/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15105888]

Why are Marxists so avoidant of essentialism?

Not trying to be too general or start a shitty thread, but I've read some Zizek and David Graeber lately and within each text I've read they're comfortable with a lot of concepts but seem alarmed when the idea of "essentialism" comes up--seeing phrases like "traps of essentialism" and so on. They'll comfortably pave over a lot of things, but when this lurks in the corner they seem extremely worried. Why?

[Anonymous No.15106028]

>>15105888
I don't read Zizek because I don't read garbage, but I do watch his videos, because I watch garbage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTCiVDwmZ6U

hehe 21:20, "WHO WEEL KLEEN THE TOILET"

I forgot what I wanted to say, but I think it's in that video

[Anonymous No.15106209]

>>15106028
Eh I couldn't really find anything that addressed it in a pointed way.

I don't agree with Zizek but generally I appreciate his willingness to analyze "low culture" etc.

[Anonymous No.15106222]

Essentialism means that there is something of an essence within people, which basically means a form of immutable human nature. This is pretty problematic for Marxism, which posits that whatever nature we have isnt really immutable, but is rather produced by our material circumstances.

[Anonymous No.15106252]

>>15105888
Essences are spooky bullshit.
Goes back to Plato with his three souls defense of aristocracy and slavery.
The Divine Right Of Kings, Nobles being spiritually superior to the lower classes and so on.
An essence can't change, like Plato's immutable Forms that nature supposedly conform to.
All that stuff is fucking retardation.
Essentialism is cope for rich people, to help them bury the guilt of knowing they are just as worthless as regular people, just with more stuff

[Anonymous No.15106258]

Essentialism -> Hierarchy -> (insert reasoning here) -> Holocaust

[Anonymous No.15106311]

Jesus Christ you faggots don't read. Dialectics implies essence exists in the absolute and not in the moments of truth which give that essence substance. The essence of the bud is the same as the essence of the flower, but an essentialist would see their essences as fundamentally contradictory. The essentialist cannot make their way to sublations as they see essences as fixed.

[Anonymous No.15106359]

>>15106028
Based honest retard

[Anonymous No.15106700]

>>15106311
Is this flame or are you just a mouthbreather?

[Anonymous No.15106719]

>>15106258
Yeah that's another thing that I don't get about Zizek. Dude is always chimping out about yids and acting like their behavior is somehow acceptable to any non-Jewish social body. What gives?

[Anonymous No.15106726]

it's a shorthand strawman and a sign of group membership, little more

[Anonymous No.15106734]

>>15106252
You sound like you're essentially a loser pleb desu

[Anonymous No.15106752]

>>15106726
why is this bad

[Anonymous No.15106764]

>>15106719
Jews are supposed to know better about victimizing Others.

[Anonymous No.15106768]

>>15105888
because marxism is based on critique of essentialism, which is a categorical mistake

[Anonymous No.15106789]

>>15106768
>which is a categorical mistake

how?

[Anonymous No.15106790]

>>15106311
>Jesus Christ you faggots don't read
>posts the same fluff as everyone else in the thread
what did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.15106799]

>>15106789
thats their simplified hegelianism

[Anonymous No.15106876]

>>15106799
jesus christ

[Anonymous No.15106903]

>>15106790
No one in the thread has mentioned dialectics but my post, what are you talking about? You have pol bait
>>15106258
you have general "eh idk lol zizek
>>15106028
>>15106209
you have some retard trotting out old tropey misreadings of Marx's idea of human nature
>>15106222
and some faggot jerking off about how much he doesn't like the republic
>>15106252
You are basically proving that even you can't read, because somehow you think this people were talking about post-Hegelian dialectics

[Anonymous No.15107063]

>>15106903
>midwit enters the thread pretending he's smarter than everyone else while barely knowing anyone
Probably cant even define what 'dialectics' is

[Anonymous No.15107096]

>>15107063
in the briefest and most general terms,dialectics is the rational working through of the antagonisms inherent to contradictions by means of particular processes (dialog/history/ect.)

[Anonymous No.15107112]

>>15107063
it's taking two things that are opposites of each other and fusing them together like in dragon ball

[Anonymous No.15107158]

>>15107096
>Dialectics
>rational
>>15107112
this anon is on the money

[Anonymous No.15107222]

>>15107158
Yes, dialectics is always rational. Hegel literal said "the real is rational, and the rational is real"

[Anonymous No.15107400]

>>15107222
not that anon, but Hegelian dialectics has to do with abstractions,

abstraction + abstraction = something real

BUT, whatever saves you in this discussion goes

[Anonymous No.15107513]

>>15107063
this guy didnt tear apart any of my posts so he checks out

im really smart and handsome btw

[Anonymous No.15107530]

>>15107400
>not that anon, but Hegelian dialectics has to do with abstractions,
>abstraction + abstraction = something real
you are thinking of the Hegelian development of consciousness which moves from concepts in their abstract universal towards their concrete particularity. you should read Who Thinks Abstractly? it's only a few pages and Hegel lays out quite elegantly why metaphysics in its proper sense is never abstract

[Anonymous No.15107556]

>>15107530
man, I've watched one lecture on German idealism and chimed in, that's where I have it from

[Anonymous No.15107605]

>>15107556
I've read just about everything Hegel has written, short of his Encylopedia

[Anonymous No.15107607]

>>15107605
why

[Anonymous No.15107612]

>>15107607
so I can shitpost in a properly Hegelian fashion

[Anonymous No.15107627]

>>15107612
hmmmmmmmmmmmm
You're not a redditor, are you?

[Anonymous No.15107636]

>>15107612
I try to adopt the, what I call it, Hegelian way of thinking. The professor in the lecture said that some philosopher come to conclusions with "based on this I conclude that this is true", but Hegel would do something like "guys, what do you think about this possibility?"

I find the Hegelian way, let's say, less frustrating.

Where do I read more upon it?

[Anonymous No.15107644]

>>15107627
yes I spend all my time when I am not reading Hegel on /r/rickandmorty just chatting and upvoting

[Anonymous No.15107663]

>>15107636
without reading Hegel? look into speculative metaphysics

[Anonymous No.15107691]

>>15107605
I hope you read Kant and Fichte too, and the context, I recommend Beiser's work on the era of german idealism, it's the peak of philosophy
even if it's wrong its the best philosophical tools we have to produce something better

[Anonymous No.15107694]

>>15106903
Took up the ass a bit too hard last night, eh? Go dilate, faggot.

[Anonymous No.15107695]

>>15107663
I don't mind reading him. I'm currently reading the Who Thinks Abstractly, if you cut off his cringe attempt at humor, the article is reduced by 50%

thanks for the recommendation

[Anonymous No.15107699]

>>15107400
And how are you going to are you going to find the abstract category if not through a rational process?

[Anonymous No.15107718]

>>15107695
you can't get Hegel if you don't get the whole kantian problematics

[Anonymous No.15107755]

Essentialism is a form of idealism, which is contradictory to a Marxist understanding of nature (via dialectical materialism)

[Anonymous No.15107756]

>>15107695
yes, but at least his prose is nice (comparatively speaking). The preface to the Phenomenology is probably the best overview, and I would recommend that, but he will tell you right in the preface that this approach isn't properly dialectical. he wants you to go through the whole system step by step, but most people will never do that. If you read the Preface carefully and all the way though, no bullshit, you will be better read on Hegel than 98% of this board.

[Anonymous No.15107789]

>>15107756
I actually started reading it once, the writing wasn't as bad as I expected. I stopped at the part where he says that humanity needs to start looking at the stars again.

[Anonymous No.15107846]

The surface level answer is because marxian ontology presumes that everything is immanent to the dialectic of history. For Hegel the dialectic of history was Hegelian, whatever that actually means (no one can quite agree). For the Young Hegelians the dialectic of history was identified with various forms of utopian socialism, and for one Young Hegelian, Karl Marx, it was the dialectic of freedom's emergence through class struggle.

Everything is immanent to the dialectic, which is ontologically primary. This includes any political, social, cultural, or philosophical form. Another way of saying ontologically primary is "essential," referring to the distinction between essence and accident in metaphysics. What is essential about something is that which makes it what it really is, and what is accidental about something are the ephemeral pseudo-qualities that can be added to it or taken away from it without changing what it really and fundamentally is. For Hegel and Hegelians history is, essentially, dialectical and self-transcending. No one moment of history (as the manifestation of spirit) is sufficient to account for it, except maybe its ultimate moment, when its potential has been totally converted to actuality and it is "complete" (this is controversial). Cultures and minds transcend insufficient understandings of the essence of nature because their insufficiency generates contradictions, which impel higher syntheses.

For a Hegelian this is Spirit contemplating itself through history, but for a Marxist, again, it is the dialectic of freedom realizing itself by progressively transcending imperfect realizations of freedom. The theology is different but mechanism is the same: insufficient realizations of a potentially perfect realization contain contradictions, and the clashes generated by these contradictions systemically cause self-consciousness of the contradictions and of the need for a higher synthesis, no longer in contradiction with itself.

[Anonymous No.15107852]

>>15107846
What really matters is that for a Hegelian, including for Hegelian Marxists/Marxist Hegelians, ANY account of essence is necessarily immanent to the dialectic of history. There is no static essence. So essentialism is ipso facto bad, because anyone who thinks they have finally figured out what the world is and what its meaning is must necessarily be deluded, since Spirit does not yet know itself. This Hegelian outlook causes all kinds of ambiguities, and these are irreducible in Hegel. No one has completely proved whether Hegel thought we only observe history's movements after the fact or whether we are responsible for forcing almost-there dialectical movements to finally move. Regardless, the leftist Young Hegelians certainly interpreted Hegel along the latter lines, as being a descriptive philosophy only lacking in praxis, and Marx was one of these (although the issue comes back among Marx's followers who can't decide whether he wanted us to go out and spark the revolution or just raise consciousness or wait for the dialectic to give us the right moment or what, again these are fundamental ambiguities in BOTH Hegel and Marx).

This is all in theory. In practice there are different kinds of Marxists. Hardcore Hegelian Marxists might fit the foregoing description but most "Marxists" are retards who haven't read Marx and certainly haven't read Hegel. They are much more likely to be influenced by the vague atmosphere of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" pervading the 20th century and only partly derivable from Marx. If you could see the lines of influence and discursive constitution underlying the ideas of the average college Marxist, the lion's share probably stems from French poststructuralism's anti-essentialism and even from Heidegger and German historicism, more than it comes from Marx. Marx was an influence on the French, but their anti-essentialism was much more bourgeois, orthodox Hegelian Marxists don't like it because it keeps the deconstructive/hermeneutic of suspicion elements of marxian critique but puts them in service to limp-dicked bourgeois/neoliberal value systems.

[Anonymous No.15107862]

>>15107852
The Marxist wants to critique all forms and emphasize their immanence to the dialectic because he wants to open up the way for the dialectic and raise consciousness of it. The Frenchman wants to "break down essentialisms" so that he can free the bohemian hippie soul to suck cock for heroin money and "artistically recreate" himself. Adorno is "anti-subjectivist" or "anti-transcendental" to the extent that essentialist theories of the transcendental subject reify human subjectivity in ways which are not self-consciously intended by the transcendental philosopher, and because everything is immanent to the dialectic, any unself-conscious thought or theory is necessarily just an ossified form of the present dialectical moment, meaning necessarily an insufficient/not yet properly actualized moment. Because the present moment is "bourgeois," transcendental philosophy and Lebensphilosophie and the contemporary craving for escapist mysticism and irrationalism are all in some sense byproducts of the bourgeois moment of spirit, and when they become hardened up into movements or trendy philosophies they are preventing the flow of the dialectic (which is trying to transcend the bourgeois moment).

The Frenchman doesn't really have any of this, the Frenchman takes for granted that human beings are irresponsible, endlessly constructible hedonists who all live in Paris ca. 1960 and enjoy jacking off in front of eachother by being perpetually more avant garde than thou. So the Frenchman wields similar tools of breaking down anything like transcendental philosophy, religion, mysticism, any kind of objective values outside of the flux of history, but he has no philosophy of history. His philosophy of history is static and arguably rousseauist, it's "if you didn't care so much about Kantian categories of the understanding OR about arbitrary taboos against pedophilia, you'd be a much happier fluidly intersubjective kid-toucher."

[Anonymous No.15107873]

>>15107862
Modern college """"leftists""" come out of the French milieu more than the Marxists. Adorno hated the '68ers and saw them as a dangerous bourgeois absorption of leftist techniques, without the meaning or intent behind the techniques. This is the speciality of the bourgeois weltgeist, techne for its own sake and the ability to absorb anything into itself while covertly stripping it of any dangerous capacity to fundamentally alter the bourgeois weltgeist (called negativity by Hegel, as it "negates" what is presently essential/normal/etc). Whereas the Frenchman wants to fuck kids and do drugs and watch pretentious art films, not realizing decadence was already tried as a counter to rational disenchantment (and self-consciously abandoned as untenable within a decade of its inception) almost a century earlier, the modern college """""""leftist"""""""""" is much worse because he isn't even a pseudo-decadent with serious commitments to fuckin' kids and doin' drugs. He isn't even like an even more watered-down knockoff of the French, like Allen Ginsberg or some other hippies. Hippies at least were willing to change themselves and do weird shit like go grow beets on a commune. The modern college leftist can't do any of this, because he's rich, and his dad is paying $600,000 for his private high school and university finishing school education after all is said and done, and he enjoys drinking $7 faggot lattes too much to actually do anything outside his own comfort zone. The college leftist is a feminized twink whose dad pays his rent. Also unlike the French degenerate, he's not even willing to learn theory to a high enough degree to show off.

The Frenchman had values, sort of, in what Bataille called "excess." He had hedonism and competition for prestige (the neverending contest to be the ultimate retarded dandy Frenchman). These were not in homeostatic equilibrium with neoliberalism, they at least occasionally caused him to do something, like fuck a kid and die of AIDS even when the bourgeois functionary class wasn't into this, or devote himself to surprisingly half-decent philosophy in spite of his shitty motivations for pursuing it (one-upping other French idiots). And of course the German Marxists were plenty sincere since they actually believed in the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical character of history, which is incidentally why they all died of bitter broken hearts after WW2 as they realized the Marxist dream was dead, there was insufficient energy to catalyze dialectical star formation (at least without risking fascism again), and humanity had slumped into a bourgeois brown dwarf as a consolation prize, arguably worse than fascism.

[Anonymous No.15107881]

>>15107873
To understand the college leftist you have to understand that he doesn't even have the courage to have "excessive" values, even degenerate ones like the French. French poststructural crypto-neoliberalism was the prototype of modern college leftism, but it still had some sharp edges. Now there are none. "Leftism" and "anti-essentialism" have no meaning anymore, all the excitement of the French, of the German, even of the hippies like that kid-fucker Ginsberg, even of the late hippies who at least paid lip service to transgression by occasionally living on a commune and killing themselves on drugs. There is NOTHING left of the legitimate left. It is now completely bourgeoisified, it is an excuse for rich wiener kids to preen themselves by pretending to indulge in it at their half a million dollar finishing schools, paradoxically as part of their training to enter the capitalist managerial class as technocrat mandarins. There are no excesses like French kid-fucking left, because those were the product of a Frenchman going "too far" into radical immanence and going "so, like, anything goes then? even fuckin' a kid? is that cool? I'm French so I guess so?" The equilibrium is perfect, there are no more "too fars," there is insufficient energy to do anything other than hover at the lowest energy state, the least self-conscious possible mode of the bourgeois world-system. All that's left is bourgeois puritan pseudo-morality (rooted in "keeping up with the joneses," petty social policing, and tall poppy syndrome) wearing the dead husk of liberal humanist values. In his natural mode the college leftist is a latte-sipping metrosexual vacationer and future rent collector. When pushed to affect self-understanding, he is devoted to subtly toothless pseudo-humanism like "gays should be able to marry ANY household appliance they want!" or "when the man says nigger, that's bad! no more nigger!" or "women should be happy because that's a feminism! that woman not happy? what wrong?? me give 0.05% of my inherited wealth to social cause while systematically dodging taxes now???"

[Anonymous No.15107887]

>>15107881
Worthless parasites like Zizek are the last vestiges of the previous stage of the regression, used as a transition to the present stage. They are not even Frenchmen but the aging curators of the actual Frenchman, having received the Frenchman's leftovers of the German's leftovers in the 1980s. Many of these pieces of shit are Eastern Europeans who took to them too readily after the fall of the USSR, or cultureless pig Americans and their financier overlords playing with the tatters of what they think is "European culture" (Parisian boyfucker philosophy and smoking cigarettes in a turtleneck). The least incompetent of these cargo cultists are sifted to the top of the bourgeois pseudo-intelligentsia to teach human garbage teenagers the bare minimum shibboleths they need to perform to be accepted by the eunuchs' guild as a "Deleuzian transfeminist" as part of their roleplay of being a benevolent porous meritocratic oligarchy.

In the singular instances that one or two people within this thought prison develop the unconscious desire to escape from it, they are funneled away from mainstream ho-hum academics and toward a COOL SUBVERSIVE one like Zizek who sometimes says a thing YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY!!! but they're so cuckolded by meta-meta-meta-bourgeois nightmare world that they don't even notice Zizek collects his exorbitant salary and fees from the most bourgeois institutions imaginable while schmoozing with a bunch of disgusting fucking nepotistic degenerates like Avita Ronell.

[Anonymous No.15107980]

>>15107846
>For Hegel and Hegelians history is, essentially, dialectical and self-transcending. No one moment of history (as the manifestation of spirit) is sufficient to account for it, except maybe its ultimate moment, when its potential has been totally converted to actuality and it is "complete" (this is controversial)

Since I'm not a specialist in Hegel or post-Hegelian philosophy, here's a question: do those people actually perceive history as an object rather than a mere entity? Or is it just a bold generalization?

[Anonymous No.15108151]

>>15107887
hmmm

[Anonymous No.15108214]

>>15107980
I think history was BTFO'd in the 20th century.

[Anonymous No.15108226]

>>15105888
Because materialism and existentialism are very connected and existence precedes essence is like the core of existentialism.
It's ultimately wrong obviously but whatever.