What Charles's saying is that doing a Kant now, after Marx, near the end of the twentieth century, is as retrogressive as doing a Jefferson or a Franklin. Cult studs don't go for the latter, mainly because nobody (to my knowledge) has explicitly combined them with, say, Lacan, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. to make them look dangerous, thrilling, and glamorous. (Well, except that Ezra Pound, some critics say, was bound to a Jeffersonian vision of political economy. Will this indirect association with fascism make Jefferson diabolically attractive to timid disciples of Heidegger?) Without a postmodern cover, Kant would look as dull & provincial as the agrarian fantasy of Jefferson. In real life, though, Jefferson was more cosmopolitan -- hey, he even got to live in _Paris_ with his beautiful black mistress, how's that for a master-slave sexual dialectic! -- than Kant, who never got out of Konigsberg (which didn't stop him from commenting negatively upon Africans). More importantly, Jefferson actually got to be a leader of a real revolution, whereas Kant merely theorized the virtues of bourgeois freedoms while arguing against the then revolutionary practice of utilitarian philosophy as well as revolution itself. It's as if Kant wanted the fruits of revolution without having to struggle for them. This is not to say that it was Kant's personal fault; it's just that Kant lived in the conservative backwaters (East Prussia).
Isn't it urban & urbane ennui that makes many of our contemporaries want to get a kick out of illiberal, mystical, & reactionary sorts of philosophy, while also longing for an orderly society with bourgeois freedoms & social democratic perks? (Terry Eagleton says that it is.) If Heidegger had not been a Nazi, noone would probably want to read him now. It's like that new David Fincher film _Fight Club_. Or like the avowed pacifist Kenneth Mackendrick's quest for an ethics that takes into account a 'diabolical evil' & the 'traumatic Real.' (Ah, sounds like Pasolini!)
If you like illiberal philosophy, though, why not study Sophists, Hobbes, Machiavelli, & Sade? They are more compatible with Marxism, and they give you as much radical nominalist jouissance as you wish.
toward a rakish Marxism,
Yoshie