Professional Philosophy in the Age of Neoreaction: some unintended consequences of the analytic/continental divide and the ethics of theorizing

In explaining the varieties of contemporary reactionary philosophy to my non-philosopher spouse, I settled on: “dark enlightenment” (DE) is neoreaction that leans continental, TESCREAL is neoreaction that leans analytic. Even though I am firmly of the view that the continental/analytic divide is more sociological (i.e., foremost a relation of power and privilege) than anything else, there are nevertheless some characteristic differences in canon and methods. With its focus on textual exegesis, working with literature in translation, and so on, continental philosophy looks more like the other humanities, especially literary and cultural studies. Analytic philosophy has traditionally tried to cozy up to the sciences; it privileges work in English that focuses on purportedly apolitical technical matters. Continental philosophy doctoral programs tend to be in Catholic universities (Pope Benedict wrote a dissertation on phenomenology), whereas analytic ones tend to be in the Ivy League and big private institutions like NYU. Famous if problematic analytic philosopher Peter Singer’s work is central to the TESCREAL bundle philosophies, which often incorporate consequentialist ethics, just as Nick Landian DE is often called things like “Deleuzian Thatcherism” of “based Deleuze.” 

This scheme is helpful in highlighting the differences between these two main strands of contemporary neoreactionary thought. I’m not going to go into a deep dive into each school of thought both because others have done that (I especially like Paul Gilroy’s, Elizabeth Sandifer’s, and Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres’ work on this matter) and because my interest here is more in thinking through a few other issues. (I’m also not going to cite any of the DE or TESCREAL stuff directly because the bad stuff is immediately evident and I don’t want to repeat it or give it oxygen.) First, understanding the Dark Enlightenment and the TESCREAL bundle as continental and analytic sides of the same coin helps bring into focus the institutional structures of legitimation that have kept DE almost entirely out of the academy (which to be clear is a good thing) yet allowed TESCREAL bundle ideas to flourish at the highest level of institutional prestige (which is bad). There’s a generalizable lesson to be gleaned from how and why US-based continental philosophy has kept DE well on the pseudoscientific fringes of the profession; that generalizable lesson has less to do with the will and moral fiber of individuals and more to do with structures and institutions. Second, I want to go back to the DE’s roots in the University of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) to draw out an underlying commonality between DE and TESCREAL philosophies: their reactionary posthumanism.

Though DE has its roots in institutionalized academic philosophy, it exists primarily outside the academy and in the US this is true nearly without exception (in 2016 Stony Brook considered rescinding the PhD of a graduate known to affiliate his philosophical work with the so-called alt-right, and the fact that his politics called renewed attention to the pseudoscientific quality of his work and thus put the legitimacy of his credential in question is evidence of how the field thinks on this matter). And to be clear, I’m talking about US-based academic philosophy including the APA, SPEP, SAAP, and the like. In this regard, quote-unquote “theory” doesn’t count as these scholars aren’t appointed in philosophy departments and generally don’t attend those aforementioned philosophy conferences. I’m discussing philosophy as a profession, an institution, and a sociological entity, not at the level of content. Institutionally, US continental philosophy has had to ally itself with the other “underrepresented” traditions in the field, most notably African-American and Latin American philosophy and American pragmatism. The postwar “analytic/continental divide” shoved continental philosophy to the margins as supposedly “not real philosophy,” just like other traditions marginalized for their association with oppressed groups like non-white people and white women. Even though one of continental philosophy’s main figures of the 20th century was a literal Nazi (i.e., Heidegger), in the US continental philosophy was equated with Marxism and shoved out of prestigious places like the Ivy League in order to insulate them from McCarthyism. By the end of the 20th century, the main continental departments were: SUNY Stony Brook, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Penn State, Memphis, DePaul, Emory, Oregon, Villanova, and Loyola Chicago. And most of these departments were not strictly continental, but pluralist, including some analytics, some continentals, and typically a pragmatist and an African-American and/or a Latin Americanist, with perhaps someone else doing something non-Western. Penn State and Memphis are known for their prominence in African-American and Latin-American philosophy; Charles Mills was at Northwestern before he headed to CUNY; Emory’s philosophy department is known for its links to its Gender Studies PhD, its history of prominent American pragmatists, and George Yancey moved there like 15 years ago; Lou Outlaw has been at Vandy for decades; in Fall 2000 my very first grad class at Depaul was Emmanuel Eze’s “Race and Enlightenment’; though he’s at Columbia, Robert Gooding-Williams’s work has long straddled continental and African-American philosophy; Angela Davis is the most prominent American constituent of the Frankfurt School; I could keep going on, but you get the point. The analytic/continental divide created institutional conditions where continental philosophers had to materially ally themselves with African-American and Latin-American philosophy and with feminist philosophy to form a collective that could institutionally legitimize these philosophical traditions that mainstream philosophy excluded.

The clearest and strongest evidence of this is the existence of what’s called “The Pluralist Guide to Philosophy.” (“Pluralism” in this context refers to the pluralism of philosophical traditions.) In the blog era an (in)famous analytic philosopher created a ranked guide to philosophy grad programs that really only ranked analytic programs. The Pluralist Guide was a response to that, which offered guidance on which philosophy PhD programs were good for studying the following subfields: “Africana Philosophy, American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Latin American/Latinx Philosophy, LGBTQ Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race.” The guide was created by experts in all of these fields, and it is a clear example of these subfields coming together in very material ways to collaborate for their collective betterment and survival. 

In the US context, the hegemony of analytic philosophy created material conditions where scholars and students of continental philosophy had vested interests in alliance and collaboration with African-American, Latin-American, queer, and feminist philosophy. This created conditions where continental-leaning departments tended to have more Black and brown faculty than your average philosophy department. This also leads to more Black and brown students in classes at all levels, and course offerings and requirements mix all these traditions together to the point that if you want to study continental philosophy in the US you will likely also have the chance if not the requirement to also take a class in one of these other subfields. Because of the institutional alliances among continental, African-American, and Latin-American philosophical traditions, non-white faculty and students contributed more and had more influence in these pluralist programs than they had the ability to do in the rest of the field, where they were disproportionately underrepresented compared to the general population. I remember one year, maybe 2010 or 11, when I took the UNC Charlotte Ethics Bowl team to Southeast regionals and each of our two teams of five had only one cishet non disabled white guy; we looked VERY DIFFERENT than the other teams. At the institutional and personal level, people studying continental philosophy in the US in the 21st century are much more likely to be around gender and racial minorities than they are to be around people who are fluent in both French and German.

These material institutional and personal alliances with African-American, Latin American, and feminist/queer philosophical traditions and philosophers is a main reason why DE never gained legitimacy in US professional philosophy: the people most likely to be otherwise reading for example Deleuze were probably also reading Linda Alcoff, Charles Mills, Sylvia Wynter, Derek Bell, and bell hooks, and they were doing so in the direct company of Black and brown colleagues and students. If continental philosophers’ material interests were institutionally aligned with their African-American and Latin-Americanist colleagues, then it was not in the subfield’s interest to jump of the neoreactionary racist deep end as that would go a long way in dissolving the pluralist coalition that created and maintained space for continental philosophy in a discipline that would otherwise ship it back to France and Germany (or McGill).

This is likely also why there are no vocal TERFs in US academic philosophy (if they’re there they are not publishing about it). As Emmie Malone pointed out in a Bluesky convo, all the transphobes in American academic philosophy are basically the same segment of the field that argued feminist philosophy wasn’t real philosophy back 20 years ago when I was starting out. Those people do not claim to be feminists. The feminists in US academic philosophy have been part of the same pluralist coalition as the continentals, and the ethos of that subfield has been similarly shaped.

The picture I’m painting here is not one about individuals being good or bad people. There are certainly plenty of examples of individual continental philosophers or feminist philosophers who have problematic, racist personal and professional views, like the time my graduate department denied tenure to the first woman of color to go up in the department’s history. My claim rather is that nobody in the US picked up Land’s work and ran with it because instructional factors meant it wouldn’t get them anywhere: among the audience most familiar with Deleuze and otherwise most likely to be into a “based” version, there was less-than-average receptivity to white supremacist neoreaction. The generalizable lesson here is that when white people recognize and systematize their material alliances with non-white people, together they can build institutions that are inured to pseudoscientific white supremacist blathering. It’s not that (mostly white, but the defining thing about the alt-right is its nominal multiracialism) American continental philosophers are like in any way morally or ethically superior to anyone else; it’s that we had been put in circumstances that made it unusually evident that our material fates are tied to those of our African-American and Latin American colleagues and we only had a chance of surviving if we worked together. US continental philosophers are literally examples of Marxists whom circumstances prevented from making the Vampires-Castle-style argument that all differences should be subsumed under class, and for this reason we have, as a part of the profession, avoided some of the main faults that befell members of our British counterparts in the CCRU.

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As someone trained up in one such continental/pluralist program, I’ve read Kara Keeling’s work on Afrofuturism and know that at the level of form and technique Afrofuturisms and patriarchal racial capitalism can function effectively analogously. Though she doesn’t speak about the CCRU directly, Keeling’s work has helped me understand what about the CCRU’s work besides the presence of people with fascist sympathies has lent it toward DE and those sympathies. The short answer is: there’s nothing in the work or the method itself to prevent it from leaning in liberatory or fascist orientations, the only real check is the concrete material commitments of the authors, their working conditions, and the work itself. It’s not a question of what work you are doing or the methods you execute, but one of with and for whom you are working.

In her book Queer Times, Black Futures, Keeling shows how Grace Jones’s music video for her song “Corporate Cannibal” takes up the logics of finance capitalism and control societies in ways that leverage Black cultural approaches to repetition to uncover otherwise-foreclosed possibilities in hegemonic practices. “As a digital signal,” Keeling argues, “Grace Jones displays the modulation of control societies in order to make the experience of a force that attends Black existence, heretofore felt primarily by Black people, more broadly perceptible and, perhaps, more widely distributed and felt” (185-9). Jones’s image in the video depicts modulatory control, such as the control that real-time pricing algorithms exercise on shoppers as they adjust prices based on facial recognition and user profiles. At a very abstract level, the recursivity and feedback-loop-like character of algorithmic modulation echoes what James Snead has famously theorized as the “circulatory” approach to repetition in Black culture. As Keeling puts it, 

While Snead posits repetition as a souce of the abiding potential within Black culture to undo the temporal logics of European culture, his analysis of Black culture is less of a celebration of its noise and speed…than a theorization of its mobility, its dispersion, disruptive potential, and endurance” (161)

Conceiving of repetition as something like a “changing same,” Snead’s theory of Black culture could be interpreted as a practice aligned with Silicon Valley ideologies of “disruption,” the “noise and speed” here evocative of Mark Zuckerberg’s (in)famous injunction to “move fast and break things.” However, Keeling finds a differently-oriented kind of potential in Snead’s theory of repetition, one where disruption brings together two or more “incommensurable” (162) in a way that gestures towards (but doesn’t indexically represent) presently-counterfactual realities (you could call these “virtualities” after Deleuze, or “otherwise” ways of being in the language of Ashon Crawley and other Black studies scholars). Keeping calls these presently-counterfactual realities forms of “lying in wait” (174), much like Harriet Jacobs literally lay in wait in her grandmother’s attic as she hid from her enslavers…or in the way Jones’s work contains potentialities lying in wait for other artists to take up, the way for example Larry Levan remixed “Pull Up To The Bumper.” This is exactly the sort of “sonic fiction” Kodwo Eshun discussed in his landmark book More Brilliant Than The Sun…and it’s also the same sort of speculative theorization that we see throughout Land’s writings. These speculative, posthumanist methods can be pointed in both progressive and reactionary political directions.

The thing that makes Land’s execution of the same methods Keeling identifies in Jones’s work comes down to who is in the room, which sorts of people these theories materially ally themselves with. Whereas Land rhaposizes about so-called “Lemurians” (i.e., mythic WHITE inhabitants of a lost Atlantis-like civilization), Keeling closely reads the cultural productions of Black queer women and sex workers. You could think of it as a difference in material commitments to archives and the populations they record and serve. I’m thinking here of Sara Ahmed’s critique of the “founding gesture” of new materialist feminisms, where she examines how a concept “acquires significance in part through its nearness to other words” (25) and aims to “account for how [scholarly] work may be gathering around a gesture” (24) of “newness” or “surpassing” existing feminist scholarship. To claim that 2000s feminist scholarship is “anti-biological” (too textual, focused solely on “social construction,” etc.) is to dis-identify with current feminist scholars and scholarship and align oneself, however unintentionally, with others who claim that biology is somehow fundamental to social identity. From this angle, it’s unsurprising that one of the leading feminist new materialists (and Deleuzian feminists), Elizabeth Grosz, has been found to have trans-exclusionary elements in her work, as these days the leading proponents of the “sex is biological” line are…trans-exclusionary feminists. According to this line of thinking, the value of a theory or method is its ability to put us in community and solidarity with others, and our ethical/political responsibility is to align ourselves, you know, not with fascists. As I argued above, the reason why US continental philosophy has largely avoided DE and other neoreactionary drivel is because the institutional structure of the profession here has made it the explicit interest of continental philosophers to solidly align themselves with African-American, Latin American, feminist, and queer philosophers and philosophical traditions. Orienting our methods to these colleagues and these philosophical traditions, US continental philosophers collect ourselves, our ideas, and our resources around these commitments, which are quite commitments from those of Land and the DE.

I discuss this idea that the ethical and political valence of theory and theorizing is determined by whom it aligns us with (and against) at the end of my forthcoming book Good Vibes Only. Here’s the relevant bit:

Every act is both for some things and against others, towards one direction and away from another. As Beauvoir writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “no action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men” (99). Kimberly Crenshaw’s examples in her original theorization of intersectionality illustrate this point powerfully: requiring women’s shelter inhabitants to participate in group therapy in English oriented the shelter towards some women (anglophones) and away from others (mainly immigrants), just as Black women commonly experience situations, such as the case of Mike Tyson’s sexual assault allegations, where feminist allegiances are taken to be at odds with allegiance to Black communities, and vice versa. Similarly, right-wing women like Phyllis Schlafley and Moms for Liberty have all chosen to orient themselves toward white patriarchy and away from non-white women and queer people. I have chosen examples with especially fraught stakes to illustrate this point, but it is true of even our most seemingly banal actions: what I eat, what I wear, whom I choose to sit next to on the train or bus, etc., all these actions orient us both to some people and away from others (e.g., sweatshop owners, fast fashion megacorporations, independent farmers, industrial agriculture, etc.). Beauvoir’s point here is not just that we are multiply situated with regard to many constituencies, but that every orientation is necessarily an orientation away from and against others. It’s impossible to be “for” everyone. If we are all situated and there is no ideal, view-from-nowhere position from which to ethically reason, then, according to Beauvoir, everything we do will interfere, in a negative way, with some people: “in order to serve some men,” she writes, “we must do disservice to others” (113). 

Oppressive systems that restrict access to full personhood are designed to obscure the fact that every action is a disservice to some people. By restricting full personhood to, for example, white people and/or men, such systems make it possible for individuals and institutions to “deny the value of what they sacrifice in such a way that they find that they are sacrificing nothing” (Beauvoir EA 112). Near life is one of many methods of making systemic violence appear to sacrifice no-thing or no-body. There are countless ways patriarchal racial capitalism obscures the sacrifices it expects of gender, racial, and class minorities. Liberalism can appear to act in everyone’s interests (e.g., the interests of a “general will”) only because it excludes anyone with different sorts of interests from civil personhood. However, in a non-ideal world like ours already organized by multiple structural violences, orienting ourselves toward some people and away from others is also an orientation toward or against those structural violences. 

Systemic oppression and ideal theory make it easy to obscure the fact that every orientation toward is also an orientation against; from a Beauvoiran perspective, the issue here is not the fact of being oriented against some people, but the fact of obscuring it. As Beauvoir puts it, “the situation of the world is so complex that one can not fight everywhere at the same time and for everyone…. Thus, it is possible, and often it even happens, that one finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are pursuing goals whose validity one acknowledges himself.” Each of us is multiply situated with respect to a variety of contexts and affinities, and there’s going to be many times that we have to orient ourselves against people with whom we are otherwise aligned in pursuit of an end we have decided that, in this particular context, is more important than that alignment. For example, members of fan communities across the arts commonly choose to prioritize their allegiance to social justice over their commitment to certain artworks and fandoms as the authors, actors, or musicians involved in those works have been found to be serial sexual harassers or anti-trans activists. Just as the ambiguity of existence is something Beauvoir argues must be assumed rather than surpassed, the ambiguity of such choices must likewise be assumed and claimed rather than elided behind discourses such as “near life.”

For Beauvoir, every action is a statement of values: in this particular situation, some things and people matter more than others. Each of our actions is a choice of some people over others, and if we want to recognize the personhood of those whom we act against, we have to acknowledge that our action doesn’t vibe with (or actively harms) their interests. Instead of disappearing these impositions or losses behind ideas of non- or sub-personhood (such as near life) or idealized abstractions of group identity, in order to frame ethical action as the absence of wrong, Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity frames ethics as the contextualized choice of which people you will be for and which people you will be against. In Beauvoir’s ethics, it’s impossible to be always and categorically “for” people you might otherwise be aligned with, and this is why it’s essential to assume and take responsibility for the ambiguity of human existence. You may have acted against people you are otherwise aligned with, in doing so you endorsed a value (such as liberation or oppression) that will be made more real through your action. The ambiguity of human existence makes zero-sum consequentialism impossible.

Readers who aren’t well-grounded in Beauvoir’s existentialist ontology see her talking about “choice” might misinterpret her as arguing for a liberal individualism where political decisions are analogous to market decisions, or what Sartre calls “the freedom of obtaining.” However, for Beauvoir, “choice” is less a calculation of individual self-interest and more a positing of values and claim of responsibility for those values. As Kristiana Arp explains, for Beauvoir “the freedom that the ethical person seeks is a special kind of freedom, moral freedom, different in kind from the freedom of choice that all humans possess and indeed cannot escape from.” The freedom of “choice” or “obtaining” is defined by its unfettered capacity to select among alternatives – “to each their own,” and so on. Beauvoiran moral freedom leans in the opposite direction: it names the commitment to some specific values over others. For example, I work in an office in lower Manhattan and have a seemingly endless number of choices when it comes to what to eat for lunch. However, in our current system of industrialized agriculture, choosing what to eat is more often than not a choice of whom to exploit: do I exploit animals and slaughterhouse workers and have a burger, or do I exploit farm workers and use excessive carbon resources to have a fresh salad? (I am reminded here of X-RAY SPEX’s 1977 song “I Live Off You”). Neither of those options is free of exploitation; my lunch order is thus a moral choice of some values over others, such as human versus non-human suffering. In this situation there is no neat and clean moral calculus where I am doing no harm, because moral innocence is not the point, moral freedom is. In choosing some values over others, freedom is an ethical practice, not the exercise of personal liberty.  

So in the end the way we philosophers and theorists must address this moment of neoreaction is by picking our people — i.e., not the fascists, not the t3rfs, not the genocidares, etc. – and working with and for them by speaking with them, reading and listening to them, orienting our work around our shared cultures. We have to materially ally ourselves and our interests with those who are also committed to antifascist, anticapitalist ways of being