an intellectual francophile. I've since developed a deep aversion to French philosophizing. The entire tradition from Descartes onward is seeped in insufferable narcissism. These were people deeply inhaling their own flatulence, obscurantist wankers marinating in their own incoherent ejaculations.
Style matters. A lot of these people claimed Nietzsche as precedent, but Nietzsche was a stylist par excellence. Heidegger and pseudo-scientific structuralism ruined everything. Heidegger's tortured language has to do with him having to give his anti-modernism modern camouflage, a problem shared with a lot of erstwhile modernists—hence the modern fetishization of "difficulty." So many modernists—including Marx—cannot bring themselves to own up to hating the hateable modern world. That would have made them run-of-the-mill conservatives indistinguishable from peasants. So they pass themselves off as avant-garde innovators and "dialectically" twist all their statements to permit themselves to speak out of both sides of their mouth.
In clinical terms, they were all obsessionals, terrified of their own subjectivity, hiding it under a dense smokescreen of qualification. Modern "dialectical thought" is evasion, cowardice posing as sophistication.
Post-60s intellectual poseurs had to deal with the fact that real communism had made Marxism vulgar, forcing them to formulate more esoteric "postmodern" forms of pseudo-dissent. If there was ever an altermative to modernity, it could only have been a return to what preceded it, but that was not a sexy stance to take. Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which at root is an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.
