As a way to collectively refer to — and flippantly dismiss — the works of mid-late 20th century French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean- François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and their contemporaries, the term ‘postmodernism’, usually deployed in combination with epithets like ‘relativists,’ ‘charlatans,’ ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable nonsense,’ has done a huge amount of damage. In many cases, those casting aspersions (who include a fair number of self-identified ‘analytic’ philosophers, but also various leftists and anarchists) frame themselves as die-hard rationalists — defenders of the Enlightenment tradition and enemies of mystification and intellectual cargo cults. In few instances, however, is there even a passing familiarity with the work of those being dismissed as irrelevant or, worse, dangerous enemies of thought.

Why do these theorists, often referred to as ‘post-structuralists’ or ‘Continental philosophers’, provoke, to paraphrase Timothy Leary, such strong negative reactions in those who have never read them? What is so dangerous or unsettling in their thought?

Perhaps most obviously, in a complex and information saturated world there’s a lot of incentive to avoid ideas that run counter to those we’ve spent time and energy cultivating, or that get us through the day. Grappling with new philosophies takes time and some also pose deep existential challenges, drawing attention to the foundations of our worldview and making them appear far less solid than we may be comfortable with. White supremacy and, more generally, structural inequality are good examples of this: to really grapple with these conceptually we have to be willing to commit to a fair amount of intellectual labour, thinking about the world in ways we may not be used to with serious implications for how we view ourselves and our ethical relations with those around us. Given our natural aversion towards this kind of work, there’s a strong tendency to diminish the import of new ways of thinking, either by recuperating them into our existing worldview through distortion and oversimplification or, relatedly, by rendering them unworthy of our attention through caricature and negative association.

The dominant understanding of Continental philosophers (a term that seems to have first been used by mid-20th century English philosophers like Gilbert Ryle to sharply distinguish themselves from French existentialists and phenomenologists, and which I’ll be using throughout this article, with the proviso that, as Simon Critchley reminds us, ‘Continental philosophy is an invention, or more accurately, a projection of the Anglo-American academy onto a Continental Europe that would not recognise the legitimacy of such an appellation — a little like asking for a Continental breakfast in Paris’) is rife with inaccuracy and caricature: a Derrida who says there’s nothing outside of the text; a Foucault who says everything is a discourse and for whom resistance is impossible since we’re all structurally determined; a Deleuze and Guattari who create neologisms at the speed of sound and advocate a ‘rhizomatics’ — an anything-goes practice of schizoid collage; a Baudrillard who literally thinks that the Gulf War never happened. Is this really what these philosophers — the leading lights of their generation, all students and lecturers at the most elite French academic institutions — are saying? Are all those thousands upon thousands of pages of Continental theory, loaded with sophisticated engagements with the entire history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics through to Heidegger, nothing more than a handful of childish and patently absurd provocations?

Of course not, but can we really blame people — philosophers even — for deferring to caricatures when confronted with several hundred pages of:



Since the One is nothing but the being-given-without-givenness (of) the One, it in no way produces philosophy or the World (procession, emanation, ontologico-ekstatic manifestation, creation ex nihilo, onto-theo-logical perfection) — there is no real genesis of philosophy. This is the non-sufficiency of the One as necessary but nonsufficient condition. The Real is a ‘negative’ condition or condition sine qua non for, precisely because it is not itself nothingness or negation.

No, François Laruelle is certainly no Bertrand Russell. Here we arrive at Noam Chomsky’s argument against Continental philosophers: that they’re a) saying something of value, in which case we’re either too stupid to understand them or they’re too pretentious to write clearly, or b) there is nothing to understand, they’re just indulging in empty wordplay for the sake of it. And yes, it’s hard to get a clear grip on what the above quote may mean. There are, however, several problems here. First, we need to engage with work within its intended context. This means relying on the actual writings of Continental philosophers, not decontextualized snippets. Random paragraphs of so-called analytic philosophy are equally opaque when viewed in isolation, as any reader of Quine or Sellars or even Wittgenstein can attest to (even more so when they’re laden with formal logical notation). We also need to think about broader socio-political context: writing in France in the 60s and 70s, for instance, Foucault and Deleuze quite reasonably assume familiarity with several of the key debates of the time around class composition, subjectivity and so forth, as well as at least some understanding of Marx, Lacan, Sartre and other highly topical theorists.

This doesn’t, however, explain all of the difficulties of language Anglophone readers of Continental philosophy face. Crucially in this regard, we should remember that seminal works like The Order of Things, Anti-Oedipus and Of Grammatology are French books that have been translated into English, something the translators themselves have described as an arduous and sometimes inherently fraught task given the incommensurability of French and English with their different vocabularies and idiosyncrasies. A further challenge in translating philosophy is to ensure that key technical terms convey their full intended sense or range of meaning, something that is never entirely possible, especially when dealing with neologisms. For instance, the important Deleuzian term agencement is inadequately translated as assemblage, entirely losing the connotation of agency and ‘doing’ in the original. This is not to suggest, by the way, that neologism — a term that’s used as a criticism but which simply means ‘new word’ — is a bad thing. Analytic philosophers also sometimes need to invent new words like heterophenomenology or grue to talk about new ideas and, to state the banally obvious, all words were once new words.

Then there’s the matter of style. Continental philosophers are more prone towards the use of figurative and allusive language, with the result that their writing often feels like a heady mix of high theory and experimental literature, as though William Burroughs is channeling Hegel while macro-dosing on LSD. If we’re used to a more sober style of philosophy, where clarity and dispassionate step-by-step logical disquisition are encouraged (although let’s not forget that this is also an aesthetic preference, a style), these creative flourishes may suggest that Continental philosophy is insufficiently rigorous, or prone to ungrounded whimsy. This, however, is not the case. Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and co. are exceptionally rigorous, systematic philosophers, although it can take a fair amount of intellectual labour to grasp the full scope of their interventions. This difficultly, although it is far from insurmountable, is also often invoked as an inherent problem. Here there is perhaps a conflation of philosophy with pop philosophy: Alain Badiou is assuredly not Alain de Botton or Peter Singer, but then neither are the analytic philosophers Quine, Sellars, Brandom, van Fraassen and the Churchlands. Pop philosophy of the ‘How to Live an Ethical Life: ten steps to feeling okay in the world’ variety is perfectly legitimate, as is its helpful if-you-can’t-explain-it-to-a-six-year-old-it-isn’t-worth-saying ethos, but to assume that it is representative of philosophical aims, scope, debates or milieu is similar to viewing Discover Magazine as representative of cutting-edge science as opposed to being a presentation of actual scientific work (the kind published in peer-reviewed journals and intended to be engaged with by small groups of peers within a specialised field that assumes a great deal of prior knowledge and intellectual training) for a popular audience. We do not expect said scientific papers to be written in the tone of popular science journalism, nor do we assume that they should be immediately accessible to a lay audience, so why should philosophy have to conform to this unreasonable standard?

Speaking of science, however, is it not the case that Foucault and co. are unscientific, or even anti-science? In fact Continental philosophers, despite the stereotype, tend to be surprisingly well-versed in science, often more so than their analytic counterparts, even if the most famous ‘rebuttal’ of dreaded postmodernism, Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, may at first glance suggest otherwise. While the intentions of this much-abused book are in fact reasonably modest — to demonstrate that some Continental philosophers use technical mathematical and scientific terminology incorrectly — most of those who refer to it (at least some of whom, it appears, have not actually read it but invoke it anyway as a kind of irrational magical incantation to ward of the wrong-headed purveyors of deconstruction and rhizomatics) frame it as a critique of the actual philosophies in question, whereas the authors explicitly state that this is not their goal and that they are not qualified to pass judgement in this regard. Interestingly, it now appears that they were not qualified to pass judgement on the maths and science either: Arkady Plotnitsky and others have drawn attention to where Sokal and Bricmont fundamentally misunderstand, for instance, Deleuze’s use of differential calculus in his masterpiece, Difference and Repetition (which he once described in an interview as his attempt to give 20th century science the metaphysics it deserved), or what Lacan was going on about with all that talk of phalluses and negative numbers. Derrida’s scathing response to the authors is also a worthwhile read.

Sokal is probably more familiar to readers as the perpetrator of the legendary Sokal hoax, a prank he pulled on Social Text, a cultural studies journal, in 1996 by submitting an article obscenely titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Astonishingly, the article was approved and published but turned out to be utter nonsense — a bricolage of cherry-picked quotes, ramblings, trendy terminology and erroneous deployments of science. Sokal used this as unequivocal proof that postmodernism was nothing more than vapid charlatanism. If we’re being uncharitable, all he really demonstrated, just as the Badiou Studies Journal hoax and several scientific journal hoaxes have more recently underscored, is that journals don’t always review their content well and some of them are sorely lacking in academic and ethical integrity (which in turn raises questions about the position peer-reviewed journals occupy in a neoliberal publish-or-perish academic landscape, as well as the pressure placed on overworked, precarious intellectual labourers to review submissions, but let’s not digress…)

More charitably, Sokal was perhaps drawing our attention to a serious historical problem: not Continental philosophy itself, but the way in which serious works of French philosophy were originally translated and imported into cultural studies and literary criticism departments, their initial ports of call within US and UK academia, where they were used in an exceptionally loose, non-rigorous and occasionally entirely erroneous fashion by well-meaning intellectuals (and undoubtedly some pretentious sophists too) without any substantial grounding in philosophy. François Cussot’s exceptional French Theory maps this trajectory, exploring the various misunderstandings and naïve re-purposings of Deleuze, Baudrillard and others within the English and American art and counterculture scenes and the effects this continues to have in the present. While Cussot, to his credit, does not pass judgement, I think it is safe to assume that, shorn of both socio-political context (May 68, the French psychoanalytic milieu, the prominence of Marxism in the French academy, the role of intellectuals in French public life) as well as philosophical background (German Idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism and anthropology, the mid-20th century philosophers of science Canguilhem, Cavailles and Bachelard, the French renewal of Nietzsche), early Anglophone encounters with Continental philosophy tended, for the most part, towards exactly the kinds of caricatures those most disparaging of Foucault and co. tend to operate with, grievously conflating these decontextualised third-hand adaptations with the work of some of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

Such conflation may have been excusable in the pre-internet 80s and 90s, but the wealth of decent secondary literature and exceptional translations we now have available no longer justify a swift dismissal of Continental philosophy. Anyone who wants to seriously engage with this work will find in it all the qualities it is supposed to lack and which are more often exclusively associated with analytic philosophy: logical rigour, grappling with fundamental questions of epistemology and ontology, exhaustive engagements with the implications of contemporary science and so forth, Manuel DeLanda’s phenomenal explication of the science embedded in Deleuze’s work for analytic philosophers, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, being a particularly salient example of the latter.

So why the continued rift? Why do so many highly qualified professional academics insist on perpetuating what we now know to be dubious falsehoods? Is there even a real dichotomy, a qualitative difference between so-called analytic and so-called Continental thought?

While the divide — always a little more rhetorical than substantial — is now being crossed, most notably in the work of a new (or newly discovered) generation of French philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, François Laruelle, Alain Badiou and Tristan Garcia, as well as the Anglophone philosophers broadly involved in the speculative realist (Graham Harman), object-oriented ontology (Levi-Bryant), new Promethean/rationalist (Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, Peter Wolfendale, Xenofeminism), post/a-human (Patricia MacCormack, Cary Wolfe) and new materialist (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad) ‘movements’ (I hope you’re Googling furiously!), it does seem to be the case that there remains at least some difference in focus or scope. To construct a caricature of my own, analytic philosophy has largely been engaged with questions around philosophy of mind and language analysis, along with the endorsement of specific reasoning techniques and stylistic conventions, whereas Continental philosophy is more comfortable exploring metaphysics and empirico-transcendental doublets (a term used by Foucault to point out some remarkably subtle map-territory problems in how we think about thinking and the production of knowledge) with a wide range of styles and epistemological approaches. Analytic philosophy tends to model social reality a-historically, in terms of rational agency and game-theoretic type systems, while Continental philosophy discusses society in terms of histories of power and inter-subjectivity. Analytic philosophy, to cut to the chase, thinks in terms of liberal democratic subjectivity within Rawlsian democracies, whereas Continental philosophy, being largely Marxist or otherwise left/radical, considers the systemic conditions that create certain kinds of subjectivities (including, notably, neoliberal subjects who defer to analytic philosophical tropes in order to assure themselves that the world is just as it should be, that this is the best of all possible worlds).

In short, and this is the crux of my broader argument, there is a fundamental political difference underlying or intersecting with the not-insubstantial philosophical differences (which are of course far more nuanced than my straw person, as philosophers like Rorty, for instance, were keenly aware). Continental philosophers tend to identify as Marxists, autonomists or anarchists of various strains, whereas analytic philosophers, for the most part, see themselves as continuing the proud tradition of classic Locke-and-Mills liberalism. And when they do, like Nozick, refer to themselves as ‘anarchists’ or similar, it’s a strangely classically liberal/libertarian anarchism.

Some crucially important questions follow from this: what are the existential and material interests analytic philosophy — the kind quick to disparage anything sounding vaguely French — supports? What does it seek to defend? What does it assume? Are philosophies that end up arguing for liberal democracy as the best of all possible forms of social organisation actually post-hoc justifications made by those who politically identify as liberal democrats? When analytic philosophers complain that there is no political or ethical normativity to be found in Continental philosophy, are they not putting the ethico-political cart in front of the onto-epistemological horse? These kinds of questions are explicitly posed — albeit in a more general sense — by Continental philosophy, which is perhaps another reason why there is so much aversion to it. Such aversion is, in final reckoning, deeply ironic, because while many have argued that thinkers like Foucault are anti-Enlightenment, Foucault and co. in many cases view themselves not as enemies of reason and the pursuit of knowledge but as drawing the Enlightenment project towards its logical conclusions, which entails a critical engagement with its very founding assumptions of humanity, progress, subjectivity, normativity, modernity and so forth. In this sense, Continental philosophers are, to be somewhat cynical, sometimes better Enlightenment thinkers than analytic philosophers who identify with this tradition but have gotten stuck somewhere along the way, following a different trajectory away from instead of through Kant — a trajectory that has in some sense started to spiral in on itself, or become an asymptotic curve that at some point blurs into an infinite series of footnotes to Wittgenstein.

If we value the role of philosophy in society, and if we think, with Ray Brassier, that ‘philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem,’ we should act with philosophical integrity in how we approach new ideas. We should not dismiss them because they do not fit our political or aesthetic preferences and we should try to countenance their troubling implications regardless of subjective discomfort. Because the simple truth (and of course there are no simple truths) is that we live in troubling and turbulent times, times that, if we are to make any sense of them at all, demand that we think anew and challenge our most basic assumptions of what it is to be in the world and what the world is. Instead of losing ourselves in contrived possible and ideal worlds, built out of Lego blocks and trolley problems as barricades against the full glare of the light of reason, we would do better to acknowledge the infinite complexity of this one. In doing so, we may find in the obfuscatory, pretentious, delusional and nihilistic thought of postmodern relativists like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari exactly the kind of profound humility, coupled with cautious pragmatism and experimental courage, sufficient to this most urgent task.