| The sense of massive deja vu settles over me when I see these pieces. Or more accurately: hasn't this been done already? I studied continental philosophy as a graduate student about ten years ago and have kept up since as much as possible. Continental philosophy was the spawning pool for the loose cluster of tendencies[0] that form the concept of postmodernism in the imagination of most - Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard. At this time, it seemed definitively that this set of ideas this lot was on the way out. There was even a term for what was bad about them, as captured in After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux: correlationism[1]. The idea that human thought never "got at" the truth because of intermediate cognitive or societal structures or biases. There was a whole movement against correlationism called speculative realism[2]. In the UK at least, indeed, the focus of continental philosophy that preceded it seemed to oppose this postmodernism taken as a name for this cluster of thinkers. Broadly, a solid focus on Deleuze resulting in "new materialisms" (often scientifically informed) and a figure like Alain Badiou (Meillassoux's tutor) who very much attempted to stake out the ground for Truth with a big-olde-capital-T. So to me that it is still a live term and people are talking about it so much is pretty strange. Of course that continental philosophy influences other discourses, and that both Derrida and Foucault were quite interdisciplinary in their work. So one could say this is some sort of institutional lag. But it is an odd thing to observe[3]. --- [0] I say this because Foucault and Derrida are better described as post-structuralists and this is what they would have considered themselves as. Lyotard helped assist the terms with his work certainly in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir but it was a term of societal diagnosis rather than support. I feel that postmodernism as a cluster term was the result of the reception of these theories in American literary theory departments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Criti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism [3] I'm not actually adjudicating here on the merits or otherwise of those thinkers grouped as postmodern. That's another topic. |