“Why is it that skeptical and relativistic arguments have the cultural power that they now do? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why have themes of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism come to have the cultural dominance they do? And how can those intellectual themes coexist with a […]
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Michel Foucault said: “All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” And philosopher Todd May summarizes Foucault’s conclusion this way: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.” For more on Foucault’s contributions to postmodernism, see p. 11 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau
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Counter-Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that in moral society, one “coalesces with all, in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.” And: A “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.” Further:
Immanuel Kant said: “Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.” For more on the meaning
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Jacques Derrida on the relevance of Marxism to postmodernism: “deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also *within the tradition* of a certain Marxism in a certain *spirit of Marxism*.” For more on the implications of Derrida’s writings for postmodernism, see p. 14 of
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“Deconstruction,” Stanley Fish confesses happily, “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.” For the implications of Fish’s quotation for postmodernism, see p. 11 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau to Foucault. Information about other editions and translations is available at this dedicated page.
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Theologian Richard Niebuhr called Friedrich Schleiermacher “the Kant of modern Protestantism.” Here is Schleiermacher himself: “The essence of religion is *the feeling of absolute dependence*. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.” For more on Schleiermacher and his contributions to postmodernism, see p. 57 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau
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“The normal fuck,” writes Andrea Dworkin, “by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.” For more on the implications of Dworkin’s claim for postmodernism, see my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau to Foucault. Information about other editions and translations is available at this dedicated
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