Abstract
In spite of the philosophical efforts of those like Karl Popper to avoid a repetition of the ugly legacies of Nazism, fascism, and totalitarianism, they are carried on today by the alt-right. Moreover, one of their strategies is to use the very concepts of theory coined to eradicate sexism, racism, and homophobia in support of these hateful ends. A common accusation we hear today from left theory is that the alt-right has stolen and misused their concepts. These concepts include identity and identity politics, which can be formatively traced back in left theory to the Combahee River Collective—and followed forward to their rebranding and repackaging by the alt-right as Identitarianism. But while the alt-right embraces the former accusation (namely, theft) by admitting that it is an accurate assessment of how they acquired much of their conceptual core, they also contend that the latter charge (namely, misuse) is really one that refers to how left theorists have used their own concepts. That is, the alt-right claims that it is actually left theorists who have misused the very concepts they created.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, six vols., eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–35), vol. 5, para. 414.
- 2.
Max Fisch says that Peirce’s rationale for preferring semeiotic to semiotic is that the Latin semi- (half) does not make evident the Greek semeion (sign). “There is nothing halfway about semeiotic,” writes Fisch. “[I]t is all about signs, and it is about all signs.” “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs,” in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max W. Fisch, eds. Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 322.
- 3.
Writes Derrida, “I have often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is—far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated—at bottom what happens or comes to pass.” (“The Time is Out of Joint,” in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp [New York: New York University Press, 1995], 17).
- 4.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 32.
- 5.
Radicalesbians, The Woman[-]Identified Woman (Pittsburgh: Know, Inc. 1970), 3–4. Pamphlet from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
- 6.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33.
- 7.
OnlyWomen Collective, “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality,” in Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism, eds. OnlyWomen Collective (London: OnlyWomen Press, 1981), 5.
- 8.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33.
- 9.
Jill Johnston cited by Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33.
- 10.
Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 19.
- 11.
Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics, 19.
- 12.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34.
- 13.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34.
- 14.
Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34.
- 15.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” differences 3, no.2 (1991): vii–viii.
- 16.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” viii.
- 17.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” viii.
- 18.
Statement from Off Our Backs 1, no.1 (1970). https://web.archive.org/web/20051224044533/http://www.offourbacks.org/Mission.htm
- 19.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 [1989] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 218.
- 20.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213. Brown cited by Echols.
- 21.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213.
- 22.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213. Gay Women’s Liberation cited by Echols.
- 23.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 218.
- 24.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
- 25.
Esther Newton, “Will the Real Lesbian Community Please Stand Up? (1982, 1998),” in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 161.
- 26.
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement [1977]” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 264 & 274.
- 27.
“How to Write History Like an Identitarian,” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 14, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/14/how-write-history-identitarian
- 28.
Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 115.
- 29.
Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Southern Poverty Law Center, 115.
- 30.
Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Southern Poverty Law Center, 115.
- 31.
Stephan Talty, “The Method of a Neo-Nazi Mogul,” The New York Times (February 25, 1996). https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/magazine/the-method-of-a-neo-nazi-mogul.html
- 32.
Stephan Talty, The Method of a Neo-Nazi Mogul.
- 33.
Stephan Talty, The Method of a Neo-Nazi Mogul.
- 34.
Stephan Talty, The Method of a Neo-Nazi Mogul.
- 35.
“Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropaamerican-identity-movement
- 36.
Hannah Gais, “What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left,” The New Republic, July 6, 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/143722/alt-right-learned-left
- 37.
Hannah Gais, “What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left.” My emphasis.
- 38.
Hannah Gais, “What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left.”
- 39.
Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition (Budapest, Hungary: Arktos Media Ltd, 2015), 4.
- 40.
Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns, 4.
- 41.
Michel Foucault, “Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir [1974],” in Dits et Ecrits: Tome II, 1976–88 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 523–524.
- 42.
As an example of this, consider Sedgwick, who used the “tools” of deconstruction as “crucial resources of thought” in her fight against breast cancer. Writes Sedgwick, “That deconstruction can offer crucial resources of thought for survival under duress will sound astonishing, I know, to anyone who knows it mostly from the journalism on the subject—journalism that always depicts ‘deconstruction,’ not as a group of usable intellectual tools, but as a set of beliefs involving a patently absurd dogma (‘nothing really exists’), loopy as Christian Science but as exotically aggressive as (American journalism would also have us find) Islam. I came to my encounter with breast cancer not as a member of a credal sect of ‘deconstructionists’ but as someone who needed all the cognitive skills she could get. I found, as often before, that I had some good and relevant ones from my deconstructive training” (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12n11). In the same book, she also describes paranoia as “a tool for better seeing differentials of practice” (130).
- 43.
That is, if we regard theory as toolbox in the sense advocated by Foucault. There are, of course, other potential ways to regard theory as a toolbox, including ones that limit it only to emancipatory, and socially and politically progressive uses. But the latter uses assume an ethics or politics of terminology that is absent from Foucault’s conception.
- 44.
Hannah Gais, “What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left.”
- 45.
For an account of posttheory, see my term entry on “Posttheory” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 636–637.
- 46.
For eight other ways of looking at theory, see Chap. 2, “Dark Infrastructure.”
- 47.
See The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 357–745; From Socrates to Cinema: An Introduction to Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 1033–53; and, Morality Matters: Race, Class and Gender in Applied Ethics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 645–654).
- 48.
For an account of Peirce’s work on this dictionary, see my co-authored article, “Peirce’s Work for the Century Dictionary,” Peirce Project Newsletter 3.1 (1999): 1–3.
- 49.
Daniel Friberg, The Real Right Returns, 63–110.
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Di Leo, J.R. (2024). Ugly Theory. In: Dark Academe. Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56351-5_7
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