I think there’s an article somewhere associating Michel Foucault with so-called, ‘neoliberalism’.
Postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, whether of Marxism or anything else, are important qualifying stages of epistemological, ontological, and other forms of, reflexivity; forms of reflexivity that require more than just practical, pragmatic, or Occidental-theoretical, understandings.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, there have been all kinds of reactive epistemology, things like ‘speculative realism’; object-oriented ontology; and even the various cults of immanence, some of which attach themselves to Deleuze and Guattari.
It’s interesting that someone like Nick Land preferred the seeming tangibility of Deleuze and Guattari, instead of what he saw as the ‘academic formalism’ of Derrida. It’s obvious that he did not understand Derrida.
It’s then interesting to see his taking up with right-wing politics, something that is arguably not at all disconnected from his philosophical preferences and dislikes.
In my own work, of course, I have observed a general movement that can be called Occidental positivism, which probably isn’t that far away from Derrida’s logocentrism.
The entire Occident is caught up in its own ‘brand’ of positivism which proceeds according to its distinctly ‘marked’ epistemology, in one direction only. It knows of no other way but this proprietary and unilinear herding of knowledge.
This is why it could not solve the paradox of desire, because it was spellbound by the hypostatic and substantialising atrophy of its own principle of desire, which it could only image as the loveless invariance of servile control.
It is this age-old image of imperial security, intrinsically belonging to the West, that is attempting to rehabilitate and readjust itself according to its ridiculous philosophical exhaustions, dressed as rhetorics of immanence.
These shapes of contemporary reaction and how they show themselves all describe some of the contours of Occidental positivism.