File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Mar.95, message 17


Date: Sat, 11 Mar 1995 13:19:23 -0600
From: Jim Elson <jlelson-AT-utdallas.edu>
Subject: Re: Postmodernism


On Sat, 11 Mar 1995 WIDDER-AT-vax.lse.ac.uk wrote:
> 
> The point is that the use of the term 'postmodernism' is a 'modern' trope
> par excellance.  With the exception of Lyotard, the term is almost never
> advanced by those who are subsumed under it, or it is only employed for the
> most pragmatic purposes -- i.e., as a term used VERY loosely to describe a
> GENERAL form of thought that a number of thinkers are BROADLY associated 
> with.

Having read the posts in this thread with considerable interest, I
have held my tongue in hopes that someone would raise the very cogent
points which Nathan Widder has.  I suspect that the problems concerns
a conflation of two different conceptions of post-modernism which
is typically understood as some sort of "new fashion" which many of
its derogators claim is rapidly becoming passe.  As will become
obvious, this is a thoroughly modernistic perspective.

The other conception--of course, there are not necessarily only two,
however, it is rhetorically useful to speak as if there were--is
Nietzschean.  In this sense, it is more accurate to speak of
post-modernity since this underscores that instead of an academic
fashion we are speaking of an age/era/epoch as is modernity which
can be said to have begin with Descartes and his contemporaries.

Gianni Vattimo addresses this issue extremely well in _The End of 
Modernity_.  He follows Nietzsche's lead by defining modernity as
the age of "overcoming" and the "new" which rapidly becomes dated and
is replaced by something still "newer".  I have written about this
previously in this mailing list.  Instead of repeating myself, I'll
answer the question of who is a post-modern thinker: anyone who has
abolished the "apparent" world along with the "real" one.

--Jim
===========================================================================James L Elson:              |<o  When you stare into the abyss too long  o>|
School of Arts & Humanities |<o       the abyss stares back into you.    o>|
University of Texas-Dallas  |                  --Nietzsche--               |

BTW, I would greatly appreciate anyone telling me of passages in _Human,
All Too Human_, or elsewhere, where Nietzsche addresses the notion of
modernity.  Vattimo suggests that he finds that definition there.  Even
though I agree that it is implicit, I have yet to come across places
where N. comes close to stating Vattimo's definition of modernity.  Have
I just overlooked it?  Thanks in advance.


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