and graphing continuous movements. Instead, it focuses on studying small numbers and the significant changes occurring during transitions between them. From this perspective, he argued that “this mathematics of man – to be discovered along lines that neither mathematicians nor sociologists have as yet been able to determine exactly, and which is, no doubt, still to be elaborated to a very large extent – will, in any event, be very different from the mathematics which the social sciences once sought to use to express their observations in precise terms” (Lévi-Strauss 2008, 22). This “different mathematics” was the essence of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism.

Indeed, Jakobson had a decisive influence on these theoretical advancements of Lévi-Strauss. It is important that this was not only personal but embedded in the context of the institution of knowledge production in the U. S. and France at that time. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the linguist brought the enthusiastic anthropologist into contact with cybernetics and information theory. In 1949, after World War II, Jakobson embraced elements of cybernetics and information theory in a successful effort to secure research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, envisioning them as the future of the human sciences. Jakobson had an extensive intellectual network in the French-speaking world. His association with Lévi-Strauss gained notice in postwar French intellectual circles due to Jakobson’s influential role in the Prague School of Linguistics and later as a professor at Harvard and MIT, contributing to the revival of Ferdinand de Saussure’s work (Kline 2015, 142).

In 1948, Jakobson attended the Macy Conference on cybernetics as a guest. This was a result of the insistence of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, who had been involved with the conference from its earliest days, that social scientists should be actively invited to participate in solving “the fault lines between the natural sciences and the social sciences” at the Macy Conference on cybernetics (Kline 2015, 37). Their efforts have enabled the Macy Conference to expand its role beyond the realm of the natural sciences. In addressing the challenges of cross-disciplinary communication and emphasising communication over research collaboration in interdisciplinarity, the Macy Conference played a pivotal role in advancing cybernetics and information theory within the social sciences and biology. These conferences served as a crucial platform for leading scholars from diverse fields to convene regularly between 1946 and 1953, spanning ten meetings, and explore the application of concepts from cybernetics and information theory beyond mathematics and engineering.

Established in 1930 to support medical research, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation played a role in advancing interdisciplinary research in the United States, aligning with a broader movement initiated by the Social Science Research Council in the 1920s to integrate various social science disciplines. During the 1930s, Weaver, heading the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, as has been discussed, funded the application of physics and chemistry to biology, laying the groundwork for the emergence of molecular biology as a research area. The success of physics during World War II presented opportunities and challenges for promoting interdisciplinary approaches. In 1949, Frank Fremont-Smith, the medical director of the Macy Foundation, conveyed to the cybernetics group that the foundation’s conference program aimed to address the imperative of breaking down barriers between disciplines and fostering interdisciplinary communication (Kline 2015, 39). According to Kline, “he was overjoyed that the group had finally taken the psychiatrists’ notion of the unconscious seriously” (Kline 2015, 64). This was particularly challenging between the physical and biological sciences on one side and the psychological and social sciences on the other.

Fremont-Smith emphasised the urgency of the issue, noting that the rapid development of the physical sciences, outpacing the social sciences, posed a serious risk of potential social misuse hindering further progress in civilisation. The cybernetics group organisers believed their field could contribute by providing a shared language to bridge the communication gap between the natural and social sciences. In contrast to more narrowly focused venues, the Macy conferences aimed at integrating cybernetics and information theory into a comprehensive discipline. (Kline 2015, 38). The challenging interdisciplinary exchanges at the Macy conferences, involving mathematicians, engineers, physiologists, and social scientists, underscored the difficulties and complex issues inherent in merging these fields. These interactions revealed the ongoing debates between proponents and sceptics of cybernetics and information theory, highlighting the potential and limitations of these emerging disciplines.

At Jakobson’s urging, Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation sent literature on information theory and cybernetics to Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan in Paris. Both theorists incorporated the ideas of cybernetics and information theory into their writings, seriously grappling with the rise of these technocratic frameworks. The Rockefeller Foundation’s communication with Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson reflected a decades-long effort to promote technocratic approaches in French social science. The École Libre, a crucial step in this series of efforts, cultivated a distinguished group of Francophone researchers open to interdisciplinary empirical research. The collective works of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan played a significant role in defining structuralist methodologies in France. Their shared embrace of cybernetic themes significantly contributed to establishing the terminology of cybernetics in postwar France.

Lévi-Strauss interpreted Marcel Mauss’s social theory, suggesting that primitive gift-giving practices constituted systems of cybernetic communication. This interpretation paved the way for conflating linguistic, economic, social, and technological “communication systems,” fostering a technocratic worldview. This perspective, in turn, blurred essential distinctions between technical and linguistic communications in the works of diverse thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Félix Guattari (Geoghegan 2020, 56). Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is not merely a relic of the past, surpassed by poststructuralism. Instead, it remains a significant presence in contemporary discourse, as the challenges it presented endure.

Structuralism aimed to uncover the fundamental rules governing symbolic systems by scrutinising their organisation and interconnections. At the core of Levi-Strauss’s philosophy lies the notion that human beings should be understood as fundamental elements of the natural world, formed by biological and physical elements that determine their existence. This determination occurs through unconscious processes of human intellectual activity, deeply rooted in our biological makeup and the brain’s physiological conditions. Consequently, the development of culture simply represents the realisation of a preexisting underlying system inherent in nature. The adherence of the human mind to natural laws enables the emergence of exchange, the fundamental driver of social interaction, and the attribution of meaning. Thus, symbolism, exchange, and signification are inherently linked to nature, forming an inseparable and continuous association. Formerly perceived as a theoretical limitation of Lévi-Strauss, this naturalistic perspective now functions as a crucial subject for reconsideration in a world that calls for a new perspective on nature, prompting a reevaluation of his structuralist approach.

5. Conclusion

Structuralism entailed the thorough classification of system elements, comprehension of their interrelations, and recognition of patterns as initial steps toward comprehension. In a paradoxical turn, poststructuralism employs structuralist methods to deconstruct the implicit logic that underpins structuralism. The crucial distinction between structuralism and poststructuralism resides in their attitudes toward communication. Poststructuralism ultimately differs from Lévi-Strauss’s notion, rejecting the belief that societal processes can be linguistically represented. While the extent to which poststructuralism constitutes a fundamental departure from structuralism is debatable, it cannot be denied that poststructuralism owes its existence to the foundation established by structuralism. Poststructuralism emerged as a theoretical current seeking to reexamine cybernetics and information theory, particularly challenging the mathematisation of knowledge, as critiqued by Lévi-Strauss. It extends the limits of what Lévi-Strauss referred to as “the mathematics of man.” In today’s context, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence and automation, the issues structuralism confronted in the past resurface, underscoring the lasting significance of the French engagement with technology from the 1960s.

References

Éribon, Didier. 1991. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Trans. Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. 2011. “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn 2011), pp. 96-126 (p. 102).

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. 2020. “Textocracy, or, the Cybernetic Logic of French Theory.” History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 33(1), pp. 52-79.

Jakobson, Roman and Claude Lévi-Strauss. 2018. Correspondance 1942-1982. Paris : Seuil.

Kline, Ronald R. 2015. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2008. “Human Mathematics.” The UNESCO Courier. No. 5, pp. 21-24.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. The View from Afar. Trans. Joachim Neurgroschel and Phoebe Hoss. New York: Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2021. Wild Thought. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. 2000. Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Parmar, Inderjeet. 2012. Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wahl, François, et. al. 1968. Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?. Paris: Seuil.

Weaver, Warren. 1933. “The Benefits from Science—Science and Foundation Program—The Proposed Program.” 27 Jan. Rockefeller Foundation Collection. New York.

Wiener, Norbert. 1965. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Nick Nesbitt’s Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians and Jason Read’s The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work can be read as two complementary attempts to think Spinoza and Marx together, but they operate on very different terrains. Nesbitt works inside the conceptual machinery of Reading Capital, asking what a Spinozist, non-Hegelian dialectic actually looks like; Read, by contrast, brings Spinoza and Marx to bear on the concrete politics of work in contemporary capitalism.

In Nesbitt’s account, the “encounter” between Spinoza and Marx is mediated by Althusser and his collaborators. The central question is not simply whether Reading Capital “uses” Spinoza, but how its project of a science of capital depends on a Spinozist reworking of dialectics. As Nesbitt puts it very clearly in the introduction, his book “analyses the theory of a materialist dialectic as it is developed in the writings of Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou, focusing on their singular analyses of Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics” (p. XII).

He meticulously traces how Althusser, Balibar, and others attempt to construct a “materialist dialectic” that abandons Hegelian negativity, contradiction, and reconciliation. Remaining “faithful to Althusser’s essential identification of Marx’s synthetic, materialist dialectic,” Nesbitt insists that this is “a dialectic excluding totality, negation, and contradiction” (p. XII). Drawing on Spinoza’s concepts of substance, attributes and modes, Nesbitt shows that Reading Capital seeks a positive logic of capitalist totality: the economy, politics and ideology are distinct fields whose relations are immanent rather than subordinated moments in a teleological process.

This yields a particular image of Spinozist Marxism. Dialectic becomes a matter of mapping structural determinations and their effects, rather than narrating a drama of alienation and its overcoming. Nesbitt is firm when he demonstrates how this project runs up against its own limits: the risk of turning Spinoza’s monism into a flattening of differences, the tension between structural determination and historical contingency, and the difficulty of articulating political practice from within a highly formal theory of totality. The book is demanding, but it repays close reading with a precise understanding of what “anti-Hegelian” and “Spinozist” meant in the Althusserian moment.

In Nesbitt’s telling, Spinoza doesn’t enter French Marxism as a “nice influence” or a fashionable detour; “Spinozism” enters because a set of problems inside French Marxism can’t be solved with the usual inherited tools—Hegelian dialectic, moralised humanism, or a philosophy of history that guarantees outcomes. Spinoza becomes necessary at the point where French Marxism seeks to remain rigorously materialist while also accounting for how subjects, beliefs, and collective passions are produced and how they can be transformed, without reintroducing a sovereign Subject, a transcendent norm, or a teleology.

In this sense, Spinoza supplies what French Marxism sought in the mid-century rupture with “humanism”: a materialism without an expressive, interior self. If the “human” is not a foundational essence but an effect of social relations, then philosophy needs an ontology in which individuals are not self-grounding atoms but modes, finite configurations of relations, capacities, and constraints. Spinoza’s account of individuals as relational compositions (what a body can do, how it is affected, how it persists) provides Marxism with a way to describe subjectivity as produced rather than presupposed. This dovetails with the Althusserian demand for a theory in which the subject is an effect of structures and practices rather than the origin of history.

Spinoza also offers French Marxism a non-Hegelian concept of determination, one that helps with the classic Marxist headache: how to think causality in a complex social totality without reducing everything to linear cause-and-effect. Spinoza’s immanent causality maps neatly onto the attempt to conceptualise a social formation as a structured whole whose elements mutually condition one another. Cause is not “outside” its effects; effects remain within the causal order, In this register, Spinoza is “introduced” not as metaphysics for its own sake, but as a way to make sense of structural causality, overdetermination, and the fact that ideology, law, and culture are not mere “reflections,” but fundamental material forces in the reproduction of social relations.

Further, Spinoza becomes indispensable once ideology is treated seriously, not as “error” removable by education, but as a durable, affective attachment. Spinoza allows French Marxism to explain why domination persists even when people know they are dominated: because social power operates through the production and organisation of affects, and because the imagination is a fundamental component of collective life, not a mere cognitive defect. In other words, Spinoza provides a theory of how “imaginary relations” are lived materially, through bodies, habits, and passions; so ideology critique becomes a question of transforming affective economies, not merely correcting ideas.

Indeed, Spinoza gives French Marxism a different picture of emancipation. Instead of freedom as moral will or historical destiny, freedom becomes an increase in collective power and adequacy: the capacity to act, to understand the causes of one’s affects, and to organise everyday life through more enabling compositions. That shift matters politically: it reframes revolution less as the fulfilment of a guaranteed historical script and more as the construction of new forms of common power, new institutions, practices, solidarities, and affective arrangements that materially change what bodies and groups can do.

So when Nesbitt clarifies the way in which Spinoza was necessarily introduced into French Marxism, the claim is: French Marxism needed an ontology of immanence that blocks the return of the sovereign subject, a model of determination fit for complex social totalities, an affective-material theory of ideology, and a non-teleological concept of emancipation as the production of collective capacity. Spinoza is the philosopher who, in that conjuncture, could carry all four demands at once.

Nesbitt’s “contextualisation” does two things at once: it shows where Spinozist Marxism sits in the postwar intellectual landscape, and it shows why that position keeps mattering, because the Spinoza revival is not just an archival return but a recurring political symptom of crises in how the Left thinks causality, subject formation, and collective agency.

Nesbitt’s description of “theoretical geography” is that postwar Europe should not be pictured as a single, unified continent of “Western Marxism.” The usual label often compresses a very uneven terrain into one dominant story: after the defeats of revolutionary politics in Western Europe, Marxism becomes philosophical mainly and academic, and its primary conceptual language becomes Hegelian, especially in the wake of Lukács, with his emphasis on totality, mediation, reification, and the possibility of class consciousness as the standpoint that can grasp the whole.

Against that flattening, Nesbitt invites us to treat the period as a field of competing problem-spaces. For Nesbitt, Reading Capital matters because it doesn’t merely “reinterpret” Marx; it retools what counts as Marxism in the French postwar conjuncture (pp. 5-6). It becomes crucial precisely insofar as it generates a form of Marxism that is not simply another variant of Western Marxism’s familiar Hegelian lineage, nor a reiteration of party orthodoxy. Instead, it inaugurates a distinct French configuration: a Marxism organised around epistemology, structural causality, and immanence, rather than around the drama of historical Spirit, expressive totality, or the moral vocabulary of humanism.

On this view, Reading Capital is the text that formalises a decisive break: Marxism must be read as a rigorous science of social formations, not as a philosophy of history or a politics of the Subject. That is why Althusser’s emphasis on “symptomatic reading,” the “epistemological break,” and, most importantly for Nesbitt, “structural causality,” becomes foundational (p. 6). Causality is no longer conceived as linear determination or dialectical negation moving history forward; it is the immanent efficacy of a structured whole whose effects appear in uneven, displaced, and overdetermined ways. In that sense, Reading Capital authorises a “positive” or non-negational dialectic: the real produces effects without needing to pass through the theatre of contradiction-as-negation.

This is also what uniquely separates postwar French Marxism from other Marxist traditions in Nesbitt’s mapping. Where some strands centre political economy, class consciousness, or cultural critique, the Althusserian intervention centres “the conditions of intelligibility of Marx,” how Marx’s categories work, how an object like “the capitalist mode of production” is constructed, how ideology and reproduction operate as material forces, and how method is inseparable from politics. The Spinozist relay is decisive here: Spinoza provides the conceptual resources for immanence and non-expressive determination, allowing Reading Capital to propose a Marxism that refuses both humanist interiority and Hegelian teleology, while still claiming maximal explanatory power.

So when Nesbitt treats Reading Capital as crucial, he is saying: this text is the hinge through which French Marxism became a different kind of theoretical project, with its own commitments, i.e., anti-historicism, anti-humanism, and anti-teleology, its own causal logic such as immanence and structure, and its own ambition to reactivate Marx’s materialist dialectic as an epistemological breakthrough rather than as a moral or cultural worldview.

The loudly reiterated charge of “theoreticism” has often reduced this dismissal to a dogmatic, idealist overreach, consigning Reading Capital to the dustbin of history. Against this received commonplace, the book insists that we look beyond the more familiar and readily sanctioned Althusserian motifs and return instead to the text’s uncompromising, categorical epistemological claims, to recover, pursue, and fully reactivate the remarkable productivity that Althusser and his virtuoso students first set in motion.

Therefore, what matters is not only what texts thinkers read, but what problems they were trying to solve: how to explain the durability of capitalist rule, how social formations reproduce themselves, how ideology works as a material force, how subjects are formed and attached, and how political organisation is possible without relying on guarantees supplied by a philosophy of history. On this map, “Hegelian Marxism” is one region among others, not the universal grammar of “the West.”

The borders become visible when examining how different traditions organise causality and agency. In a Lukács-derived zone, the political and epistemic wager is often tied to mediation and totality: reification can be overcome if the proletariat, or a collective agent aligned with it, attains a standpoint capable of grasping the total social process. In the French Spinozist/structuralist zone that Nesbitt tracks, the problem is reframed: the subject is not a given bearer of emancipation but an effect of practices, institutions, and ideological apparatuses, and causality must be thought without slipping back into teleology or an expressive totality. Spinoza becomes essential here because immanent causality and an account of affects allow Marxism to theorise reproduction, attachment, and collective composition without reinstalling a sovereign Subject.

Seeing the landscape this way also clarifies that these are not merely “schools” distinguished by taste. They are responses to different conjunctures and strategic dilemmas, i.e., Cold War pressures, Stalinism and anti-Stalinism, decolonisation, transformations of labour and social reproduction, and crises of political organisation. Theoretical difference, in Nesbitt’s mapping, is therefore also political difference: each problem-space implies a different diagnosis of domination and a different imagination of how emancipatory capacity might be built.

Historically, Spinozist Marxism in France becomes legible as a relay point between several pressures: the exhaustion of certain Hegelian dialectical idioms; the need to theorise ideology, reproduction, and the social production of subjectivity without falling back into moral psychology; the Cold War situation in which “humanism” is both a resource and a trap; and the encounter with decolonisation and mass politics that forces Marxism to think organisation, belief, and collective desire as material forces rather than mere “superstructure.” In that map, Spinoza is not a decorative reference but a means of retooling Marxism to address problems that a philosophy of history or a voluntarist theory of revolution couldn’t adequately address.

That mapping also clarifies why France becomes a crucial site for this strand. In Nesbitt’s framing, the French uptake of Spinoza is tied to a distinctive postwar configuration: intense disputes over Stalinism and anti-Stalinism, a philosophical struggle over “the subject,” and an attempt to conceptualise determination and mediation without teleology. Spinoza offers an immanent ontology and a theory of affects that enable Marxism to address how subjects are constituted, how consent and attachment endure, and how collective power can be composed, without presuming a sovereign will or a guaranteed dialectical outcome. So “Spinozist Marxism” appears as a regional solution to a continental problem: how to be materialist about politics and about subjectivity.

From this perspective, the political meaning of today’s Spinoza revival becomes clearer. The revival is attractive now for structurally similar reasons: contemporary capitalism governs as much through affects and micro-disciplines as through wages and law. Spinoza’s vocabulary, such as composition of bodies, powers to act, imagination as a social force, and affects as vectors of attachment, seems uniquely suited to diagnosing why people stay invested in arrangements that harm them, and why “knowledge” alone rarely breaks ideological grips. In that sense, the revival indexes a renewed urgency around how power recruits desire.

Nesbitt’s contextualisation also helps distinguish two different political uses of Spinoza today. One is diagnostic: Spinoza as an analytics of governance, ideology, and affective capture. The other is constructive: Spinoza as a repertoire for thinking institutions of the common, collective empowerment, and non-sovereign organisation. Seeing where Spinoza functioned in postwar France helps you evaluate which of these uses you’re inheriting, and whether the current revival risks becoming purely academic or can be reconnected to questions of strategy, organisation, and material transformation.

Not surprisingly, Read’s The Double Shift takes as its point of departure precisely the practical insight that Nesbitt’s book brings to the fore. Read shifts the focus from the form of theory to the lived realities of work. He argues that work today is not only an economic category but also an ethical norm and affective apparatus: one is obliged to work, to want to work, to treat work as the basis of social worth. The introduction opens with the blunt observation that “work is all around us. For most of us, it is the basis of our economic life through wage labour. It is the condition for procuring food, clothing, and shelter.” He immediately adds that work “is also embedded in our culture, society, and politics,” so that it comes to be “at the center of economic, political, and ethical life.” (“Introduction”).

To grasp this “double shift,” i.e., work as both exploitation and moral demand, Read argues that we must abandon a rigid base/superstructure model and instead treat the economic and the ideological as immanently intertwined. As he writes, “understanding and engaging critically with this situation entails moving beyond the very concepts and schemas that define critical thought,” in particular, the familiar picture of the economic base and ideological superstructure (p. 1). Here, Spinoza’s analysis of conatus, affects, and imagination becomes crucial.

Read argues that the book takes work as its central problem but approaches it through a philosophical orientation at the intersection of Marx and Spinoza. He argues that the usual ways of relating thinkers can’t capture this intersection; either as influence, even though Marx read and excerpted Spinoza, or as disagreement, since they don’t directly argue with each other, and their objects/methods differ. Rather, bringing them together opens a third space: both place practical activity prior to reflection and treat it as the basis of existence and consciousness. At the same time, this practical grounding of thought is ambivalent: it enables knowledge but also produces mystification. How we perceive the world, i.e., accurately or not, depends on how we are determined to act within it.

For Read, more importantly, the shared Marx–Spinoza intuition is that consciousness doesn’t begin as clear self-knowledge. It begins as lived immediacy: I feel hunger, ambition, envy, pride; I think, “This is what I want,” “This is who I am,” “This is why I acted.” That first-person certainty is absolute as an experience, but it is usually opaque about what produces it. In other words, the earliest and most common form of consciousness is not truth but a practical, affective orientation to the world that already carries distortions.

In Spinoza, this opacity is tied to the imagination and the affects. We are aware of our appetites and desires. Still, we typically don’t know the chain of causes, such as encounters, bodily states, social relations, and institutions, that determine what we want and how we interpret events. This is why Spinoza can say in different formulations that humans think themselves free because they are conscious of their actions and desires, yet ignorant of the causes that determine them. The imagination supplies narratives and images that make our striving feel self-originating: I take my desire as mine in a sovereign sense, rather than as an effect of how my body has been affected and composed with other bodies.

In Marx, meanwhile, something parallel happens under the name of ideology, even if, as Read notes, Marx doesn’t sustain the term consistently. Social relations, especially capitalist relations, do not merely constrain people from the outside; they shape the very forms in which people perceive reality. Individuals encounter market society through wages, prices, contracts, “choice,” and “merit,” and these everyday appearances become the default grammar of thought. People experience their interests and aspirations immediately, e.g., “I need a job,” “I deserve more,” “I must compete,” but the structural conditions that generate those necessities and self-understandings remain hidden. The result is not simply an error in the head; it’s a practical consciousness rooted in everyday activity within a specific social order.

Balibar’s phrase conscientia sive ideologica—consciousness, that is, ideological consciousness—is intended to capture precisely this convergence: ideology is not a secondary layer superimposed on a neutral mind; it is the original form of awareness. Consciousness is ideological as such insofar as it spontaneously presents effects as if they were causes, and presents socially produced necessities as if they were natural facts or personal decisions. It is “most immediate” because it is what you get by default when you live inside a determinate world of practices, institutions, and affective attachments.

This is also why both traditions resist the comforting idea that critique is mainly a matter of “enlightening” people. If the imagination/ideology is the first form of consciousness, then the task is not merely to replace false ideas with true ones. It is to transform the conditions of experience, that is to say, the practices, apparatuses, and affective economies that generate what feels obvious, what feels desirable, what feels possible. Knowledge becomes inseparable from a reorganisation of life: changing how bodies are affected, how labour and cooperation are organised, how collective power is composed.

So this “ideological occlusion” isn’t a moral defect or a straightforward lie; it’s the ordinary point of departure for finite beings—in a Spinozist sense, situated within causal chains, and in a Marxist sense, formed within social relations. Consciousness begins as an appearance that is sufficient for navigating the world, but insufficient for understanding what makes that world, and our own desires within it, take the shape it does.

Read calls his method “double shifts” across three registers of immanence: economics and politics are immanent to each other; ideology and bodies are immanent to each other; and praxis and poiesis (doing/making) are immanent to each other. These three intertwined double shifts form the book’s theoretical orientation. In this way, Read uses Spinoza to reopen Marx’s concepts of labour-power, cooperation and subsumption. The compulsion to work is analysed not simply as “false consciousness”, but as a modulation of affects: joy, pride, shame, fear and hope are mobilised to bind subjects to their own exploitation.

From Read’s perspective, the “double shift” between Spinoza and Marx shows that a mode of production is never only an economic arrangement; it becomes a mode of striving, i.e., lived in affects, imagination, and desire. This is why people can end up fighting for their own servitude as if it were salvation: everyday practices shape imagination, and imagination in turn stabilises and reproduces those practices, creating a self-reinforcing loop of attachment (pp. 202-203). I think that this argument is Read’s distinctive way of taking up Spinoza’s famous question: why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

Yet that exact intimate reproduction is also where change can begin. Because work is the linchpin that binds worker and capitalist and moralises endurance, it is also the point where contradictions become felt, especially when work’s ethics no longer match its economic realities. The attachment to work that holds capitalism together at the level of ideology is therefore also what threatens to unravel it at the level of affects and lived experience.

Read adds that much “anti-work” critique misses this because it targets only particular jobs or nostalgically idealises older forms of labour, mistaking the concrete for the abstract (p. 203). As long as imagination remains confined by the wage-labour horizon, treating work as the route to both economic survival and ethical well-being, practice and imagination keep each other trapped. The task is to grasp work’s double function: it reproduces the present order, but it also contains the desires and tensions through which that order can be transformed. Work is thus a site where bodies and minds are formed together, a field of non-sovereign activity in which people strive to persevere in conditions they do not control. This Spinozist attention to affects allows Read to show, very concretely, how contemporary labour regimes, from precarity and the gig economy to managerial “well-being” discourse, operate as apparatuses of subjectivation.

Out of personal interest, here, I can’t resist setting Read’s conceptualisation of work alongside Moishe Postone’s critique of labour. Both converge on a decisive point: labour is not merely an activity people perform; under capitalism, it is a historically specific medium that forms subjects. Yet they diverge over what is primary. Read foregrounds affects and processes of subjectivation, whereas Postone foregrounds the value-form and the impersonal dynamics of abstract domination. For Postone, “labour” in capitalism is neither a transhistorical human essence, i.e., productive activity as such, nor a privileged standpoint of emancipation.

It is a historically specific form of social mediation; the way capitalist society reproduces itself through value, abstract labour, and socially necessary labour time. Domination, therefore, is not chiefly imposed by bosses, managers, or ideology from the outside; it is internal to an impersonal structure: the compulsion of abstract time, productivity, and valorisation that binds workers and capitalists alike. From this perspective, precarity and the gig economy are not simply novel management styles but manifestations of a deeper dynamic, intensified competition, accelerated turnover, just-in-time labouring, and the tightening grip of time-measured performance as the metric of social wealth.

Read’s Spinozist emphasis, by contrast, clarifies how that structural compulsion is made livable, and how it secures attachment. Where Postone explains why labour regimes are repeatedly reorganised around time, measurability, and competitiveness, Read shows how workers are fashioned into subjects able to endure, and sometimes even to desire, these regimes: through affective modulation, for examples, anxiety, hope, guilt, hustle-pride, through “well-being” discourse as a technology of self-regulation, and through the embodied tempos of precarity that recalibrate attention, exhaustion, and aspiration.

In conclusion, I would say that Nesbitt remains close to the internal architecture of Reading Capital and to the intra-mural debates of French Spinozism; the stakes are primarily conceptual and methodological. He writes for readers who care about the precise status of attributes, the logic of exposition in Marx, and the philosophical difference between a Hegelian and a Spinozist dialectic. Read, by contrast, moves more freely between Marx, Spinoza, and contemporary social theory with a clear eye on immediate problems: the glorification of work, the erosion of collective protections, and the ways labour disciplines and exhausts while presenting itself as a moral horizon.

Yet the two books are more than simply “theoretical” versus “political.” Each illuminates the other’s blind spots. Nesbitt clarifies the conceptual conditions under which one might refuse a Hegelian logic of contradiction and negativity and think capital as an immanent totality; Read, working on the ground of labour and subjectivity, shows why such a refusal matters. His insistence on the immanence of economic and ideological processes, and on the co-production of material conditions and affects, can be read as a practical instantiation of the kind of non-Hegelian materialism Nesbitt reconstructs. Conversely, Read’s analyses of how people are attached to work could benefit from the sort of systematic mapping of determinations and levels that Nesbitt derives from Reading Capital.

At the same time, each has characteristic limits. Nesbitt’s commitment to internal reconstruction means that questions of race, gender, coloniality and ecology barely appear; the “materialist dialectic” of Reading Capital is treated as self-sufficient rather than as one regional moment within a broader history of capitalism. Read’s focus on the ideology of work in largely Euro-American contexts means that the global division of labour, the colonial history of work discipline and the racialisation of labour relations receive less sustained treatment than one might wish, given his own tools. In both cases, the Spinozist vocabulary of immanence and transindividuality could be further developed toward a genuinely planetary analysis.

Taken together, however, Nesbitt and Read mark two essential poles of contemporary Spinoza–Marx scholarship. Nesbitt shows how, at the level of method, Spinoza helps to reconfigure Marxism as a theory of immanent structures and determinations that does not need a teleological dialectic. Read demonstrates how, at the level of politics, Spinoza helps to rethink labour, affects and subjectivity beyond the old base/superstructure schema. For a reader interested in both the formal logic of materialist critique and the everyday politics of work, reading these two books alongside one another makes clear that the “Spinozist Marxism” they share is not a single doctrine but a field of problems: how to think totality without transcendence, activity without a sovereign subject, and critique without nostalgia for a lost human essence.

The development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century fundamentally altered philosophical conceptions of matter. The first and second laws of thermodynamics—energy conservation and entropy increase—revealed a universe governed by dynamic energy exchanges rather than static mechanics. However, these laws appeared to predict the cosmos’s inevitable exhaustion, culminating in a final equilibrium or ‘heat death.’ Friedrich Engels challenged this fatalistic interpretation, arguing that it misrepresented the significance of energy. Engels, adopting a dialectical perspective, reinterpreted thermodynamics as a philosophy of production rather than decline, viewing energy as the dialectical pulse of matter that unites conservation and transformation.

In Dialectics of Nature (1873–1886), Engels aimed to incorporate contemporary scientific discoveries into Marxist materialism. (Engels, 1883) He interpreted the first law of thermodynamics as evidence of the ‘indestructibility of motion’ and the second law as revealing the irreversible transformation of forms. Collectively, these laws embodied the dialectical unity of constancy and change. Engels contended that energy is not a static quantity but the ‘self-activity of matter,’ a continuous process of conversion among physical forms such as heat, motion, and electricity. As Engels asserted, ‘motion itself is a contradiction’: ‘rest and motion, identity and difference, are inseparable.’ (“Anti-Dialectics: Motion as a Contradiction,” n.d.)

Thus, energy embodied dialectics itself: it both conserved and transformed, negated and renewed. The apparent entropy observed in physical systems did not signify universal decay but instead revealed nature’s historical dynamism. In opposition to the mechanistic ‘heat death’ hypothesis proposed by Clausius and Kelvin, Engels argued that energy dissipation in one region invariably generates new gradients elsewhere. (“Materialism and the Dialectical Method,” n.d.) Nature, in this framework, is not a closed system tending toward equilibrium but an open, infinite totality engaged in continual self-renewal. Entropy, therefore, represents a temporary moment of negation within a broader cycle of regeneration.

Engels’s approach thereby historicised the concept of energy, framing it not as a metaphysical substance but as the medium of transformation connecting inorganic and organic processes. In Dialectics of Nature, he extended this logic to encompass life and thought, positing that the energy of living beings signifies the transformation, rather than the abolition, of physical energy. (Engels, 1883) Consciousness, in this view, emerges from the dialectical movement of energy through matter, culminating in labour and social production. Consequently, human history is continuous with natural energetics; the transformation of energy in labour mirrors transformations of energy in the physical world. For Engels, both natural and social production constitute energetic processes of negation and renewal (Zwart, 2022).

A century later, Engels’s proposition reemerges in the work of Deleuze, though in a transformed context. Like Engels, Deleuze rejects the interpretation of thermodynamics as a science of depletion and instead conceptualises energy as the fundamental principle of production. However, Deleuze reframes this energetic materialism not in dialectical terms but as a differential field of intensities that continuously generate new forms. While Deleuze also treats energy as a principle of production, he departs from Engels’s dialectical framework of negation.

In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze differentiates between extensive and intensive magnitudes. Extensive quantities, such as mass, volume, and temperature, characterise stable, measurable states, whereas intensive magnitudes, including pressure, potential, and difference, define the gradients that drive change. In this framework, energy is not primarily a conserved quantity but a magnitude that differentiates. It serves as the source of individuation, described as ‘the difference which is the sufficient reason of all phenomena.’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 222)

Deleuze thereby transforms the thermodynamic concept of energy into a metaphysics of difference. While classical thermodynamics views energy as tending toward equilibrium, Deleuze conceptualises the universe as sustained by non-equilibrium, maintained through the productive tension of intensities. In this perspective, entropy does not symbolise decay but instead signifies the redistribution of potential across the field of difference. Dissipation becomes a precondition for novelty, as each expenditure of energy generates new gradients and possibilities for transformation.

For Deleuze, energy is not a unity or totality but a multiplicity. It does not reconcile opposites but proliferates differences. His ontology of energy rejects both the mechanistic model of closed systems and the dialectical model of cyclical synthesis. The world is a field of immanent production, a ‘plane of consistency’ on which intensities continually recombine without ultimate equilibrium. In this way, Deleuze offers a radical rethinking of energy. Life and thought are not exceptional forms of organisation but expressions of the same energetic creativity that pervades matter. The human subject becomes one configuration among many in a universal process of production. As he and Guattari put it, ‘production is everywhere … it is the production of production itself’. Energy is the material and affective substance of this production: the movement of desire, matter, and difference.

Engels and Deleuze both advocate for a non-mechanistic interpretation of energy, yet they fundamentally diverge in their respective conceptualisations. For Engels, energy embodies the unity of opposites within a totality—conservation and transformation, being and becoming—thereby ensuring both the permanence of matter and its historical development. In contrast, Deleuze conceives of energy as differential rather than dialectical; it possesses only variations, not opposites. Its transformations do not return to unity but instead open new trajectories of becoming. Deleuze’s differential ontology interprets production as the immanent creativity of energy, dissolving boundaries between human and non-human activity and privileging the discontinuity. The contemporary relevance of Engels and Deleuze is evident in their ecological implications. Engels’s focus on the interdependence of natural and social energetics anticipates ecological systems theory, which conceptualises the biosphere as a network of energy exchanges and feedback mechanisms. His critique of the ‘heat death’ hypothesis aligns with current rejections of linear models of ecological collapse, instead proposing that diffusion and renewal coexist within the planetary cycles.

Deleuze’s perspective is grounded in ‘corrected vitalism,’ which regards life as an emergent property of energetic differentiation. His conception of energy as creative intensity parallels contemporary theories of self-organisation and non-equilibrium dynamics. Isabelle Stengers later characterised Deleuze’s metaphysics as a ‘cosmology of becoming,’ where the irreversibility of energy is not a tragedy but a precondition for invention. (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) Consistent with Engels, Deleuze maintains that the planet is not a passive system but a field of production.

Engels and Deleuze each transform the physics of energy into a philosophy of production, albeit through distinct frameworks. Engels interprets energy dialectically: it conserves through transformation and negates through renewal. Thus, every apparent loss or dissipation is integrated into a broader cycle of regeneration, with energy embodying the rhythm of contradiction and resolution. In contrast, Deleuze conceptualises energy as the effect of difference, produced by divergence and dissipated. Rather than returning to unity, each expenditure of energy initiates new trajectories of differentiation, so that what appears as loss from a thermodynamic perspective becomes, in Deleuze’s terms, the very condition for the emergence of new forms.

In short, Engels and Deleuze refute the image of energy as exhaustion and instead affirm it as the power of creation. In this sense, they offer two complementary responses to the thermodynamic imagination: Engels’s energy of contradiction and Deleuze’s energy of intensity. Each reveals that the cosmos is not condemned to entropy but animated by it, that energy, far from dwindling into equilibrium, is the world’s capacity to make itself anew.

References

Engels, F. (1883). Dialectics of Nature. Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/index.htm

Rosa Lichtenstein. “Anti-Dialectics: Motion as a Contradiction.” https://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2008_03.htm

Maurice Cornforth. “Materialism and the Dialectical Method.” https://leninists.org/images/1/1a/Materialism_and_the_Dialectical_Method.pdf

Engels, F. (1883). Dialectics of Nature. Chapter 1: Introduction. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/don.pdf

Zwart, H. (2022). “Dialectical Materialism” in Continental Philosophy of Technoscience. Springer Nature. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-84570-4_3

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.

When Alexander the Great approached Diogenes of Sinope and offered him any gift, the philosopher replied: “Stand out of my sunlight.” This brief utterance has endured as one of philosophy’s purest declarations of freedom: the refusal of mediation, privilege, and subordination. For Diogenes, to philosophise was not to serve a ruler or to seek an abstract truth beyond life, but to live freely under the sun, exposed and unshielded. His response performs the very gesture of thought emancipated from power: an existence so self-sufficient that even empire becomes redundant.

The irony is inscribed in his very name. Diogenes (Διογένης) means “born of Zeus,” a marker of divine lineage, yet he was known to his contemporaries as the Dog (κύων, kyōn), and his followers as the Cynics (kynikoi—literally “dog-like”). What should have signified noble descent became the emblem of shameless simplicity. Diogenes embraced the insult, transforming the dog into a philosophical figure of freedom: faithful to the earth, unashamed of the body, indifferent to hierarchy. The dog lives directly, without mediation or possession; it barks, eats, sleeps, and desires without apology. In this animal openness, Diogenes found the condition of actual thought: philosophy not as mastery, but as exposure to light.

Aaron Schuster, in How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, an original reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” retrieves this Cynic inheritance. As he notes, “it was Plato who established the dog as the ‘philosophical animal par excellence’” (Schuster, 2024, p. 8). In the Republic, Plato praises the dog’s ability to discern friend from foe through knowledge rather than appearance, a trait he calls “truly philosophical,” for “how could the dog be anything but a lover of learning if it distinguishes what is its own and what is alien in terms of knowledge and ignorance?” Schuster goes on to trace how this Platonic lineage continues in the Cynics, those self-styled “dogs” who, led by Diogenes of Sinope, turned shamelessness and simplicity into philosophical virtues.

Whether their name came from the Cynosarges, the “White Dog” gymnasium, or from mockery of Diogenes’s scandalous behaviour, they embraced the dog as a symbol of honesty and natural life. As Schuster recalls, the first philosophical talking dog appeared only centuries later, in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, where Cerberus praises the Cynics for entering Hades “laughing and cursing at everyone,” the true mark of fearless philosophy. Schuster brings Diogenes and Kafka’s dog together to show that the philosophical dog survives from antiquity to modernity, but its freedom has changed form: from public defiance to private endurance, from rejecting the master to obsessively seeking him.

In this sense, Kafka’s dog, endlessly questioning the origins of nourishment and the habits of its own species, becomes for Schuster a modern figure of the philosopher: solitary, obsessive, ridiculous, yet animated by a stubborn freedom to inquire. Like Diogenes, the dog in Kafka’s story lives in radical proximity to the world, thinking not from transcendence but from hunger, habit, and vulnerability. Its philosophising is not noble or transcendent but canine, an inquiry sustained by need, perplexity, and the refusal to stop asking.

Diogenes’ command to Alexander, “stand out of my sunlight,” thus echoes through Kafka’s burrowing dog. Both claim the right to think outside sovereignty: to expose thought to the immediacy of existence. In Diogenes, this freedom is solar and public; in Kafka’s dog, it is subterranean and anxious. Yet two distinct modes of freedom give form to what Schuster calls “the dog’s new science of freedom,” a freedom that lies not in domination but in persistence, in the capacity to live and reflect without privilege or protection (Schuster 2024, p. 216). To philosophise, in this lineage, is to inhabit the world as a dog in the sun or under the ground, i.e., faithful not to power, but to the restless movement of thought itself.

This gesture of the dogged philosopher confronting the shadow of Alexander frames Schuster’s book, in which Kafka’s canine investigator inherits Diogenes’ defiance. Schuster’s “new science” resists the sovereignty of abstract knowledge and defends the poetic moment of life as the ground of genuine inquiry. He asks what it would mean to philosophise “like a dog,” treating Kafka’s canine narrator as an unlikely theorist and experimental scientist.

The author argues that Kafka’s story is more than a parable: it outlines a speculative “system of science.” The dog’s investigations into music, nourishment, fasting, and community raise deeper questions about knowledge, language, institutions, and freedom. The “new science” here is a canine philosophy that parallels, and at times anticipates, phenomenology (Husserl) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). For Schuster, the dog embodies theory’s eccentric hero: maladjusted, melancholic, yet radically committed to truth.

Schuster regards Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” as a seemingly minor literature and treats the dog’s inquiries not as curiosities but as the basis of a speculative system: “a cynological system of science” that parodies academic disciplines and reveals philosophy’s persistence in neurotic failure and maladjustment (p. 240). Food science, musicology, ritual, and freedom form the eccentric departments of this canine university. Like Diogenes’s dog, Kafka’s dog insists on the right to investigate outside the grandeur of institutions, embracing the comic dignity of errancy.

While reading Schuster’s book, not surprisingly, the work that came to mind was Vico’s New Science. Vico’s project, like Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “dog philosopher,” belongs to the same counter-tradition that resists the purification of reason. Two authors defend what might be called the Baroque imagination, a thought that moves through images, bodies, and affects rather than through abstraction or clarity. Vico’s new science is a poetics of knowledge, a philosophy that insists the origins of reason lie in the passions and fictions of human collectives. “Poetry,” he writes, “constituted the first common language of all the ancient nations” (Vico, 1984, p. 151).

The earliest humans, seized by fear and wonder, invented gods, myths, and rituals that shaped the world into intelligible form. Against the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, Vico affirms the continuity of imagination and law, myth and knowledge, body and truth. He claims that “the study of metaphysics and of poetry are naturally opposed to each other: one purges the mind of prejudices, while the other immerses and subverts it in them” (Vico, 1984, p. 183). What metaphysics purges, in his view, the Baroque restores—the flesh of thought.

For Vico, this poetic wisdom is not a deviation from science but its primordial condition, a first science that precedes modern epistemology. It is a science of figures, gestures, and passions: what Deleuze would later call a “logic of sense” rather than of identity. Vico’s world is baroque in its refusal of linearity or transparency; it is made of folds, repetitions, and metamorphoses, where divine and human, nature and artifice, intertwine. Knowledge does not unfold from a pure principle but curls back upon the opacity of life.

For Schuster, Kafka’s dog is not merely an allegory of modern anxiety but a figure of philosophy itself, a creature that thinks from within its own hunger, perplexity, and absurdity. Like Vico’s primitive poets, the dog’s inquiry begins in need and sensation. Its thought is not transcendental but corporeal, not systematic but obsessive and circular. In my terms, this embodies the Baroque spirit of immanent thinking, operating from within the conditions it attempts to comprehend. The mind doesn’t observe from above but rather burrows through its reality, treating its own line of inquiry as a subterranean fold emerging from thought’s very ground.

Thus, the affinity between Vico and Schuster lies in their shared resistance to the metaphysical demand for detachment. They imagine a thinking that is incarnate and curved, a thought that bends toward its object rather than distancing itself. Vico’s poetic science generates reason from the depths of imagination, while Schuster’s dog philosophy engenders reflection out of appetite. Each defends philosophy as an activity inseparable from life’s conditions, i.e., its hungers, absurdities, and affections. Two figures, the Vichian poet and Kafka’s dog, think with the world rather than about it.

Deleuze provides the conceptual topology that binds these two gestures. The Baroque fold is his name for this very curvature of thought: a world in which matter and mind, inside and outside, form an infinite series of inflexions (Deleuze, 1993, p. 24). The fold is both a metaphysical and ethical principle: thought’s refusal to be purified, its insistence on remaining implicated. To philosophise, in this sense, is to inhabit the fold of the world, not to escape it; to think as the dog does, exposed to light and noise, faithful to the confusion of existence.

Suppose Diogenes’s freedom consists in saying “stand out of my sunlight,” and Kafka’s dog’s freedom consists in persisting in its questions. In that case, Deleuze shows that this same freedom belongs to the imagination itself: the freedom of thought to remain folded in the world it contemplates. The Baroque imagination thus becomes the space where poetic wisdom, canine curiosity, and philosophical creation coincide. Thought is not a geometry of clear ideas but an art of folds, a practice of immersion and emergence.

Vico’s divine poet and Schuster’s philosophical dog all resist the Cartesian sun that blinds rather than illuminates. They teach that philosophy’s true light is not transcendence but immanence, the sunlight that touches the dog’s body, the myth that shapes a people, the fold that turns reflection back into life. The resonance with Schuster is clear. Kafka’s dog laments the absence of the “true word” and conducts bizarre experiments in search of it. Still, Schuster reads this as philosophy’s condition itself: “What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophise with Kafka’s dog?” (Schuster, 2024, p. 3). Just as Vico insists that human institutions can only be understood through the poetic imagination that produced them, Schuster insists that philosophy survives only through its maladjusted, parabolic form. Their projects reject the sovereignty of abstraction and affirm the necessity of parable, fable, and imagination in the constitution of knowledge.

The figure of Diogenes allows us to see the alignment more vividly. In defending Kafka’s dog, Schuster resists the Alexandrian authority of modern bureaucratic institutions. He returns philosophy to the dog, whether in the myth-making “poetic animals” of the First Nations or the neurotic canine researcher of Kafka. Each transforms what seems marginal, absurd, or irrational into the very foundation of a new science. I would say that Schuster’s contribution is not only a playful rereading of Kafka but also a contemporary continuation of Vico’s gesture. If Vico’s New Science founded the modern human sciences on the recognition of poetic imagination, Schuster’s “new science” preserves philosophy’s future by defending its right to failure, eccentricity, and maladjustment.

The lesson of “new sciences” is that truth cannot be secured by abstraction alone. It must be defended in the poetic, parabolic, and eccentric gestures that sustain life. Whether in Vico’s cycles of nations or Schuster’s canine university, philosophy remains, like Diogenes, a dog before Alexander, claiming nothing but the singularity of life. The dog, then, is anything but incidental. For Schuster, Kafka’s dog extends the lineage of the poetic animal, one that persists stubbornly in its parabolic inquiry, undeterred by institutional neglect. And for Diogenes, the dog was philosophy itself: shameless, faithful to nature, defiant of power.

In the landscape of contemporary philosophy, Schuster’s work stands as a singular effort to think after the exhaustion of critique. Writing through figures like Kafka and Diogenes, Schuster reclaims philosophy’s right to be minor, comic, and errant in the face of institutionalised reason. His project refuses both the transcendental ambitions of theory and the moral sobriety of critique, exploring instead the residual vitality of thought that persists amid failure. Against the procedural rationality that now governs knowledge, from academic bureaucracy to algorithmic mediation, Schuster’s humour and perversity mark a counter-conduct: an insistence that philosophy’s dignity lies precisely in its maladjustment.

Schuster’s thought begins where the humanist confidence of Vico ends. For Vico, poetic imagination founded the world; for Schuster, that world has already decayed into its own commentary. Through Kafka, he locates philosophy not in the recovery of myth but in the refusal of coherence, the right to remain unfinished, maladjusted, and exposed. His writing insists that philosophy’s task is no longer to explain or to found, but to endure its own failure with precision and humour. Vico still believed that the imagination could shape institutions; Schuster inhabits the ruins of that belief. What he calls philosophy survives only as a gesture, i.e., dog-like, minor, obstinate, faithful not to system but to life’s residue. The sunlight that once illuminated the genesis of meaning in Vico now burns in Schuster as irony: a brightness too harsh for reconciliation, a light under which every order shows its cracks.

To read Schuster, then, is to encounter the end of the “new science” itself: philosophy after its institutions, thinking as scavenging, truth as the persistence of error. His kinship with Diogenes lies not in rebellion but in style, a fidelity to the low, the comic, the shameless, against the empire of authority that still calls itself reason. Schuster’s philosophical stance resonates with what might be termed the post-critical moment: the exhaustion of critique as a mode of mastery and its transformation into an art of survival.

Yet where these projects often retain a metaphysical ambition to reconstruct forms of worldhood, negativity, or relation, Schuster’s intervention is more ironic and ascetic. He refuses the consolation of restoration. His philosophy inhabits the point at which critique itself becomes comic: where the philosopher, stripped of institutional authority, must learn again to think from the gutter, in laughter, embarrassment, and persistence. In this, Schuster stands less as a theorist of renewal than as a practitioner of philosophical degradation, a thinker of the remainder that thought cannot sublate. His Diogenes is not an allegory of resistance but of exposure: the insistence that, after the collapse of systems, what endures of philosophy is its capacity to blush and to bark, to live without mastery.

In this light, Schuster’s philosophy reads as a diagnosis of the academy’s own terminal farce. The institutional forms that once guaranteed philosophy’s legitimacy, i.e., peer review, editorial mediation, and disciplinary consensus, now persist only as automated rituals within the algorithmic economy of publication. Artificial intelligence has completed what managerial reason began: the substitution of thought by procedure, critique by compliance. Yet Schuster’s ironic fidelity to failure grants this exhaustion a strange dignity. His laughter is not cynical but diagnostic, exposing the empty core of the academic illusio. In an age when machines can simulate the gestures of reflection, Schuster’s insistence on maladjustment becomes an ethical stance: to think as that which resists optimisation, to remain human not by mastery but by error. Philosophy, in his hands, survives precisely where its institutional body collapses: barking, embarrassed, and alive.

References

Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). The Anthlone Press.

Schuster, A. (2024). How to research like a dog: Kafka’s new science. MIT Press.

Vico, G. (1984). The first new science (L. Pompa, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

Throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, I kept thinking back to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which I first read during my postgraduate years, when its world of faded revolutionaries and post-1960s paranoia felt like a strange, distant satire. Watching Anderson’s film, those old images returned with a surprising vividness. The connection wasn’t just a matter of influence. However, Anderson has long been open about his fascination with Pynchon, having already adapted Inherent Vice and borrowed the loose, sun-drenched melancholy of Vineland for Licorice Pizza. What struck me this time was how One Battle After Another seemed to inhabit the emotional afterlife of Pynchon’s world. The film didn’t just echo his sensibility; it carried it forward, translating Pynchon’s mourning of revolution into something quieter, more luminous, and, perhaps, more forgiving.

This film is, in many ways, an unambiguous tribute to the post-war generation that failed, those who once believed that history could be remade but instead witnessed their own ideals dissolve into compromise, repression, and fatigue. Anderson treats that failure with irony. The character of Bob, played with restraint by Leonardo DiCaprio, becomes the vessel for this mourning and its quiet transformation. In the story, he is one of the few who has managed to endure without betrayal, not because he won or adapted, but because he refused to turn his convictions into nostalgia. There is something movingly anachronistic about him, a survivor who has outlived his own cause yet still carries its embers. Bob does not speak in slogans; he lives in fidelity to something that once mattered. In that sense, he is the film’s moral centre: the last witness of a vanished horizon who passes on not doctrine but an attitude, a way of remaining honest in a dishonest time.

The underground organisation to which Bob once belonged, French 75, encapsulates the tragic irony of modern rebellion. The name originates from a World War I artillery gun, later glamorised as the title of a cocktail. It thus carries in itself the mutation of history’s violence into bourgeois leisure. Anderson’s use of the name transforms this double image into a commentary on the afterlife of revolution: what begins as a weapon of imperial warfare and technological modernity is reappropriated as the emblem of a militant underground, only to end as a marker of vintage nostalgia. In this shift from artillery to aperitif, French 75 becomes a cypher for the fate of twentieth-century radicalism itself, the conversion of revolutionary energy into aesthetic memory. By invoking it, Anderson gestures toward the paradox of a generation that tried to turn the machinery of modernity against empire, only to discover that modernity’s apparatus was too deeply woven into their own desires.

The name thus condenses the film’s political implication: the recognition that even revolt, in the age after the 1960s, risks being absorbed into the culture it once sought to overthrow. This connection is made explicit in the scene where Bob watches the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers on television. The Battle of Algiers is a classic Italian-Algerian film that depicts the Algerian War for independence. It’s a quiet but devastating image: a man who once fought for change now sits alone, watching another people’s struggle reframed as history. The choice of the Algerian War is not accidental. It was the defining event for the post-war generation, the moment when the contradictions of Western democracy and colonial violence could no longer be ignored

Anderson takes Pynchon’s long shadow of American disenchantment, that sense of a revolution betrayed and commodified, and asks what it would mean to live with it, rather than lament it. Vineland was written at a moment when the counterculture’s ideals had curdled into nostalgia and irony; Anderson’s film appears in an age when nostalgia has lost its consolatory power, overshadowed by the catastrophic resurgence of reaction symbolised by Trumpism. Yet he does not abandon Pynchon’s terrain, California’s bright decay, the aftermath of utopian failure, so much as alter its emotional temperature. His world breathes where Pynchon’s contracted. It feels as if Anderson were trying to reawaken something left dormant in Vineland: the possibility that tenderness might survive after irony, that a form of care might persist even when history seems to have run out of faith.

Revolutionary history rarely ends with triumph. More often, it leaves behind a residue, i.e., gestures, affects, fragments of unfulfilled desire. When collective energy collapses, its traces persist as the melancholy of the left: an attachment to the lost object of revolution that cannot be renounced yet cannot return. In Vineland, the failure of the counterculture hardens into parody. The dream of liberation has been converted into spectacle, replayed across the television networks that now stand in for history. Pynchon’s survivors of the sixties live under the reign of the “Tube,” a totalising system of surveillance and entertainment that transforms dissent into content. Their irony is the last defence of defeated revolutionaries; their laughter is the noise of grief. Every image of revolt has already been filmed, every gesture anticipated and neutralised. History does not end with apocalypse but with reruns.

The melancholy of Pynchon’s California is a paralysis of futurity, a place where mourning has hardened into style. Anderson’s film begins in the wake of that paralysis. Its world inherits the same disillusionment but inhabits it differently, as if time itself had thickened, slowed to the texture of memory. His characters keep fighting “one battle after another,” yet their struggle has lost its ideological compass. What remains of politics is a kind of endurance: the ability to stay within one’s disorientation rather than conceal it beneath irony. Pynchon’s melancholia was sustained by an inability to mourn a revolution already lost, while Anderson’s response is to efface the trace of that loss, to neutralise the very affect of revolutionary mourning.

If Vineland marks the moment when revolutionary energy ossified into nostalgia, One Battle After Another restages that exhaustion within the spectacle of the American action film. Anderson’s work stages the wreckage of the twentieth century’s revolutionary dreams amid the choreography of raids, shoot-outs, and betrayals. Beneath its surface momentum lies a meditation on how the militant energies of the 1960s curdled into paranoia, addiction, and state violence. What begins as an allegory of insurgency gradually becomes a drama of fatigue, where ideology gives way to the bare instinct to protect and endure. By the time the narrative turns to Bob and his daughter Willa, Anderson has inverted the grammar of the action genre itself: the real “battle” is no longer political conquest but the fragile continuity of human connection amid ruins. In this sense, the film transforms the failed revolution into an ethics of attentiveness, the capacity to remain alive, receptive, and unfinished in a world that has survived its own ideals.

The task is no longer to resurrect a lost revolution but to redeem its sensibility, to discover, within melancholy itself, the seeds of another temporality. Revolutionary melancholia, in this sense, does not culminate in despair. The certainty of victory has disappeared, yet the capacity for renewal endures, fragile but persistent. For this reason, the film struck me as an allegory of our present dilemma. Anderson seems to imagine a new kind of solidarity, one stripped of the failed adventurism of the 1960s, a more chastened form of collective attachment born not of fervour but of fatigue. Yet this vision is haunted by a paradox: the world his film imagines as fiction is, in fact, the world we already inhabit. The defeat, surveillance, and depoliticisation that once served as Pynchon’s satirical backdrop have solidified into the texture of everyday life. The violent immigration crackdowns and the protests that rise against them in the film no longer belong to the realm of fiction.

Nevertheless, Willa is imagined as another child of hope, born amid the ruins her father could never leave behind. She does not inherit his ideals as doctrine. Near the film’s end, there is a small, luminous scene: Bob asks his daughter about a new device, the smartphone, and she patiently shows him how it works. The exchange is simple, almost trivial, yet it distils the film’s emotional core: the passing of the revolutionary flame, not through sameness but through difference. Anderson’s camera lingers on her face just long enough for us to sense that the history of defeat can also be the ground of renewal. Her father’s past does not burden her; she carries its energy differently, as a rhythm, an undertone. Her very presence intimates that hope does not die with a generation; it only alters its form, finding a new idiom in the gestures of those who come after.

Anderson’s characters, caught between nostalgia and resignation, seem to accept this condition as inevitable, embodying a generation that no longer dreams of overthrowing power but of surviving within its ruins. What Anderson captures, perhaps more acutely than he intends, is the transformation of political hope into aesthetic endurance, the moment when history itself begins to look like an afterimage of a revolution that never came. Not surprisingly, MAGA supporters dismiss Anderson’s film as an outdated leftist fantasy that glorifies violence. Yet, as Lacan reminds us, fantasy is not the negation of reality but its very structure. What becomes evident today is that this symptom no longer belongs to the left; the Trumpists have appropriated it.

In 1983, in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, Gilles Deleuze wrote a short, searing text called “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat.” Deleuze interprets the Palestinian struggle as a long historical tragedy of displacement and denial of existence, whose resistance found symbolic embodiment in Arafat. He argues that the conflict is not merely about land or religion, but about the very right of a people to exist as a distinct entity.

He maintains that the Holocaust, an immense historical crime, was transformed by Zionism into a religious-mystical “absolute evil” that justifies new violence against other innocent people. Israel’s foundation, supported by the U.S. and Europe as a form of reparations to Jews, shifted the burden of this reparative justice onto the Palestinians, who were not responsible for the Holocaust. The United States, Deleuze notes (via Elias Sanbar), recognised in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians echoes of its own history of “emptying the land” of Native Americans.

Deleuze stresses that Zionism was a colonisation of displacement, not exploitation: Palestinians were to be expelled or ghettoised, not integrated as a labour force. This policy represents a form of “cold” genocide, where geographical evacuation replaces total physical extermination. He links this logic to capitalism’s dual movement: imposing limits for exploitation while constantly pushing these limits outward, the “American Dream” now projected as the dream of “Greater Israel.”

Arafat gave the stateless Palestinian people an embodied political presence, a government-in-exile and a fighting nation. Deleuze likens Arafat to a tragic Shakespearean figure, embodying both leadership and solitary dignity. Despite betrayals, failed negotiations, and hostile Arab regimes, Palestinian resistance persisted, nourished by cycles of defeat and broken promises. It was not a hagiography but a meditation on what it means for a people denied political existence to find embodiment in a single figure. Grandeur, for Deleuze, was not power, not charisma in the conventional sense. It was the capacity to give a dispersed, stateless collective a visible and acting presence, to hold it together under conditions of near erasure. Arafat’s tragic stature arose from this function: he became the body of a people treated as though they had never existed.

Deleuze frames the Palestinian response, “we are a people like others,” as a refusal of Israel’s exceptionalism (“we are not a people like others”). The tragedy of Arafat’s “solitary grandeur” in besieged Tripoli illustrates both the resilience and vulnerability of the Palestinian cause. Without justice for Palestinians, Deleuze warns, Israel itself will face the mirror image of its own intolerance. Strikingly, as early as 1983, he had already discerned the very dynamics that have since culminated in the present devastation of Gaza.

Four decades later, Gaza, long the symbol of statelessness, has been reduced to a landscape of ruins, mass displacement, and famine. Yet the figure who has drawn the anger of governments and the sympathy of a global multitude is not a commander of fighters but a young Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg. Her interventions, linking the planetary climate emergency with colonial wars and insisting on the humanity of the Palestinians, have provoked fierce denunciations from political leaders and institutions. Still, they have resonated with millions of young people. To describe her stance as a new form of “grandeur” is to suggest that the ethical function Deleuze discerned in Arafat persists, albeit in a different key: the embodiment of a collective will to live against structures of erasure.

Deleuze saw the Palestinian tragedy as not merely a matter of territorial dispute but of historical denial. The injustice, he wrote, was that the Palestinians were treated “as if they had never existed.” The Zionist movement, in his view, had pursued a project not of classical colonial exploitation but of geographical evacuation, an effort to render the land empty, to turn its people into ghosts or transients. This was what he called a “cold genocide,” in which the destruction of a people occurs not only by mass killing but by displacement, confinement, and the making of ordinary life impossible. The Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 were, for Deleuze, a condensed episode of that long violence. Arafat’s lone word, “shame,” named the betrayal of promises and the violation of guarantees given to protect civilian lives.

This logic of un-peopling is painfully visible in Gaza today. Since the autumn of 2023, entire districts have been levelled by bombardments, the majority of the population has been repeatedly uprooted, and aid agencies have warned that Gaza could become uninhabitable. The International Court of Justice, responding to petitions under the Genocide Convention, has ordered Israel to allow humanitarian access and to prevent acts of a genocidal nature, noting the risk of famine and destruction of the means of life. These rulings do not settle the legal question of genocide, but they do affirm the gravity of what Deleuze called the question of a people’s survival as such. What is at stake is not merely sovereignty or borders but the right of a people to persist.

As I noted above, Deleuze’s central insight was that Zionism transformed the Holocaust, the great historical crime, into an “absolute evil,” a religious and quasi-mystical category, and that Europe and the United States, rather than confronting their own historical responsibility, displaced the burden of reparation onto the Palestinians. Those who had no part in the Holocaust were made to pay its price. This grotesque displacement has now taken a planetary form. The costs of historical industrialisation and global wars are borne most heavily by those who contributed least to them: small island nations facing rising seas, agrarian populations suffering drought and famine, refugees from conflicts driven by resource extraction and militarised borders. In the present war, a besieged civilian population is exposed to destruction that echoes this displaced debt.

Thunberg’s language of climate justice makes this continuity visible. She has insisted that the colonial logic that uproots people and the carbon economy that destabilises the planet are two faces of the same historical injustice: those who contributed least to the destruction of the earth and the escalation of war suffer the most. Deleuze also warned that if the Palestinian national embodiment were destroyed, if the PLO were dissolved or absorbed into other states or movements, a new and more intractable conflict would arise: a “double terrorism” of state violence and religious-militant violence feeding on each other.

That prediction has been realised. The October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas and the massive military response of the Israeli state, i.e., siege, bombardment, and destruction, have locked the conflict into a deadly polarity. In the absence of a legitimate and credible civic-national Palestinian representative body, militancy rooted in religious idioms has come to stand for resistance. At the same time, state violence is justified as self-defence. The political space that could mediate between them is eclipsed.

In this bleak landscape, Thunberg’s interventions appear at first marginal, even quixotic. Yet they enact the same structure that Deleuze called grandeur: the embodiment of a collective otherwise voiceless in official politics. From her solitary school strikes, she came to symbolise the claims of a generation whose future is mortgaged by fossil capitalism. By linking the war in Gaza to the planetary climate crisis and by speaking for those rendered invisible in both arenas, the young, the displaced, the vulnerable, she has given ethical expression to the persistence of the uncounted. She does not command armies or negotiate treaties; her voice is performative rather than executive. But it gathers a dispersed multitude under a single insistence: that life on earth, in all its forms, must be protected against the machinery of extraction and extermination. Her grandeur lies not in power but in refusal, refusal of the logic that treats some lives and some territories as expendable.

The opposition between the colonial logic of emptying and the politics of planetary care is the crux of the present conjuncture. Where the former makes space by removal, the latter seeks to keep the world habitable for all. Thunberg’s linking of climate and Gaza is not a rhetorical provocation but a recognition of a shared structure: the conversion of whole regions into sacrifice zones, places whose people are rendered disposable. This recognition redefines politics beyond the framework of competing national sovereignties; it points to the more basic question of survivability.

To name Thunberg’s role as grandeur is not to idealise her or to ignore the criticisms often levelled at her interventions. She cannot supply a concrete roadmap for peace in the Middle East or for the transition to a post-carbon world. Her language is sometimes castigated as moralistic or naïve. Yet Deleuze’s concept was never about policy detail. It was about the singular figure who embodies resistance at the moment when a collective faces erasure. In that sense, Thunberg stands, as Arafat once stood in another register, for the persistence of a people, only now the “people” is planetary, not national.

In Deleuze’s terms, Arafat appears as a tragic figure: he embodies a people whose very existence is denied, carrying the weight of their dispossession and the betrayals of history. His “grandeur” is bound to loss; it arises from having to give a dispersed and besieged people a political body at the cost of his own solitude. By contrast, Thunberg is not a tragic figure, but a child-like one, in the sense that she embodies a new beginning, play, and the capacity to create values rather than merely inherit wounds. Her grandeur does not lie in bearing the sorrows of a dispossessed past, but in summoning a collective that is still in the process of becoming—a planetary demos of the young, the displaced, and the climate-vulnerable.

Where Arafat’s tragic grandeur was tied to the endurance of a people scarred by exile and dispossession, Thunberg’s child-like, affirmative grandeur looks forward, seeking to call into being the people who are missing, those whose emergence is necessary if the earth itself is to remain inhabitable. Yet the two figures share a more profound kinship in Deleuze’s sense: both reveal that true political grandeur emerges where established forms of sovereignty fail, giving voice and presence to collectives that are otherwise excluded from the political field.

Suppose Arafat’s presence marks the persistence of a people already wounded and exiled. In that case, Thunberg’s stance affirms the possibility of inventing a people yet to come: a transnational subject of planetary care that resists both colonial expulsion and ecological destruction. In this sense, her figure embodies Deleuze’s insight into the grandeur of embodiment, shifting the register of national tragedy to one of global affirmation.

The convergence of the climate crisis and colonial war reveals that the fundamental political question of our time is not simply sovereignty, but survivability. Any movement towards peace in the Middle East must be linked to the restoration of a legitimate Palestinian political body capable of representing its people, but also to the dismantling of the conditions, i.e., blockade, displacement, famine, that make ordinary life impossible. At the same time, the global struggle against climate collapse demands that we see the fate of Gaza not as a local exception but as an emblem of the new frontiers of disposability.

By returning to Deleuze’s 1983 text, we recover a fundamental insight often obscured by decades of geopolitics: that the erasure of a people breeds unending destruction, whereas the emergence of a political embodiment, however fragile, opens the horizon of settlement. Thunberg’s defiant solidarity does not resolve the conflict. Still, it reveals the shift in the locus of political grandeur: from the nationalist leader of a stateless people to the planetary activist who names the conditions of everyday life. To recognise that shift is not to diminish the urgency of Palestinian self-determination or Israeli security, but to see that both now depend on resisting the more profound logic of expulsion and on defending the integrity of the world we share.

The grandeur of Greta Thunberg lies in her refusal to separate climate justice from colonial justice, the future of the earth from the fate of the people of Gaza. She gestures, against the blind forces of militarism and extractivism, towards the possibility of a planetary commons. Her voice reminds us that the question that haunted Deleuze in 1983—i.e., the persistence of a people against the fiction of their non-existence—has today become the question of the persistence of life itself.

In Deleuze’s essay on Arafat, grandeur lay in his capacity to embody a people whose very existence had been denied, giving a dispersed and displaced collective a political body. That grandeur was inseparable from tragedy: it emerged only where sovereignty had been foreclosed, where political representation could be sustained only in exile and resistance. The grandeur associated with Greta Thunberg, however, discloses what might be called the repetition of tragedy as difference. Here, the figure no longer carries the wounds of a dispossessed nation but instead summons a collective that has not yet come into being.

As Karl Marx observed in his famous dictum about history repeating itself, a repeated tragedy ceases to be tragic; it becomes something qualitatively different, a new scene with new actors and a new task. In this sense, Thunberg’s grandeur is not a continuation of Arafat’s tragic burden but an affirmative call that arises from the same historical impasse yet points toward another horizon. Seen from this angle, Gaza is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but also the site where the possibility of a people is being erased. The destruction of homes, infrastructures, and civil institutions risks extinguishing the very conditions in which a political subject can exist. To insist that there is a Palestinian people, “a people like others,” as Deleuze quoted the first issue of the Revue d’études palestiniennes, is to engage in precisely that work of invention against the forces of erasure.

Thunberg’s interventions reveal a further displacement of this Deleuzian task. The people who are missing today are not confined to a single national community but include the dispersed, inter-generational, and planetary constituency whose survival is threatened by the twin logics of extractivist capitalism and colonial war. Thunberg’s voice does not merely advocate for policy change; it calls into being a planetary demos of the young and the vulnerable, a demos that does not yet have an institutional form. Her defiance, like Arafat’s tragic embodiment, thus points to the work of invention: giving presence and insistence to a collective otherwise excluded from politics.

The encounter between Gaza and Thunberg makes vivid the stakes of that question: the task is not simply to organise the already existing masses but to invent the collective capacity to persist where the world’s order would prefer them absent. To speak of the grandeur of Greta Thunberg is therefore to recognise, not personal heroism, but the moment in which a single figure helps name and assemble those who are missing, those who must become a people to have a future.

During the years when the Soviet bloc was disintegrating and globalisation was accelerating as a seemingly irreversible world order, I began to read Lukács in earnest. Why Lukács? The answer lies in the peculiar intellectual landscape of May 1968. When students at Nanterre and the Sorbonne began to occupy lecture halls in the year, the text that passed hand to hand in cheaply duplicated pamphlets and leaflets was not the ABC of Communism or the official Soviet manuals of dialectical materialism, but Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. The French translation of the book, published in 1960 by Éditions de Minuit and reissued in 1968, had already been circulating among small groups of dissident Marxist students thanks to Lucien Goldmann, who introduced Lukács’s work to the French public in the late 1950s. Memoirs by participants such as Alain Badiou and Daniel Bensaïd recall that the “Lukácsian problem” of reification and totality was debated in student assemblies alongside pamphlets by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky.

Archival evidence of this intellectual atmosphere can be found in the ephemeral literature of the time: duplicated flyers and discussion sheets distributed by the March 22 Movement at Nanterre often cited Lukács’s theses on reification as a way to explain the alienation inherent not only in capitalist production but also in the bureaucratic structures of the French Communist Party and the trade unions. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s 1967 preface to a new French edition of History and Class Consciousness further shaped its reception by linking Lukács to contemporary critiques of technocracy and the university. In this sense, the book’s presence in 1968 was more than symbolic: it furnished a philosophical grammar for a generation that rejected both Stalinist orthodoxy and the economistic reduction of class struggle, and that sought instead to understand alienation as a structural feature of modern social life.

That Lukács’s 1923 text, long condemned by the Comintern as “ultra-leftist” and only cautiously rehabilitated in the late 1960s, circulated among the militants of Paris is historically significant. It suggests that the student and worker insurgents saw themselves as heirs to a critical, unorthodox tradition within Marxism, one that challenged the bureaucratic ossification of the socialist movement and insisted on the dialectical unity of theory and praxis. The May events thus marked not merely a political confrontation with the Gaullist regime but a renewed encounter with the unresolved philosophical legacy of the early twentieth-century Marxist debates over Hegel, reification, and historical agency.

For this reason, my engagement with Lukács was never a matter of antiquarian curiosity about a canonical Marxist figure. It was, rather, an attempt to grapple with the profound reconfiguration of the historical horizon in which Marxism itself had been situated. I was particularly intrigued by how Lukács’s late engagement with Hegel differed from, yet remained entangled with, his earlier appropriation of Hegelian dialectics. Why, in the 1930s and 1940s, did Lukács choose to write about the early Hegel, the young philosopher shaped by the revolutionary fervour of the 1790s, rather than the later Hegel who, in the Philosophy of Right, treated the state as the decisive institution for ethical life and whose thought was often invoked to justify political order and authority? This choice seemed especially telling at a moment when Marxism itself was undergoing a profound transformation, with its revolutionary impetus increasingly absorbed and tamed within the doctrine of “socialism in one country.”

My curiosity about this intellectual decision opened a path to re-examine not only the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century but also the broader relationship between philosophy and political movements. It compelled me to revisit the question of what it means to think dialectically at a time of historical rupture and to ask how philosophy can keep alive the possibilities of collective transformation when social movements risk being subsumed by state-centred frameworks. This question, in turn, became inseparable from my later engagement with French philosophy after 1968, i.e., Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, and others, whose own re-readings of Hegel and Marx sought to reimagine politics beyond the teleologies of the Party and the state. Thus, what began as an inquiry into Lukács’s treatment of Hegel’s youth gradually became a lens through which I explored the changing conditions of thought and struggle from the crisis of Marxism in the interwar period to the theoretical ferment unleashed by 1968.

Indeed, Lukács’s thought was crucial to the intellectual formation of postwar French philosophy, and the figure of Lukács frequently served as a counterpoint against which new theoretical positions were articulated. His legacy within French Marxism derived far less from the sprawling and sober Ontology of Social Being of his final decades, published only in fragments in the early 1970s, than from the incendiary and heterodox History and Class Consciousness. I would argue, however, that Lukács’s influence on French thought is best understood as reflecting the concerns of his later period, which may be characterised as his post-Young Hegel phase.

In the immediate postwar years, existentialist and phenomenological Marxism, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, initially drew on Lukács’s early work. The notion of reification, the reduction of social relations to thing-like, apparently natural forms, proved particularly influential. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his Critique of Dialectical Reason attempted to rethink social praxis as a way to overcome the alienation Lukács had diagnosed. Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic treated Lukács as a pivotal, though ultimately limited, figure in the effort to reconcile historical necessity with subjective freedom. Their engagements illustrate how Lukács’s dialectical humanism shaped the first phase of postwar French Marxism, even as both thinkers criticised its dogmatic tendencies.

A more decisive rejection of Lukács came with “structuralist Marxism.” Lukács’s insistence on totality and mediation—that individual phenomena could be grasped only as moments of the overall historical structure of capitalism—resonated with some French Marxists who opposed Stalinist empiricism. Yet it also provoked strong resistance from Louis Althusser, who saw in Lukács’s approach a lingering Hegelian historicism. Against Lukács’s humanist conception of history as collective praxis, Althusser stressed structural determination and the relative autonomy of economic, political, and ideological levels. This opposition marked a turning point: Lukács’s dialectical humanism became the paradigm of what structuralist Marxism sought to overcome.

However, Lukács’s defence of critical realism against avant-garde experimentation strongly influenced the French debates of the 1940s and 1950s. His conception of the realist novel as revealing the underlying social totality shaped the work of Lucien Goldmann, whose “genetic structuralism” in Hidden God and Towards a Sociology of the Novel sought to link aesthetic forms to the collective consciousness of social classes. Yet even here, Lukács’s normative realism came under increasing attack as French theorists turned toward structuralist poetics, semiotics, and later post-structuralist accounts of textuality.

Lukács’s influence was thus ambivalent. He provided conceptual tools, such as reification, totality, and mediation, that helped French philosophers explore the relationship between subjectivity, society, and history. At the same time, his Hegelian-Marxist humanism and his view of labour as the ontological ground of social life became the very positions structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers set out to displace; Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital explicitly repudiated Lukács’s historicist dialectic.

Ironically, Althusser’s famous thesis of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thought exemplifies this very dynamic of influence and opposition. It was Lukács who first taught Marxists to read a canonical philosopher as a field of internal conflict, opposing the young, insurgent Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit to the later Hegel of the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right, in which the dialectic was tamed into a teleological system. In The Young Hegel, Lukács argued that Marx’s materialism could be understood only by recovering the revolutionary impulse of the early Hegel while exposing the later Hegel’s compromise with the Prussian state.

This methodology developed into what came to be known as “genetic structuralism,” a term coined and theorised by Goldmann in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing inspiration from both Lukács’s early theory of the novel and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, Goldmann sought to bridge the gap between diachronic historical explanation and synchronic structural analysis. This strategy of interpreting a tradition through its inner rupture, i.e., a Lukácsian invention, became the very tool that Althusser turned back against Marx himself.

Althusser’s periodisation of Marx, distinguishing the early, humanist writings of the 1840s, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, from the mature, “scientific” critique of Capital, reproduced this Lukácsian strategy of identifying an inner rupture, but in a more radical form and with its original meaning effectively reversed. Where Lukács recovered the young Hegel for a philosophy of praxis, Althusser rejected the early Marx precisely for his humanist legacy, seeing the later Marx as breaking into a genuinely scientific terrain. The method of positing a decisive break within a canonical figure, pioneered by Lukács, thus became a tool for overturning his own philosophical orientation. While Althusser’s partition of Marx’s work into early and mature phases has long faced criticism, in this sense, it should be understood as a deliberate inversion of Lukács’s method.

This critical relation to Lukács extended to later French engagements with Marxism, including Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of production. Lukács’s later ontology upheld labour as the foundational mediation that transforms natural causality into consciously posited ends, making it the paradigm of all social practice. Lukács’s late ontology of labour, inspired by Marx’s notion of Stoffwechsel (metabolic exchange), regards labour as the universal mediating practice through which humanity transforms nature and itself. Deleuze and Guattari refuse to privilege labour as such, seeing the wage-labour relation as a historically specific organisation of productive powers.

This perspective also clarifies Deleuze’s distance from Althusser. For Althusser, history advances through the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, expressed as class struggle. Deleuze regards contradiction as a derivative effect of the ways in which productive life is captured and organised. In Difference and Repetition, he had already argued that difference is primary and productive, while contradiction is a negative, secondary relation. This non-dialectical conception of difference underpins the critique in Anti-Oedipus of the idea that the labour–capital contradiction is the basic motor of history. Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of Marx points beyond a narrowly economistic conception of production.

By grounding critique not in the contradiction between capital and wage-labour but in the capture of life’s generative powers, they open the field of struggle to ecological, biopolitical, and affective dimensions. The question Marx first posed, how the production of the means of life is organised, thus becomes the question of how the generative capacities of life, whether understood as desire or as concrete labour, are captured, mediated, and subordinated to the logic of capital. Deleuze and Guattari reconceived production as a transversal, machinic process that precedes and exceeds the human–nature metabolism. In Anti-Oedipus, they presented production as flows and assemblages of desire rather than as a teleological human activity. This critical perspective on labour extends beyond Deleuze and Guattari. The frequent portrayal of Deleuze as an apolitical thinker, cut off from Marxism, obscures the extent to which his philosophical interventions were deeply entwined with contemporary efforts to reimagine Marxism in response to the challenges posed by global capitalism.

Not surprisingly, this perspective aligned them, from another angle, with Moishe Postone’s critique of the classical Marxist focus on labour. For Postone, labour in capitalism is not a transhistorical foundation of human emancipation, but rather a historically specific form of social mediation that generates value and a distinctive mode of domination. Both Postone and Deleuze–Guattari suggest that emancipation requires overcoming the historically specific labour-form rather than liberating labour itself, an argument that stands in stark contrast to Lukács’s affirmation of labour’s ontological primacy as the basis of freedom. In this way, postwar French philosophy defined itself in opposition to Lukács even as it remained in dialogue with him. From Sartre’s phenomenological reworking of reification, through Althusser’s critique of historicism, to Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialisation of labour, French thought after 1945 continually positioned itself with respect to the problems Lukács had posed.