Wokism as Exported Nihilism

A critical reading of the intellectual origins of wokism, from French theory to its cultural expansion through universities, media and politics.

We closed our previous article by asking how wokism had permeated left-wing positions.
Where does that ideological package come from, one that is embraced by vast sectors of opinion and that appears, openly or implicitly, as a banner both for left-wing parties and for those that do not perceive themselves as such?
A few days ago, Argentine President Dr. Javier Milei warmly praised an explanation he had found on social media.
When José Pedro Varela analyzed Uruguay’s reality before Latorre’s government, he said he was going to “perform the autopsy of the sick body before our eyes.”
The phrase could apply to the remarkable review by French computer engineer and essayist Brivael Le Pogam, which earned the president’s praise.
In a brief and blunt exposition, he explains the process through which wokism was gestated.
“Three Parisian philosophers […] provided the operating software for an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, human resources managers, journalists and legislators. That is how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history deserves to be defended, whether merit exists, or whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.”
Civilization rests on three concepts: truth is accessible through reason; good and evil exist; there is a legacy to be transmitted.
Those three horsemen of the Apocalypse set out to undermine those foundations.
Those identified by Le Pogam have not been the only ones, but if one example is enough, here are three.
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995); Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) had already understood that the dialectic of class struggle was not working, and proposed instead the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed.
The three philosophers selected by the French essayist wrote a large number of volumes, from which some successors extracted what served their purposes, and from that mass wokism gradually took shape, that “nihilism with chic packaging,” in Le Pogam’s words.
Foucault had a period as a member of the Communist Party (1950–53), maintained left-wing positions throughout his life, emphatically praised Khomeini’s revolution, and traveled twice to Iran as a journalist, until he became disillusioned, as had happened with real socialism.
He lectured at French and North American universities, spreading his ideas at the highest intellectual level.
Among other things, he taught that truth does not exist and that society must be changed. Because power is not only in the hands of the State, but also in everyday discourses and institutions, and everything is about relations of power.
He also stated that sexuality is a social construct. In other words, a truth that exists?
That same line of skepticism running through the work of these authors is reflected in the work of Enrique Santos Discépolo (1901–1951).
The philosophers expound academically what Discépolo reflects in his poetry and theatrical work.
“One is so alone in one’s pain / One is so blind in one’s sorrow / But a cruel cold worse than hatred / Dead point of souls, dreadful tomb of my love / Cursed forever and stole from me every illusion” [Uno, 1943].
“When luck, that grela (woman) / failing and failing / leaves you stranded / when you are truly down and out / without direction, desperate / when you have neither faith / nor yerba mate from yesterday / drying in the sun / when you wear out your shoes / looking for that coin / that will let you eat / the indifference of the world, which is deaf and mute / then you will feel it” [Yira yira, 1930].
While Foucault theorizes about power, Discépolo poeticizes and dramatizes it, both showing how the individual is crossed and shaped by dominant discourse.
“The model I followed in my works was life,” Discépolo would say.
Derrida proposes the deconstruction of language.
Because everything is a construct, which must be dismantled in order to see that ideas that appear natural are cultural and historical constructions. That if we perceive something as beautiful, it is because we have been taught what beauty is.
That everything is relative, because it depends on the glass through which one looks, and on the light that illuminates us.
What Discépolo says: “the same a donkey as a great professor.” A great professor… like Derrida? Because everything is relative, is it not?
Deleuze develops a theory about the rhizome and arborescent structures…
And he devotes his spare time to romanticizing the terrorist organization known as the Red Brigades and Antonio Negri, convicted as a murderer in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, who was president of Italy’s Council of Ministers.
The works of these thinkers, “combined, exported, vulgarized, form a system. And that system is a poison,” observes Le Pogam.
The thinker apologizes “on behalf of the French, for having given birth to French Theory, which gave birth to the worst ideological filth: wokism.”
Because that philosophical production, those “texts unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a terrain that did not exist at home: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its identitarian obsession.”
And from there, it spread. Through interpreters such as Judith Butler, one arrives “at queer theory,” which proposes that gender is a construction, so that everyone can self-construct however they wish.
Kimberlé Crenshaw contributes the concept of intersectionality, regarding how inequalities can be cumulative and reinforce one another.
Thus, the white, bourgeois, heterosexual, Catholic, right-wing man has become an object of public abhorrence.
Because: “every hierarchy is suspicious, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and therefore negotiable, every majority is guilty,” concludes Le Pogam.
Is that not, perhaps, the argument of most of the films shown by Netflix?

Origins of wokism.
Power, identity and deconstruction.
Cultural export and civilizational crisis.

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