French Intellectual Traces Wokeism to Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze

A French commentator writing under the name Brivael Le Pogam posted a thread on X that traces the intellectual roots of wokeism to three French philosophers active after 1968. The thread states that Michel Foucault taught that truth does not exist and that institutions represent power relations.

It adds that Jacques Derrida argued texts have no stable meaning and that Gilles Deleuze favored becoming over being. The post claims these ideas crossed the Atlantic in the 1980s and combined with American academic traditions at Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia.

The thread names Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Kimberlé Crenshaw as figures who applied the French framework to gender, postcolonial studies, and intersectionality. It argues that the resulting system treats hierarchies as suspect and norms as forms of violence.

The post has been shared by Elon Musk and Javier Milei and received more than 20,000 reposts on X. The author concludes by contrasting the three philosophers with earlier French thinkers including Descartes, Pascal, and Tocqueville.