Poststructuralism’s anti-essentialism is itself a repressive bourgeois position

Evidence

But a theoretical position that dismisses the history of materialities as a ‘progressivist modes-of-production narrative’, historical agency itself as a ‘myth of origins’, nations and states (all nations and all states) as irretrievably coercive, classes as simply discursive constructs, and political parties themselves as fundamentally contaminated with collectivist illusions of a stable subject position – a theoretical position of that kind, from which no poststructuralism worth the name can escape, is, in the most accurate sense of these words, repressive and bourgeois. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the reader’s prior curation of anti-noise/critical-theory sources — here the target is the political quietism inside poststructuralist irony, echoing earlier observations about ironic detachment being a form of disengagement.

Related

• Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism (similarity 0.78)
• Habermas’s poststructuralism critique is shaped by German anxieties over reactionary challenges (similarity 0.78)