THE LEFT IS HUMILIATED AND CONQUERED BY HEGELIAN E-GIRLS AND JESUS CHRIST
How to sublate racism by passing through racism non-racistly
Recently there has been a scandal on “philosophy twitter” (sounds cringe already). What is the object of scandal? Someone is not a leftist.
The first Hegelian e-girl, Nikki, initiated the controversy by wearing a Make America Great Again cap. The second Hegelian e-girl, Anna, in an act of boldness and virtue as well an expression of great philosophical clarity, declared that the Hegelians would seek how to become more anti-racist than naive anti-racists — sublating racism by passing through it non-racistly. What an invigorating idea! This heroic solution to the problem of racism was met with an outpouring of scorn, though not one interlocutor could explain why it was wrong on proper Hegelian grounds.
An universal outcry of condemnation arose. Seeing these petty philosophers suddenly summoned into the anti-e-girl-Aktion abandon their discipline and descend into an orgy of crude scapegoating mania — all the balding adjunct professors now taking the moment to dig into these bright and vivacious young women for daring to actually philosophize — what explains this?
One thing is universal among these people: the sense that the left has been betrayed. There is some loosely assented to project among these folks to create socialism or something like that, and Nikki and Anna have strayed too far from it. This betrayal happens over and over, to these weary philosophers — you think someone is a fellow leftist, cheers, next round’s on me — but they turn out to be a “grifter” — this is the eternal woe of the leftist; that someone would become interested in making money rather than having pointless debates all day. It is universally assented to on “philosophy twitter” that it is very important to figure out how to create socialism by synthesizing Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Althusser, and maybe psychoanalysis. No one has figured out the correct way to put all these thinkers in dialogue but when they do, socialism will happen. Every user on philosophy twitter has their own incompatible sense of the true leftist tradition which they will brashly defend against the others, accusing the others of being reactionary for defecting against the half-formed vision of the true doctrine they assemble in their mind.
The shining light of Anna has come to explain to these chattering fools what should be profoundly obvious. Nowhere in the world does these philosophers’ “leftism” exist. But they presuppose that it must. Their leftism is a kind of spirit of justice which must, axiomatically, always be held to in thought and action even as it is trampled again and again in struggle, even as its letter becomes more and more undefinable, even as it becomes a form of nostalgia for a struggle which only once was. Thus their leftism is a basic religious commitment (wokeness is like a religion). What Anna challenges them to do is make it self-conscious as a religious commitment, for it has no other coherent meaning.
From whence leftism?
Why is it the case that all these philosophers — men and women who one would hope are inspired by the love of wisdom and chase it to its myriad ends — are capable of doing so only insofar as the ends linger within the smelly vestibule of leftism?
The embrace of leftism is downstream of a different action of the philosopher — to assert himself as a noble soul who writes as a friend to humanity. You see, all over the world we have these lamentable actions — police abusing their power, greedy corporations polluting the earth, nations going to war, people being petty and abusive to one another on a dull, daily level — have we forgotten that we are all human? The noble philosopher is he who has taken the moment to lament. It is, for many, the same to say that one is a believer in humanity as it is to say that one holds to the ideal of socialism. If this is not possible to hold as an ideal, some might say, then there is no purpose to philosophy at all.
Socialism, or leftism, is necessary to invent in order to give philosophy its object and to make speech possible. Without the conceit of leftism, it is not possible to use the philosophical pronoun “we”. If the Enlightenment is the victory of the universality of language as legislator over the particularity of the sword, then leftism emerges as a possibility as soon as this legislator says “we”, and the specter of a Leviathan-like body which incorporates all who participate in language begins to be available for the philosopher to address as a subject.
Similarly to the notion of a messianic Other immanent to language as its addressee, the philosophical speaker establishes a basic act of faith by invoking a “we” which does not exist yet as the community which will carry out philosophical justice in the world. The specter must be made concrete for the words to have meaning, and the lamentations to heard, and the tears to stain firm ground.
This describes the synchronic development of leftism — it emerges as a specter as soon as some Enlighenment man invokes the “we” of humanity in his appeals to the roaring crowd. The diachronic development of leftism occurs when the left-wing project becomes incarnated in the development of a class tasked with the service towards universal ideals — the bureaucracies of civil servants which appeared in the wake of the French Revolution, and were lauded by Hegel as the vessels for the world-spirit in its quest towards absolute knowing.
Marx is a radicalization of Hegel written by a man who was upset that he was barred from academic and bureaucratic positions after writing radical pamphlets. In Marx’s On the Jewish Question, it becomes clear that the task of Marx is to advance the universal class sponsored by the state into a force which would entirely subsume the particular (non-universal) interests present in churches and private businesses. This program was instantiated in the Soviet Union, in which churches and private businesses were destroyed and all activity became subsumed into the State, with the vanguard Communist Party playing the role of the universal class. Marx becomes the supreme example of vigorous leftist universalism for other varieties of leftists and socialists (eg social democracy) to propose deviations from.
Leftism has already won. In every developed nation, there is already this universal class, this concern for the universal — all these academics, bureaucrats, media figures talking about “we” — though always in a half-instantiated form when contrasted with the dream of Full Leftism; the New Deal in America is a peace treaty between leftists and oligarchs.
The victory of the left in the West is not to create large-scale economic cooperation as such, but rather to advance the will of the universal class on several axes — global governance institutions such as the UN, the IMF — universal public education — bureaucracies such as the FDA and EPA — civil rights law and diversity initiatives — institutes for corporate cooperation such as the World Economic Forum.
The promise of such initiatives is that without the totalitarianism of an economic collectivism as in the Soviet Union, the dream of universalism, the brotherhood of man, the happy human existence could be created through institutions to eliminate fundamental non-cooperative Difference between groups such as “tribes”, races, and nations. Everywhere today these compacts fall apart, and tensions between races and nations grow, as groups systematically defect from the “we”, or doubt the “we”’s existence.
Is the solution simply more leftism? No, because not even leftists want more leftism. The “we” of the universal class goes by another name — Empire. Since the victory of the Western universal classes in the Second World War, and then the Cold War, leftism equates to Empire, imperialism, which then becomes the very thing leftists set about attempting to dismantle, given its privileging of a set of powers to rule over the rest of the globe. But no leftist demand to make Empire more tolerant or ecumenical through a strengthening of leftism can avoid the fact that this is a demand for Empire to radicalize its leadership and thus its imperative to rule. Deconstruction, as a negative theology which seeks the most meta-level non-law beyond the law, cannot be anything other than a yearning for the greatest and most total Cosmo-Planetary Empire, a “we” which is impossible to escape beyond.
But — more immediately than hand-wringing concerns over imperialism — leftists seek to escape Empire through deeper, more personal reasons: alienation. Alienation is of course the concern which leads Marx to philosophize a way out of capitalism and its demands for particularities from the whole. But this is a trap. Alienation is what sparks the gloomy contemplative soul to rally for a position where he can insert himself as the universal and thus feel a communion with man. But the actual effect of the substitution is to create the expanding bureaucracy of the state, which increases the alienation of the individual. If the leftist realizes this, he becomes Foucaldian and anti-leftist, realizing that he no longer wants bureaucracies to be in charge of Enlightenment, but seek the comfort of close-knit communities of Difference.
It is well-known that leftists are fundamentally immature. Though they embrace this “we”, they reject it as soon as “we” begins to “talk sternly like their father” — when the collective becomes cohered and re-embodied in the master signifier. Leftists are compelled to despise cops because cops tell them sternly how to behave, but the demand for more cops, more Empire is the demand of leftism. Leftists will never address this fundamental incongruence in their thought — it remains the congenital blind spot which upon recognize compels one to transcend leftism.
The Non-Leftist Turn
Original thinking, if it is to go anywhere, must decisively abandon this leftism, because original thought is not possible within leftism. There is no middle ground with leftism because it is like a religion. Either you are a person who leftists can make arbitrary guilt-based demands on to stick within the parameters of leftism or you are someone who can simply say “I am not a leftist, when you say ‘we must do x’, I am not a part of this ‘we’. Please harangue someone else”.
Leftism is like a religion but its tenets are written nowhere, yet each leftist is certain that he has a direct line to a God (his superego) which gives him the leftist script so he can pompously read it out loud to his peers. Leftist anarcho-papacy is like the fulfillment of Luther’s dream of Christianity in which every man is truly his own priest. Every leftist message is delivered with the smug tenor of disbelief that its recipient does not already know what “we” have already determined, and it is only necessary for the leftist to gesture towards the idea that consensus already somewhere out there, established in the mist. The leftist does not need to obey virtue, tradition, or prudence, he only ever needs to obey the ever-shifting dictates of the “we”. The leftist is a pure follower of the herd who can be swayed to do anything at all if he is told pressingly that “we” are doing it.
Within continental philosophy, the basic movement of rejecting leftism has been indexed by Nick Land as accelerationism. Acceleration is introduced as a “breath of fresh air” — under a new label, one need not align oneself with the stifling mandates of the “we” — one can radically “break away” through an alliance with technological exploration. This has led to much fun and innovation, but only Land himself dares follow this to its ultimate conclusion of Satanism, far-right polemics, and virulent racism. Those in his wake still feel the need to invoke the “we” at the last instance, such as Ray Brassier, who writes about how “thought has interests that are not the same as life” and says “philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem”, but still ultimately presents his philosophy in the service of the project of socialism.
Is Nick Land serious in his viciousness and misanthropy? He has said: “the only thing I would impose is fragmentation”. In 2024, fragmentation is what is manifestly desired at all scales. But does fragmentation mean pure selfishness, solipsism, neo-pagan perversions?
No, because it is a question of syntax. The leftist philosopher simply does not yet have the grammar to speak to a fragmented world. Leftism will not survive past the millennial generation, as the millennial generation is that thrust in a gap between two media environments, one in which fragmentation seemed surmountable (one only needed to redeem Family Guy), the other in which it has surged forth into an impossible chaos. The entire project of Angelicism01 is to analyze the grammar of the modern internet and mourn this “we” under the name of “ecocide”, and thus even as it occasionally lapses into alt-right toxicity, is still most fundamentally a defeated millennial leftism.
To believe that one can elevate one’s stance to the level of addressing a universal audience is a conceit of speech which betrays itself. It would seem that universality is only attainable through a mysterious mediation with the divine. This is why Hegel said that only through Christianity is the tension between the particular and the universal resolvable through the figure of the Individual (Christ). If there is a new non-leftist substitute for the universal class of justice and egalitarian brotherhood, it will be a class of Individuals, which we still do not know how to become, because we do not have the language.
Incredible insight! Fantastic work very well done!!!