Left Is Not Woke

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Scholarly investigation would complicate the claims I make about Foucault or Schmitt or evolutionary psychology”. Kant in fact went far beyond the racism typical of Enlightenment figures, as, for example, when he offers the following advice: “use a split bamboo cane instead of whip, so that the Negro will suffer a great deal of pains (because of the Negro’s thick skin, he would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a whip) but without dying”. Susan Neiman's aim in Left Is Not Woke is to remind the left of the importance of universalist values. Now into the fray comes one of the foremost popularisers of Enlightenment thought, Susan Neiman, with her succinct and compelling Left Is Not Woke, a book that arises from a 2022 lecture she gave at the University of Cambridge (a video of which can be found online). As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

John Locke, undoubtedly one of the most influential political philosophers in European history, owned shares in slave-trading companies and leveraged Enlightenment “reason” to defend the practice.

For example, how are we to handle cases when apparent tribalism can be a covert case of universalism and vice versa? For Neiman the philosophical forbears of “woke” are apparently Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, who between them undermined the belief in progress and altruism necessary for a decent politics of the left.

In this context, all anyone deemed non-marginalized can be is an ‘ally,’ an idea Neiman dismisses out of hand: ‘I am not an ally. This attempt to situate “wokeness” alongside global capitalism is one example of many in the book (e.In summation, I assume some unnamed leftists are exclusively intellectually indebted to evolutionary psychology, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. If a climate scholar foregrounds the enduring legacy of colonialism and racism on contemporary climate policies (e. Traditionally, it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second’ (8). Furthermore, and more insidiously, snarl words are frequently the language of the status quo, the epithets politicians and media personalities daily hurl at their targets. This reactionary tendency has led to some prominent class-first leftists advocating anti-LGBT+ and racist policies, constructing red-brown alliances with right-wing groups that advocate the same purity logic reviled by Neiman, and descending into “ironic” traditionalism, hierarchicalism, tribalism and nihilism.

I even agree with her on some points—loud music at restaurants is annoying—but the condescension doesn’t illuminate anything. But there is a reason this book was put to print so quickly (so quickly it lacks an index, although it is sufficiently footnoted), which has to do with the shape of politics in the world at large. end by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization […] The idea of intersectionality […] [has] led to a focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized and multiplies them into a forest of trauma.One could therefore assume that the term ‘woke’ describes nothing more than the perennial fears of conservatives for a future of human liberation – that ‘woke’ is, in fact, simply the latest shorthand encompassing general leftist principles. Certainly, its focus on the proletariat over the bourgeoisie appears to undermine its universalism, but do its origins in the Enlightenment save it from thereby being labelled “woke”? At its best, Enlightenment thought teaches us to be skeptical of received wisdom, to question sources of power and structures of domination.

Much of the content in her book is taken directly from the 2022 talk, with some interesting exceptions.Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in Berlin at the time, won the PEN prize for a first work of non-fiction in 1992.