A new post-1970s left intellectual combined Third World rhetoric with anticommunism and Nietzschean post-structuralism

Evidence

This global offensive of the Right, global retreat of the Left, and retreat also of that which was progressive even in our canonical nationalism, is the essential backdrop for any analysis of the structure of intellectual productions and their reception in our time. Within this reorganized global conjuncture we have witnessed, in all the bourgeois countries, the ascent to dominance of an entirely new kind of intellectual within a formation which continued to call itself a Left. The characteristic posture of this new intellectual was that he or she would gain legitimacy on the Left by constantly and fervently referring to the Third World, Cuba, national liberation, and so on, but would also be openly and contemptuously anticommunist; would often enough not affiliate even with that other tradition which had also descended from classical Marxism, namely social democracy, nor be affiliated in any degree with any labour movement whatsoever, but would invoke an anti-bourgeois stance in the name of manifestly reactionary anti-humanisms enunciated in the Nietzschean tradition and propagated now under rhe signature of anti-empiricism, anti-historicism, structuralism and post-structuralism, specifically Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Glucksmann Kristeva, and so on. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 791

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Ahmad’s critique of discourse-determinism’s post-1968 political function directly to the reader’s thread on Foucault’s race-struggle counter-history and strategic essentialism as materially evasive postures. — connects to: Poststructuralist debunking of nationalism succeeded Third-Worldist nationalism as the dominant academic counter-canon — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 61; A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 356; A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975 — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 791 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: Ahmad lists Foucault among the reactionary anti-humanisms — worth noting Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended lectures themselves claim a Left ancestry through Hotman and Boulainvilliers; how does Ahmad read Foucault’s own self-positioning?

Broader Connections

• A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism #corroborates (1.00) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 356
• A new anticommunist Third-Worldist intellectual displaced traditional left affiliations after 1975 #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 791
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology #qualifies (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 274
• Nietzschean theory retrofitted a postmodern anticolonialism that Marxist anti-imperialism already held #responds-to (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 947
• Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces #complicates (0.72)
• Ex-colonial intellectuals shaped the New Left and Cultural Studies from its origins #corroborates (0.72)
• Global structures enabled ideological community for marginalized intellectual movements #expands (0.72) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 147
• Sartre praised oppressed people’s violence as Nietzschean self-creation. #exemplifies (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 869