Alternatives

«А вождь наконец-то покидал насиженную Россию ... но на смену приходила только серая страшноватость, в которой душа советского типа быстро догнивала и проваливалась внутрь самой себя. Газеты уверяли, что в этой страшноватости давно живет весь мир и оттого в нем так много вещей и денег, а понять это мешает только «советская ментальность».

В. Пелевин, Generation П, с. 32.

All that remains is the серая страшноватость, endlessly refurbished, endlessly traversed by people who are so mutilated that they no longer even want what they desire and instead devote all their energies to affirming the primacy of an unlivable world over what is left of their selves. The utopian impulse is surely an old one, but what I long for is undoubtedly much newer - "N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!" But the ce implies an autre. That isn't quite it. That is still some kind of basically religious impulse. What I long for lies too far ahead of me. All I can do with my desire is prepare the way for it by willing the total negation of that which is. The way in which the present world is constituted makes the good life impossible. What resists it is too far inside us, and the subject is too riven with contradictions to survive outside of the hell which it has created for itself. But everyone already knows that utopia is not for us. That is why they claim that it does not exist. But what could be more pathetic than to think that goodness can only exist for me? We can imagine an empty utopia. This can still animate a basically humanistic political project, one which is constitutionally resistant to self-satisfaction: as long as we are alive, we have failed. But that does not mean that we want to die. We want, rather, to keep falling forward into the infinite possibility offered by an existence free from us, beyond us, not for our children (which we should not have), but for something endlessly ahead of us, unattainable, incomprehensible, the quintessence of hope.

This is what I realized as I walked past the "Cluck-U Chicken" in New Brunswick the other day.

To me, one of the great puzzles of intellectual history, and one which deserves detailed investigation: it is not enough to recognize that intellectual brilliance come in generations. It comes rather in people who meet long before they make their world-historical contributions. University friends: Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin; Eliade, Ionesco, and Cioran; Blanchot and Levinas. What does this mean?

When I first learned of the existence of this thing called postmodernism, I was amazed: how had something so vast as to be practically uncategorizeable - a something encompassing not just aesthetics but a sense of reality - have escaped my attention for so long (I was about twenty years old)? And then I realized the more amazing thing: this something had preceded me, according to the standard periodization, by almost twenty years!

What does this mean for one's position with regard to a cultural development - that is, whether one has seen it come into being, or, on the other hand, been born into it? In one case, the observer realizes the thing as it is happening around him. In the other, one looks around and realizes that one has been blind to one's own reality, not because it has crept up on you, but because you are saturated with it.

How many scholars of postmodernity are younger than it? What is the effect of this lag of the scholars behind the object of their scholarship? What will happen when those born after, say, 1980 will come to dominate academic discourse on the postmodern (if there is any such thing as academic discourse by then)?

Striking as it was for me to notice postmodernism, what I discovered was, in large measure, a corpse.