It could be argued that contemporary identity politics on right and left responds to what Mark Fisher calls the “slow cancellation of the future,” with a zealous, quasi-religious search for meaning that places critical reason in question.
To understand such a search we might look at Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Martin Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity.” Adorno argues that the impulse towards authenticity reveals a desire for an elusive form of concreteness in a world increasingly governed by the rule of abstraction.
The young Nietzsche, in On “Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”, discusses ideal abstractions as a way of conceptualising a given object by extracting the most general predicates of particular examples of that object. And this act of extraction is precisely an act of abstraction.
