Giovanni Battista Soda

This paper critically examines the methodology of Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke (2024), which offers an ambitious sociological account of ‘wokeness’ as a performative ideology deployed by elite symbolic capitalists to consolidate their privilege under the guise of progressive politics. I argue that Al-Gharbi’s account is traversed by an unresolved tension between his methodological commitments that ultimately constrains the critical reach of his analysis. Drawing on both classical and contemporary authors of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno, Jaeggi, and Celikates, I show that Al-Gharbi’s exclusive reliance on material-economic explanations leaves the normative and transformative capacity of ‘woke’ concepts undertheorized. Subsequently, I argue that Al-Gharbi’s descriptive account of ‘wokeness’ can be framed as a description of first-order ‘woke’ practices that subsequently calls for reconstruction through a second-order self-critique. Relying on Celikates, I conclude that doing so rehabilitates the emancipatory potential of ‘woke’ concepts while exposing their conservative social entanglement, grounding a discourse that moves beyond mere demystification toward a genuinely critical account of ‘wokeness’.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s portrayal of Stalin in Critique of Dialectical Reason and Karl Marx’s account of Louis Bonaparte in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in order to clarify the philosophical and political stakes of Sartre’s engagement with Marxism. Rather than asking whether Sartre was a “true” Marxist, the paper investigates how both thinkers address the dialectical relationship between revolutionary movements and the emergence of authoritarianism. By extending Sartre’s concepts of “deviation” and “incarnation” to Marx’s analysis, I show that both authors reject teleological narratives of history, including Hegel’s notion of “World-Historical Individuals”, and instead develop a theory of dialectical singularity. Their accounts of Stalin and Louis Bonaparte reveal how revolutionary praxis can be derailed by internal contradictions and external circumstances, producing leaders who simultaneously embody and deform the revolutionary impulse. Ultimately, the paper argues that Marx’s and Sartre’s enquiries entail a critical understanding of the relationship between historical progress and the rise of authoritarianism, one that frames it as a non-linear, complex, and multifaceted phenomenon.

This paper aims at providing a side-by-side analysis of Freud’s enquiry into the historical origins and the psychological characterisation of antisemitism and Sartre’s famous 1948 essays on the topic. It is well known that after heavily criticising psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness Sartre undertakes a process of reassessment of it culminating in Search for a Method and The Family Idiot. The first claim that this paper seeks to advance belongs to the field of Sartrean scholarship and argues that already five years after publishing Being and Nothingness Sartre’s philosophy has undertaken the changes that gradually led from “pure” to Marxist existentialism. This assertion can be supported by highlighting the similarities between the Anti-Semite and Jew and Moses and Monotheism. Following from this, a more generally oriented claim can be posited: antisemitism is built around the idea that history can be constructed by deleting alterity from it. In this regard, it will be argued that Freud and Sartre’s enquiries highlight this point and agree on the necessity of asserting Jewish identity and history to counteract antisemitism.

This work aims to scrutiny the concept of “taste” as developed by David Hume. Firstly, it will be highlighted the impossibility of thinking taste neither as a sub- jectivist nor objectivist aesthetic theory; on the contrary, it will be shown, through Agamben’s work, its underlying radical dialectical structure that seeks to unite subject and object. Furthermore, thanks to Deleuze’s enquiry in Hume’s thought, it will be possible to argue that Hume’s theory of art, rather than being a simple consequence of his theory of mind, plays a fundamental role in the whole Humean system, especially in the accounts on history, civilization, and the role of philosophy.