John Sanbonmatsu

In "The Postmodern Prince", John Sanbonmatsu sets out to critique the philosophical tendencies of the radical left of the past few decades from a Gramscian Marxist perspective. This effort succeeds quite well, though there are some problems.

In the first chapter, Sanbonmatsu gives an overview of the various postmodern, expressivist, new feminist etc. ideas of the proper radical position to take up, and he criticizes them for being meaningless and undermining leftist strategy by focusing on difference instead of unity. The second chapter is a continuation of this, taking aim at postmodern charlatans like Norman Brown and radical expressivist feminism like Mary Daly.

In the third chapter Sanbonmatsu explores a question that will be dear to all readers of radical leftist works: why do many radical leftists, especially postmodernists, write such terrible philosophical prose? Sanbonmatsu convincingly argues that this is in fact because the words, as reactionaries already suspected, are meant to hide a lack of content, or rather are draped around the content (still usually very little) in a baroque style. He also shows, however, that the reactionaries were wrong in suspecting this was because of the extreme leftism of their positions: on the contrary, the style is a product of the commodification of academic theory, and is in fact intended to undermine the more meaningful leftist theories such as Marxism.

The fourth chapter is perhaps the best part of the book, and ABSOLUTELY DEMOLISHES the pretensions of Foucault, while also effectively pointing out the failures of Althusser and his epigones Hardt & Negri. This chapter is a must-read for every radical leftist and everyone interested in (political) philosophy. Sanbonmatsu here shows brilliantly and wittily how the continuous removal of the experience of the human subject from radical theory is, instead of a "view from everywhere", in reality the ultimate pretension since it makes the 'archeologist' (like Foucault) the only one capable of explaining the structure of reality, while at the same time it rejects the idea of conveying knowledge. In this way, it is revealed that the anti-hegemony of Foucault et al. is really nothing else than poseur egocentrism.

The fifth and sixth chapters are comparisons of Gramsci, clearly Sanbonmatsu's favorite author, with Foucault, which unsurprisingly ends up in Gramsci's favor. The latter of the two chapters is in fact little else than a very long explanation of Gramsci's views as applied to the issues of modern radical leftism. This drones on quite a lot: I would recommend skipping it.

The last chapter introduces an attempt at formulating a Marxist ethics based on Gramsci and Merleau-Ponty. Strangely enough Sanbonmatsu suddenly rejects Marxism itself as being "reductionist", using the old canard of "not everything is about class" as his argument. He instead wants to unite Marxist theory on classes with the struggles against racism, sexism etc. on an equal level, essentially supporting a sort of 'factors thinking' but then at the level of radical criticism. He ends by using the concept of "eros" as a guideline to ethical practice for leftist radicals, and argues in favor of including animal rights.

Overall, Sanbonmatsu's book is an excellent and devastating critique of postmodernism from a radical leftist point of view, and this is its main use. The book is rather uneven though, and the constant hagiography of Gramsci gets rather tiring after a while. It is mostly recommended for leftist (amateur) philosophers and thinkers on leftist strategy, and in particular for those who have fallen into the postmodern trap. Some selective reading may help the enjoyment though.… (més)