There is always a debate about what exactly woke is. A short definition could be "identity politics from the left", i.e. the politicisation of concrete identities that are essentialised.

First, I don't use the concept of political identity. I think it is wrong and we have to stop using it. I use tribalism. However, that is only one of the woke problems. There are two other problems where I think the woke comes close to a reactionary view and I address them in the book, which is the distinction between justice and power and the question of human progress. I think these are more important than the question of identity, but they are less attended to. Secondly, I don't think it is possible to define woke, because it is an incoherent concept. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to explain that to myself. The word woke is built on a foundation of very left-wing emotions (being on the side of the oppressed, righting the wrongs of the past), which I was and am in agreement with. The problem is that emotions are completely separated from ideas. And very reactionary ideas are used.

Decades ago, essentialising people ("white people are like this", "black people are this way", "women are that way") was reactionary, but today it is progressive. You quote Benjamin Zachariah: "Self-essentialisation and self-stereotyping are not only permitted, they are considered emancipatory".

I think it has to do with something I'm researching for another book. We have moved from identifying our-selves with the hero as the subject of the story to identifying our-selves with the victim. The hero is active; no one is a hero just because he suffers. However, in the last seventy years we have focused on the victim. This is a correction; it was a positive thing at the beginning. It has always been said that the victors write history. And the victims of history are left out of history. In the middle of the 20^th century we realised that we were leaving a lot of people out of history. There were individuals who began to feel that they should not reject their victimhood, and even found that there were even material advantages to identifying as a member of a historically oppressed group.

What happened in the mid-twentieth century to bring about this change, and is it a consequence of the anti-colonial or post-colonial movement?

I think there were two causes, one anti-colonialism and the other the Holocaust that put the victim at the centre. Like many things, people wanted to correct a mistake and an absence (the lack of victims in the historical narrative) but they went too far. Germany is an example of this "over-correction" with respect to the Holocaust.

Whoever wants to identify himself as a victim is because he expects some kind of reparation. This is something that can only happen in a democracy. No one would think of demanding victim status in a totalitarian dictatorship.

That's true, but I think it's not such a conscious process. Yes, there are individuals who position themselves as victims in order to gain benefits, but most do not. For example, I absolutely hate it when I am invited to an event or committee just because they need a woman. I hate it when I am identified as a "female philosopher". I do philosophy and my gender may be important in other situations but it is not important in my profession. And most people I think in a way feel that way, they feel uncomfortable exploiting their possible victimhood. However, even if it's not a question of monetary reparations, there is a symbolic reparation: today it seems that you have more authority for having been a victim. Victimism has become a source of authority. I mentioned Germany earlier. I have written a lot about it. One of the things that changed my view was to become a prominent speaker on issues of anti-Semitism and Israel and Palestine from the perspective of a left wing Jew, which is common in Israel and the US but very rare in Germany. There are very few left wing Jews. The few who dare to speak out against Israel are even called Nazis. In Germany, there are not many Jews in important positions. I run the Einstein Forum. I have noticed that the most authoritative voices in the Jewish community in Germany are the Jews who speak only of anti-Semitism. And this is what the official, right-leaning Jewish organisations constantly do. Jews who do not want to be seen simply as possible victims of the Holocaust are considered less authentic. It's quite an interesting shift. It has also happened in the US with racism. The authentic black voices are the ones that emphasise the history of racism. I'm reading a lot of Franz Fanon, and in one of his essays he says, "I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors". He says many similar things, which are shocking today. He has become a symbol of post-colonial theory, which by the way is something very different from the anti-colonial movement. But you don't often look at these quotes from Fanon, in which he insists over and over again that he doesn't want to be a victim, that this is not his identity.

It's a similar debate to a recent film, American fiction, in which a black writer tired of "authentically black" novels writes a parody that ends up being a hit.

I enjoyed it very much, but I understand that Percival Everett's book is much better. Funnily enough, if I hadn't been living in Germany for so long I would have seen the film and liked it but I would have been more nervous about my own position in the cultural establishment. I would have been more worried. But now that the Germans have called me a Nazi... I see it with different eyes.

Your book, rather than a critique of the woke, is a defence of the Enlightenment.

My aim in this book was not to define the woke but to define the left. Because I know a lot of people who are confused about what it means to be left today. I think it's a category that still makes sense. There are people who wonder, and I understand, why we still define political ideologies according to the accidental distribution of seats in the French Parliament in 1789. You can question that, but there is a tradition that I claim, which begins in the Enlightenment, and which I think we have lost today. It's true that there have been many critics of the Enlightenment for a long time, in the 20^th century; especially, Adorno and Horkheimer with Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that was a bit disjointed... I was surprised; it was a book that appealed so much to the left. But its importance was mainly in Germany in the late 1960s. What did transcend further afield was post-colonial theory. The first time I heard a critique of the Enlightenment was with the term "Eurocentric", I remember exactly in 2006. I was writing a book defending the Enlightenment from another perspective. It seemed to me such a stupid critique that I thought it wasn't even worth bothering with, I thought it would soon disappear. For it was precisely the Enlightenment thinkers who first warned of the need to see the world from a non-European perspective. I was wrong. 2024 is the year of Kant, the 300^th anniversary of his birth. Since the Einstein Forum I have been thinking of programmes and events to do. Many institutions have been preparing something for months and years, but they all think they have to emphasise that the Enlightenment was a colonial project, that Kant was a racist. In Germany, they are focusing on that. That is the image that is being conveyed to the public. The problem is that if we discard the Enlightenment we lose many genuinely left-wing ideas. I thought it was important to preserve these values and to criticise the idea that reason is an instrument of domination, which is in Adorno and Horkheimer but also in Foucault, the postcolonial thinkers. They think we can get rid of reason, which is a Western concept, and focus only on "positionality".

Carl Schmitt is another thinker analysed in the book. His appeal to the left is surprising, considering his explicit Nazi leanings. You say an interesting thing: "Schmitt suggests that universalist concepts such as humanity are Jewish inventions [...] The argument is dangerously close to the contemporary thesis that Enlightenment universalism disguises particular European interests".

Schmitt criticises Kant for his pointedly racist views but it is ignored that Schmittian central thought is basically Nazi. Schmitt's most famous idea is that the basic categories in politics are friend and foe. I love that Adorno criticised this as childish, because it is. Part of the left's fascination with Schmitt has to do with its fascination with political will, politics without limits, and a certain authoritarianism. But, I think what really appeals is his critique of liberal hypocrisy. It's the idea that liberalism doesn't really achieve what it sets out to achieve, see his critique of British and American imperialism. The left praises his critique of that. But I still don't understand the fascination. I organised a symposium on precisely that, on why the left is fascinated by Carl Schmitt. And it was very funny because more people attended the lectures than ever before. The participants were very respectable people, almost all of them German. And they all showed their absolute fascination with Schmitt. They were not able to criticise him. Schmitt's prose is hypnotic but in a different way from that of Foucault or Judith Butler, which is dense, impossible prose, thinkers who stir the waters to make them seem deep. Schmitt has a different capacity for attraction, because his prose is very simple. You only have to look at his thesis of friend and foe, which is astonishingly simple and almost childish, but he says it with such authority. All his work is like that, full of forceful pronouncements and one thinks that it must not be so simple, that there must be something more complicated behind it. That's why I think he is considered one of the most profound German thinkers.

In the book you make an interesting distinction between optimism and hope. I get the feeling that today pessimism is left wing (for example with regard to climate change), when perhaps it used to be considered reactionary.

You are right, but perhaps this is not new. Think of the anti-nuclear movement decades ago, in the 1950s and 1960s. The left claimed a concern about nuclear destruction. I'm old enough to remember that many people had nuclear nightmares, and built shelters and decided not to have children for fear that they would be born into an uninhabitable world (something many also say about climate change). At the same time, I think it was not the same hopelessness. There are several factors that explain this greater hopelessness on the left today. One is the end of real socialism in 1991. For many people on the left, after the fall of the USSR, any possibility of implementing an idea of global social justice fell. For the few who read it at the time, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was also very influential. But above all Foucault: everything you think is a step forward and progress is actually a form of subtle domination. This is something that carries over into public debate and the media. People laugh at you if you talk about progress. They think you are naïve or closing your eyes to injustice. It has become a performance. If you want to be considered intelligent, you can't talk about hope.

You run the Einstein Forum, which is based in Potsdam, and you have often written about Germany and how it is dealing with its past, its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Is freedom of expression being restricted when dealing with these issues?

For the first time in my life, I am censoring myself when I talk about Israel in Germany. Even someone like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times is considered radical. I can't even quote his texts on Israel, which are quite moderate. Recently a human rights event was cancelled, cancelled by the organisation itself, because they couldn't talk about it. I am concerned about freedom of speech, but above all, I am concerned that the debate is being framed in the wrong way: are you more concerned about freedom of speech or anti-Semitism? This is a false dilemma. The question is whether what is considered anti-Semitism is really anti-Semitism. Often it is not. We have seen a terrible increase in anti-Semitism, but it is partly because of the behaviour of the Israeli government. Also because the Israeli government and the conservative Jewish establishment have turned any criticism of the Israeli government into anti-Semitism. That's why people rescue the old clichés along the lines of "Jews control the media". If I were ignorant I would come to that position, I understand why people come to those conclusions. For a long time, especially since the government of Menachem Begin, criticism of the State of Israel has been labelled anti-Semitic. It has been a very successful strategy. The right wing around the world, no matter how anti-Semitic (from Orbán to Trump to Modi), has realised that the way not to be labelled a fascist is to unconditionally support the Israeli government.

See, «El victimismo se ha convertido en una fuente de autoridad»