In his works Reason and Revolution (1939), Repressive Tolerance (1965) and Towards Liberation (1969), Herbert Marcuse developed a way of thinking that would initially feed the American protest movements of the 1960s, before being taken up later, involuntarily and largely indirectly, by the woke movement. We will study the parallels between his thinking and that of wokeism, notably in their primacy given to the notion of negation, the fascination with the dissident posture, and the fear of an imminent return of fascism. Finally, we will end with the fact that Marcuse was a precursor of "intersectionality", which is the heart of the woke conceptual reactor, its promise of theoretical unity that will forever remain impossible to keep.

Pierre Valentin studied philosophy and political science at the University of Exeter, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, and Paris II Panthéon-Assas. He is currently enrolled in a PhD in political science. In July 2021, he published the first works in France on woke ideology in a two-volume note for the Fondation pour l'Innovation Politique (Fondapol). He has just published Comprendre la Révolution Woke at Gallimard in the Le Débat collection, which aims to establish a deeper intellectual genealogy of the woke movement.

For the book:

https://www.amazon.fr/Comprendre-r%C3%A9volution-woke-Pierre-Valentin/dp/2072997488

For Fondapol notes:

https://www.fondapol.org/etude/lideologie-woke-1-anatomie-du-wokisme/ https://www.fondapol.org/etude/lideologie-woke-2-face-au-wokisme/