Figuring France’s poststructuralists as conservative is a fundamental misdescription.

Evidence

The misconstruction has its displaced symptom in the fanciful taxonomy with which it ends. Whatever the criticisms to be made of the intellectual descent from Bataille to Foucault (there are many), it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as ‘conservative’. Vice-versa, however neo-conservative the progeny of Wittgenstein, Schmitt or Benn, not to speak of thinkers like Bell, to castigate them as vehicles of ‘postmodernism’ is peculiarly aberrant: they have typically been among its fiercest critics. To affix the label to such foes was tantamount to obnubilating the postmodern altogether. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the larger postmodernism debate — Habermas vs. the ‘neoconservative’ label — and to the reader’s own article on the genealogy of such labels.