Post-Marxist Repudiation

Post-Marxist Repudiation names the intellectual-historical gesture by which, in the decades following 1989, dominant strands of humanistic scholarship—particularly in film studies—turned away from Marxist theory and practice as their organizing framework. Kornbluh's account in the Kornbluh source identifies two interlocking moves: a methodological drift toward empiricism and social-scientific approaches (displacing the theoretical ambitions of ideological and aesthetic critique), and an explicitly political disavowal of Marxism as discredited by the collapse of actually existing socialist regimes. Together, these moves constitute not a neutral paradigm shift but an active repudiation—a rejection that is itself ideologically saturated, insofar as it abandons the very tools (Marxist mediation, ideology-critique, the theory of the commodity form) capable of analyzing why such a repudiation feels necessary or "realistic."

The concept thus operates as a diagnosis of a symptomatic absence. Where Marxist film theory held together aesthetics (the formal analysis of film as mediated form) and social practice (film as a site of ideological reproduction and potential critique), the post-Marxist turn produces a split: empiricist methodologies handle the "social" side while formalist or cognitivist approaches handle the "aesthetic" side—without any concept capable of thinking their unity. In this sense, Post-Marxist Repudiation is not merely a historiographical label; it is the name for a structural foreclosure that prevents contemporary film studies from theorizing its own conditions of possibility.

Within anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, Post-Marxist Repudiation functions as the polemical foil against which Kornbluh reconstructs the necessity of Marxist film theory. The concept sets up the stakes: if the field has collectively abandoned Marxism, then the book's project of reading Fight Club through Marx and Lacan is itself a counter-repudiation. It is positioned at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Against Ideology, the Post-Marxist Repudiation is itself an ideological operation in the precise Lacanian-Žižekian sense: it operates through cynical distance ("we know Marxism is discredited") that, rather than escaping ideology, reproduces its deepest mechanism by foreclosing critique through the very act of seeming to move beyond it. Against Mediation, the repudiation dismantles the theoretical apparatus—particularly the Marxist concept of the commodity form as mediating social relations—that made it possible to analyze film as simultaneously aesthetic form and social practice. The result is the loss of the bidirectional mediating function that allows critique to exceed its determining conditions.

The concept also resonates with New Historicism (one of the cross-referenced canonicals, though not supplied with a full synthesis here) as one of the empiricist-adjacent methodologies that partially fills the space vacated by Marxist theory, trading structural-theoretical analysis for contextual and archival methods. Against Sublimation and Gap, a more speculative but warranted inference: the Post-Marxist Repudiation forecloses the gap—the irreducible structural antagonism at the heart of capital—by substituting contingent historical narrative for structural critique. Where sublimation allows the drive to attain satisfaction via a detour through form, the post-Marxist turn refuses the detour and collapses back into the immediacy of empirical description, losing the theoretical elevation that Kornbluh's project seeks to restore.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.72)

the methods of the past several decades have inclined toward 'post-Marxist' repudiations of Marxist theory and post-1989 denunciations of Marxist practice

The quote is theoretically loaded because it splits the repudiation into two analytically distinct axes — "theory" and "practice" — showing that the abandonment of Marxism operates simultaneously at the level of methodology (theory) and political legitimacy (practice, anchored to the historical date "post-1989"), and the scare quotes around 'post-Marxist' signal that this self-description is itself an ideological claim rather than a neutral periodization.