chapotraphouse

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.

Derrida wrote this in 1993. Sure he wasn't a communist and mostly focused on literary theory and writing books about his mom dying of dementia or how he got circumcised and had a secret name or why writing is not just glyphs, but he was not CIA adjacent (I hate this trend of just declaring people are CIA plants because you don't like them?), had the audacity to declare communism an undefeatable specter that will haunt the capitalist world until it dies in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, and his theory of deconstruction made tremendous contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies.