V Y TAU TA S M AG N US U N I V E R SI T Y

FAC U LT Y OF H U M A N I T I E S
DE PA RT M E N T OF OF PH I L O S OPH Y

Rimantas Viedrynaitis

Postmodern Philosophy
DIDACTICAL GUIDELINES

Kaunas, 2013
Reviewed by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Marija Oniščik

Approved by the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities at

Vytautas Magnus University on 7 December 2012 (Protocol No. 12)

Recommended for printing by the Council of the Faculty of Humanities of

Vytautas Magnus University on 28 December 2012 (Protocol No. 8–4)

Translated and edited by UAB “Lingvobalt”

Publication of the didactical guidelines is supported by the European Social Fund

(ESF) and the Government of the Republic of Lithuania. Project title: “Renewal
and Internationalization of Bachelor Degree Programmes in History, Ethnology,
Philosophy and Political Science” (project No.: VP1-2.2-ŠMM-07-K-02-048)

© Rimantas Viedrynaitis, 2013

ISBN 978-9955-21-360-4 © Vytautas Magnus University, 2013
Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1. Postmodernity as a Period in the History of Philosophy 6
2. Relationship Between Postmodernity and Modernity . 10
3. Main Concepts of Postmodernism . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Introduction
This study book is for the students of the philosophy programme at
Vytautas Magnus University. The study book includes a brief over-
view of major issues analysed by postmodern philosophy and pres-
ents the most important concepts of postmodern philosophy. This
book should serve as an auxiliary aid for the self-study of texts of
postmodernist philosophers.
Realising that postmodern philosophy is hard to wedge within
the framework of one interpretation or explanation, the book’s au-
thor does not make an attempt to provide a systematic and complete
image of the postmodern project. The diversity of topics and con-
ceptual solutions appearing in the spotlight of postmodern philoso-
phers is too multi-layered and diverse to implement such an idea at
all, especially within the framework of a study book. Therefore, the
most emphasis is put on general issues, the most important concepts
of postmodern philosophy, theoretical prerequisites of modernity
and postmodernity discourses as well as on the presentation of rela-
tionship between these discourses.
Each section ends with discussion questions and tasks encour-
aging the individual analysis of discussed issues and includes rec-
ommended literature, the study of which should help students to go
deeper into issues being analysed.
1. Postmodernity as a Period in
the History of Philosophy
The aim of this topic is to briefly introduce possibilities for the iden-
tification of postmodern philosophy as a historical period and al-
ternatives to the use and perception of the “postmodernism” con-
cept. Having studied additional literature, answered questions and
completed tasks at the end of the topic, students should be able to
individually describe and explain different prerequisites for treating
postmodernism as a historical period.

The prefix “post-” quite naturally implies that the word having it re-
fers to something that happened “after”, to something subsequent
in time. Thus, we could quite reasonably believe that the concept of
“postmodernism” marks time, a phenomenon following modernism.
Indeed, on the one hand, historical and geographical coordinates
can be quite easily defined for the beginning of postmodern philoso-
phy – it is France in the sixties of the 20th century as well as Great
Britain and the United States in the early seventies, when new trends
emerged in the structuralist camp, which conceptually differ from
usual and established structuralist schemes. An attempt is some-
times made to name the exact date, a certain break point, i.e. the
year 1968; however, it is obvious that such accuracy is redundant and
hardly necessary. On the other hand, postmodernity as a spiritual
and cultural diversity appears in many faces and forms well before
the revolutionary 1968. But, of course, protests of students with one
fifth of the French population quickly joining them with the slogan
“L’imagination prend le pouvoir!” (“Imagination takes power!”) in
the social and political dimension also quite accurately embodied
the philosophical mood of that time.
In the middle and the second half of the 20th century, postmodern
trends also emerged in literature (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Sam-
uel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut), architecture (Michael Graves, James
Stirling, Robert Venturi), art and music (Jackson Pollock, Clem-
ent Greenberg, Carolee Schneemann, George Maciunas, John Cage,
Michael Nyman), cinema (David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Peter
6
 Postmodernity as a Period in the History of Philosophy

Greenaway, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard)1, etc. This list can

be continued and extended as there is no area of cultural life unaf-
fected by postmodernism.
Most prominent figures primarily related to the concept of post-
modernism can be also named in the history of philosophy: it is
Jean-François Lyotard who established the concept of “postmodern-
ism” in the philosophical dictionary in 1979 by his famous work “The
Postmodern Condition” (even though the concept of “postmodern”
was first time mentioned around 1870 by John Watkins Chapman
who spoke about French Impressionists2) as well as Jean Baudrillard,
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Gilles Deleuze, and
Fredric Jameson. However, predecessors who these authors were tak-
ing their inspiration from go well beyond structuralists Ferdinand
de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, early Jacques Lacan, and early Roland
Barthes; they were also no less influenced by the 19th century phi-
losophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, and the 20th
century philosophers, founders of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl
and Martin Heidegger, etc.
Thus, philosophical prerequisites for postmodern thinking are
much earlier than the concept of “postmodernism” itself. Therefore,
it is no coincidence that Umberto Eco and Lyotard offer to look at
postmodernism more in terms of the aspect of an “an approach to
work” rather than of the historical period3. In the postscript to his
famous novel “The Name of the Rose”, Eco states summarising rea-
soning on postmodernism, „I am convinced that postmodernism is
not a chronologically fixed phenomenon, but a kind of spiritual state,
if you will, Kunstwollen (the will of art) – an approach to work. Justi-
fied the phrase that every era has its own postmodernism, as well as
every era has its own mannerism…”4 In a sense, postmodernism is a

1. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. by S. Sim. – London and

New York: Routledge, 2001.
2. David, R., Fontana, A. Postmodernism in the Social Sciences//Postmodernism
and Social Inquiry. Ed. by D. R. Dickens, A. Fontana. – London and New York:
The Guilford Press, 1994. P. 1.
3. Lyotard, J. F. The Posmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. – Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. P. 71–82.
4. Eco, U. Postilė “Rožės vardui” 1983//Eco, U. Rožės vardas. – Vilnius: Alna, 1991.
P. 426.

7
 Postmodern Philosophy

part of modernism, after all, we find the simultaneous coexistence of

these two forms of expression and thinking, especially in visual arts
and literature. Postmodernism can be also perceived as the prerequi-
site of modernism, the same way as the ineffable content of aesthetic
experience is the prerequisite of a work of art. However, when try-
ing to “trace” any causal connection between these two “structures”,
then the threat of the “disciplinary and punishing”5 discourse order
arises making further speaking accept prejudices of “coherent his-
torical development” or “historical progress”.

Questions and tasks:

1. What are variants for the historical periodization of postmod-
ernism?
2. Explain why postmodernism as a historical period can be in-
terpreted in different ways.
3. Explain what problematic aspects are mentioned by Lyotard
in the quotation below when he speaks about the content of
the concept of postmodernism:
“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts for-
ward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies it-
self the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would
make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unat-
tainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order
to enjoy them but m order to impart a stronger sense of the un-
presentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a
philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in
principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be
judged according to a determining Judgment, by applying familiar
categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are
what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer,
then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of
what will have been done.Hence the fact that work and text have
the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for
their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put

5. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. – New York: Ran-
dom House, 1975.

8
 Postmodernity as a Period in the History of Philosophy

into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always begin too soon.
Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox
of the future (post) anterior (modo)”6.

Literature:
1. Lyotard, J. F. The Posmodern Condition: A Report on Know­
ledge. – Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
2. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. by S. Sim.  –
London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
3. Postmodernism and Social Inquiry. Ed. by D. R. Dickens, A. Fon-
tana. – London and New York: The Guilford Press, 1994.
4. Eco, U. The Name of the Rose. – London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
5. Anderson, P. The origins of postmodernity. – London: Verso, 1998.
6. Postmodernism. What Moment? Ed. by P.  Goulimari.  – Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

6. Lyotard, J. F. The Posmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. – Minneapo-

lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. P. 82.

9
2. Relationship Between Postmodernity
and Modernity
This topic presents the relationship between modernity and postmo-
dernity and philosophical issues related to reflections on this rela-
tionship. Having studied additional literature, answered questions
and completed tasks at the end of the topic, students should be able
to individually describe and explain differences between postmod-
ern and modern philosophical mindset.

Problematic aspects of the modernity and postmodernity division

emerged during the presentation of the previous topic. The concept
of modernity in philosophy is generally associated with the Age of
Enlightenment whose distinctive features are: elevation of rational
thinking above faith and tradition, emancipation of philosophical
thinking, creation of great philosophical systems, aspiration for the
creation of better people and society through enlightenment and edu-
cation, and faith in the idea of universal evolution and progress. How-
ever, it would be inaccurate to identify the concept of modernity with
the diverse historical Age of Enlightenment, whose beginning dates
back to the second half of the 17th century (Benedict de Spinoza, John
Locke and Isaac Newton), or to even earlier times of the Renaissance
and Reformation. Without a doubt, new scientific achievements en-
couraged the formation of modernity. French encyclopaedists of the
18th century (Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau) and grandees of German philosophy Immanuel Kant and
Georg Hegel also largely contributed to this “rational optimism”. It is
Hegel explaining the historical process and using the concept of “mo-
dernity” who gives the positive content to it: new, modern times are
the time of ultimate fulfilment when the “global spirit” is self-realized
in the rational philosophical discourse. However, this Hegel’s action
is merely an attempt or simply a desire to see history as a rational and
progressive process obeying the logic of Hegelian dialectics. Never-
theless, history is rational to the extent of rationality we put into it.
Karl Marx, the “innovator” of the universal development and a
critic of social theories, who started his activity as a Hegelian, “im-
10
 Relationship Between Postmodernity and Modernity

proved” his predecessor in his own way  – he eliminated idealistic

speculations and, instead of the “global spirit”, made economic de-
terminism the centre of the entire system. There is no doubt that
Marx had overwhelming influence on the formation of modernity.
He is the most prominent critic of capitalist ideology who had great
influence on Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault and other left-wing post-
modernists.
The Romanticism movement of the late 18th century and the ear-
ly 19th century choosing the path of aesthetic experience and feel-
ing tries to get liberated from the pretentious situation of “subject
truth”. Perhaps, the romantic pathos could be considered a distinc-
tive feature of modernism in philosophy of the second half of the 19th
century and the first half of the 20th century. When trying to find
an alternative to modernist rationalism, philosophers of this period
make absolute and “central” aesthetic, religious, existential, and eco-
nomic experience of existence, though the inner thinking structure
remains consistently modernist: irrational belief in rationality is re-
placed with the exaltation of irrationality.
Postmodernist philosophers try to expose and deconstruct the
structure of modernist thinking. This attempt can be treated in two
ways: 1) it is the consistent continuation of modernism distinguished
by self-destructiveness and inability to solve important social prob-
lems (Jürgen Habermas), 2) a positive attempt to create new concepts
and to liberate thinking from various stereotypes: form, system-
atized traumatic experiences, linguistic structures and discourse-
disciplining power (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida).
Ihab Hassan, the American literary theorist, provides a detailed
table in his article “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”7 high-
lighting differences between modernism and postmodernism. Di-
chotomies included in this table cover many areas of humanities
and social sciences, though the author himself does not claim the
completeness and accuracy recognizing that these distinctions are
inconclusive and ambiguous.

7. Hassan, I. Toward a Concept of Postmodernism // Hassan, I. The Postmodern

Turn. – Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987. P. 84–96.

11
 Postmodern Philosophy

Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening
Distance Participation
Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction
Synthesis Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/Boundary Text/Intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Interpretation/Reading Against Interpretation/Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible (Readerly) Scriptible (Writerly)
Narrative/Grande Histoire Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire
Master Code Idiolect
Symptom Desire
Type Mutant
Genital/Phallic Polymorphous/Androgynous
Paranoia Schizophrenia
Origin/Cause Difference-Differance/Trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Irony
Determinancy Indeterminancy
Transcendence Immanence

12
 Relationship Between Postmodernity and Modernity

Questions and tasks:

1. What most important features of modernism in philosophy
could you distinguish?
2. What possible alternatives to the modern philosophical dis-
course emerged at the end of the 19th century and in the first
half of the 20th century?
3. How do postmodernists try to liberate thinking from stereo-
types?
4. What dichotomies provided by Hassan seem questionable to
you, and why?
5. Provide examples of modern and postmodern art and com-
pare them on the basis of Hassan’s table.

Literature:
1. Hassan, I. The Postmodern Turn.  – Columbus: Ohio State Uni-
versity Press, 1987.
2. Bartens, H. The Idea of the Postmodern. A history. – London and
New York: Routledge, 1995.
3. A Concise Companion to Modernism. Ed. by D. Bradshaw. – Ox-
ford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003.
4. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. by S.  Con-
nor. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
5. Habermas, J. Modernity versus Postmodernity//New German
Critique. No. 22. – Durham: Duke University Press, 1981. P. 3–14.
3. Main Concepts of Postmodernism
This topic presents the main concepts of postmodernism. Having
studied provided definitions of concepts and examples of their use,
as well as additional literature, and answered questions at the end of
the topic, students should be able to individually describe and ex-
plain the main concepts of postmodern philosophy.

Absence
“Absence is a lack that disrupts or defers full presence. Insofar as tra-
ditional Western thought and its modern consummation involve a
methaphysics of presence, the functions of ‘absence’ prove crucial to
postmodern critiques of Western thought. Within a methaphysics of
presence, primal ‘truth’ is equated with ‘being’, and being is equated
with ‘presence’: to be true, or truly to be, is to be originarily and fully
present. This tie between primal truth and ontological presence in-
forms traditional and modern conceptions of God (the source of all
truth as the full presence of being); of the human subject (the truth
of whose thought and identity would be realized in rational self-pres-
ence); and of meaning in language (the truth of whose signifying
movement would be sought in the presence of a signified). (…)
Postmodern thinkers likewise evoke absence to critique moder-
nity’s attempt to ground truth in the rational self-presence of the
self-identical subject. From the nothingness of moral existence in
Heidegger, to the radical unconscious of Jacques Lacan’s split subject,
to the trace of the other in Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of
the ethically obligated self, postmodern thinkers articulate figures of
absence that haunt the subject so as to disallow the realization of its
self-identity through self-presence.
Pivotal to most all postmodern understandings of absence is the
question of language and representation, addressed exemplarily by
Jacques Derrida, who sees absence as basic to the way linguistic signs
function. Against the view that signs secure meaning insofar as they
re-present the presence of some signified that transcends the move-
ment of signification, Derrida argues that the absence of any such
‘transcendental signified’ is necessary to the very movement of signs:
14
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

signes signify only in their differential relation to one another, and

thus only insofar as they never reach the full presence of an extra-
linguistic signified.”8

Jacques Lacan:
“For the time being, we will stick to Freud. Civilization and Its
Discontents concerns the effort to rethink the problem of evil once
one acknowledges that it is radically altered by the absence of God.
This problem has always been avoided by the moralists in a way that
is literally calculated to arouse our disgust once we have been alerted
to the terms of the experience”9.

Jean-François Lyotard:
“One can represent the Nazi madness, make of it what it also is –
an effect of “secondary” repression, a symptom, an ideology; a way
of transcribing the anxiety, the terror in regard to the undetermined
(which Germany knew well, especially then) into will, into politi-
cal hatred, organized, administered, turned against the unconscious
affect; an extreme way of repeating the traditional “adjustment” by
which Europe has, since Christianity, hoped to place outside of itself
this inexpressible affection by naming it: “the jews,” and by persecut-
ing it. But on the side of “the jews,” absence of representability, ab-
sence of experience, absence of accumulation of experience (however
multimillennial), interior innocence, smiling and hard, even arro-
gant, which neglects the world except with regard to its pain —these
are the traits of a tradition where the forgotten remembers that it is
forgotten, “knows” itself to be unforgettable, has no need of inscrip-
tion, of looking after itself, a tradition where the soul’s only concern
is with the terror without origin, where it tries desperately, humor-
ously to originate itself by narrating itself.”10

8. Carlson, T. Absence // Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor and

Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 1.
9. Lacan, J. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. The seminaro f Jacques Lacan
VII book. – London: Routledge, 1992. P. 185.
10. Lyotard, J.-F. Heidegger and “the jews”. – Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997. P. 27–28.

15
 Postmodern Philosophy

Jacques Derrida:
“The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the
retention of difference within a structure of reference where dif-
ference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of varia-
tions among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of
another transcendental present, of another origin of the world ap-
pearing as such, presenting itself as ir-reducible absence within the
presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a
scientific concept of writing. This formula, beside the fact that it is
the questioning of metaphysics itself, describes the structure implied
by the “arbitrariness of the sign,” from the moment that one thinks
of its possibility short of the derived opposition between nature and
convention, symbol and sign, etc.”11

Arche-writing
“Arche-writing is Jacques Derrida’s term for the constitutive negativ-
ity that makes signification possible, an original linguistic spacing
that cannot be recovered by any signifying act. Receiving its most
extensive elaboration in Of Grammatology, arche-writing is used
by Derrida to foreground the instability of the idea of an ‘originary
writing’. ‘Arche’ translates as ‘origin’, and insofar as something is an
‘original’ it is identical to itself and not like anything else (speech,
Derrida argues, is a paradigmatic exemple of a thing that a dominant
tradition in Western philosophy has understood as an ‘origin’ that
is self-present and self-identical). However, insofar as that ‘origin’ is
written, it is a representation of that origin, and therefore no longer
the original itself. Furthermore, in being ‘writing’ its value, like that
of all other signifiers, is produced by negativity, because of its dif-
ference from other written signifiers. Not a difference between but
a difference within signifiers, arche-writing is a term that sharply
interrogates the whole notion of identity, and in doing so, is a key
term in the wider deconstructive project of foregrounding the politi-
cal character of all identitarian claims.”12

11. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. – Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 1997. P. 46–47.
12. Hayward, S. Arche-writing//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor
and Ch.E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 16.

16
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

Jacques Derrida:
“I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of
writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condi-
tion: that the “original,” “natural,” etc. language had never existed,
never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always
been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I
wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writ-
ing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar con-
cept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically
except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire for a
speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its
difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because,
within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation,
destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the
desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached
living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we
shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. ”13

Deconstruction
“Deconstruction is a method, proceeding largely from the works of
Jacques Derrida, of reading texts to reveal conflicts, silences, and fis-
sures. Deconstruction is both theory and practice, and applies most
specifically to a mode of reading texts. Thus it is slightly differen-
ciated from poststructuralism, which, while having conceptual and
procedural similarities to deconstruction, is more of a philosophy or
point of view. Poststructuralism also hasmore to do with linguistics,
whereas deconstruction is a method that can in theory be applies to
any sort of discipline or cultural product. Deconstruction is over-
whelmingly associated with the thought of Jacques Derrida and the
writings of Paul de Man (1919–1983). Originally centered in philoso-
phy and literary theory, it has been applied to fields ranging from
architecture to theology.

13. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. P. 56–57.

17
 Postmodern Philosophy

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), in calling for an end to the Western

metaphysical tradition, had advanced the Concept of Abbau or ‘un-
building’ and had also called for existing concepts to be subject to
a ‘destruction’ that would strategically resituate them. Derrida, an
Algerian-born French philosopher, borrowed Heidegger’s concepts
withtwo major alterations: he removed any vestigial romantic poi-
gnancy from either the process of unbuilding itself or the evocation
of the metaphysical tradition, and he made it less an ontological task
than a process of reading texts. Thus Derrida’s idea of ‘deconstruc-
tion’ was directed less against metaphysical absolutes as such, which
Heidegger and others had already called into question, but against
the kind of pure presence, uninflected by trace or textuality, that
Derrida saw even in work as rigorous as that of Edmund Husserl.
In his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus in Dissèmination (1967; translated
into English as Dissemination, 1978), Derrida ends the distinction
made in Plato’s dialogue between speech, which is privileged because
it seems a spontaneous product, whereas writing is seen as a ‘poison’,
an imposed addition which only congeals the presence of speech or
displays its absence. Derrida reverses these terms, seeing writing
as the basis of speech, and speech as unable to conceptually subsist
on its own, but falling back into a kind of pervasive textuality or
arche-writing, as we only knows speech because it is comparised by
language and subject to models of linguistic representation. Charac-
teristically, Derrida reverses the accustomed hierarchy. He does this
not to elevate new absolutes of his own but to destabilize the given,
to advance what he calls différance, a special kind of ‘difference’ that
ensures that meaning is never quite totally ‘there.’ This reversal of hi-
erarchies, though especially apt when done in relation to the binary
opposition of writing and speech, can presumably put any existing
opposition (for exemple, wholeness versus fragmentation, the inter-
nal versus the external) under erasure, revealing that its terms may
not be nearly as opposed as at first glance.”14

14. Birns, N. Deconstruction//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V.E. Taylor

and Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 84–85.

18
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

Jacques Derrida:
“I wished to reach the point of a certain exteriority in relation to
the totality of the age of logocentrism. Starting from this point of
exteriority, a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a
traced path, of that orb (orbis) which is also orbitary (orbita), might
be broached. The first gesture of this departure and this deconstruc-
tion, although subject to a certain historical necessity, cannot be
given methodological or logical intraorbitary assurances. Within
the closure, one can only judge its style in terms of the accepted op-
positions. It may be said that this style is empiricist and in a certain
way that would be correct. The departure is radically empiricist. It
proceeds like a wandering thought on the possibility of itinerary
and of method. It is affected by nonknowledge as by its future and
it ventures out deliberately. I have myself defined the form and the
vulnerability of this empiricism. But here the very concept of em-
piricism destroys itself. To exceed the metaphysical orb is an attempt
to get out of the orbit (orbita), to think the entirety of the classical
conceptual oppositions, particularly the one within which the value
of empiricism is held: the opposition of philosophy and nonphiloso-
phy, another name for empiricism, for this incapability to sustain on
one’s own and to the limit the coherence of one’s own discourse, for
being produced as truth at the moment when the value of truth is
shattered, for escaping the internal contradictions of skepticism, etc.
The thought of this historical opposition between philosophy and em-
piricism is not simply empirical and it cannot be thus qualified with-
out abuse and misunderstanding.”15

John Caputo:
“But even the step back to aletheia itself is only so much metaphysics
for Derrida metaphysics of nearness and proximity, of truth and shin-
ing presence around whom a left-wing (a left-bank!) Heideggerianism
began to form. For Derrida, the later Heidegger has succeeded, not in
launching a deconstructive critique of hermeneutic phenomenology
but only in raising it up another notch into an onto-hermeneutics of

15. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. – Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 1997. P. 161–162.

19
 Postmodern Philosophy

the truth of Being. Derrida has no taste for the circle or the “belonging
together” of “Being” and ‘’man” and no interest in the metaphorics of
closeness, simplicity, unity, homecoming, and mystery which punctu-
ates the later Heidegger. If Gadamer’s work is a conservative herme-
neutic, and the later Heidegger’s a deeper repetition of hermeneutics,
Derrida’s means to be no hermeneutics at all but a delimitation, a de-
construction of hermeneutics as a nostalgia for meaning and unity.
Of these three thinkers, Derrida is unquestionably the philosopher
most faithful to the flux, most suspicious of every attempt to still its
movements or, to use his own striking expression, to “arrest the play.”
There is a more Nietzschean side to Derrida than to Heidegger or Ga-
damer, a more deeply suspicious eye, a greater sense of the fragility of
our thought constructions and the contingency of our institutions.”16

Différance
“Derrida indicates his thinking of difference by producing the term
différance, which in French superimposes the two senses of the verb
‘to differ’ (différer): ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. In this way, the term dif-
férance attempts to name the fact that our cognitive (that is, perceptu-
al and intellectual) experience of being in the world is fundamentally
generated as a dynamic process of differentiation; and that the irre-
ducible mode of this differentiation is one of ‘timing’ (deferring) and
‘spacing’ (differing) as mutually inter-dependent aspects of the same
process (and not as metaphysical substances, ‘space’ and ‘time’).
Derrida’s thinking of difference has been interpreted largely in
terms of language, given his deconstructive emphasis on textuality,
and its radical philosophical significance has consequently been un-
derstated. The notion of différance clears the way to a non-metaphys-
ical and critical insight into our mode of cognition and recovers a
thinking of difference which, while it has repeatedly recurred in the
history of Western thought, has been effectively repressed by a meta-
physics of essence saturating every dimention of Western culture.”17

16. Caputo, J.D. Radical Hermeneutcs. Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Her-
meneutic Project. – Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1987. P. 97.
17. Nizamis, K. Difference//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor and
Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 99.

20
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

Jacques Derrida:
“On the one hand, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude
that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the differ-
ence or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident
significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic
substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presup-
poses an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplic-
ity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the
minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the
other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no
meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted dif-
ference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of
the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is
différance. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or
visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such
a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-
present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior
to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.),
concept or opeartion, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore
not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of
signs among themselves within the same abstract order – a phonic
or graphic text for example – or between two orders of expression.
It permits the articulation of speech and writing – in the colloquial
sense – as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible
and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression
and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing,
no derived “notation” would be possible; and the classical problem of
relationships between speech and writing could not arise. Of course,
the positive sciences of signification can only describe the work and
the fact of differance, the determined differences and the determined
presences that they make possible. There cannot be a science of dif-
ferance itself in its opera-tion, as it is impossible to have a science of
the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain nonorigin.”18

18. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. – Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 1997. P. 62–63.

21
 Postmodern Philosophy

John Caputo:
“Then what is the advantage of the word ‘‘democracy’’ now? Why
is it not as bad as all the other words? Is it because of some ‘‘essential
nature’’ of democracy in virtue of which there would be an essential
similarity between the democracy at present and some future pres-
ent democratic condition that would arise under the impulse of the
democracy to come? Not if différance does what it says it does – not if
it constitutes meaning as an effect rather than expressing preconsti-
tuted meanings. The deeply anti-essentialist drift in différance blocks
the way to essential similarities. We might do better to say that there
is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘‘family resemblance’’ between the two.
On that model, we can say that a looks like b and b looks like c, but
a need not look like c. That is a more promising avenue to the à venir
of democracy. I am speaking of future-present democracies or post-
democracies that would arise ‘‘under the impulse’’ of the democracy
to come, because it belongs to the very idea of the democracy à venir,
while it will itself never exist (as we will see below), to provoke a
series of transformations, to set a certain seriality in motion, lead-
ing who knows where, somewhere into an open-ended future. This
democracy to come may solicit, call, or provoke; or it may lure, tempt,
or seduce; but it does not exist, not if it is ‘‘to come,’’ not according
to the very idea of the to-come. Thus, given what différance means,
or rather what it does, and given what à venir means; then between
the democracy at present and some future condition that would arise
under the impulse of the democracy to come, there would not be a
community of essence but only a seriality – an historical, narratival
or genealogical link – not an essential continuity but only a narrati-
val sequence. ‘‘Democracy’’ does not have a meaning; it has a history.
Democracy is not an essence but an ongoing historical narrative; the
word ‘‘democracy’’ is but the word we use today to mark the present
slice or cut (or epoché) in that series.”19

19. Caputo, J.D. Temporal Transcendence: The Very Idea of à venir in Derrida//
Transcendence and Beyond. A Postmodern Inquiry. Ed. by J.D. Caputo and
M. J. Scanlon. – Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007.
P. 192–193.

22
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

Dissemination
“Jacques Derrida, who introduced the term, has said of it: ‘In the last
analysis dissemination means nothing, and cannot be reassembled
into a definition… the force and form of its disruption explode the
semantic horizon… It marks an irreducible and generative multiplic-
ity’. Like Derrida’s term différance, ‘dissemination’ cannot simly be
defined precisely because it names the process by which ‘meaning’ is
generated without ever strictly being fixed or given in the way that
a definition is supposed to do. The conventional sense of the term,
‘to distribute, scatter about, diffuse’, suggests the process by which,
in language, the meaning of any term or set of terms is distributed
and diffused throughout the language system without ever coming
to a final end. The word derives from the Latin disseminare, from
dis-, apart, and seminare, to sow, from semen seed. Derrida plays on
this sense of reproductive fertility: a kind of self-seeding function of
language and discourse.
Dissemination is intimately implicated with two Derridean no-
tions: difference (or différance) and the trace. It can be understood as
operating at two interrelated levels, or with two extensions of sense.
Of these, the wider in scope is the one that is associated primarily
with notions of textuality, intertextuality, and text, but also with that
of discourse. The narrower in scope is associated more specifically
with the poststructural displacement or transformation of structural
linguistics and semiotics.”20

Thomas Lewis:
“In addition to furnishing a certain closure, this last passage
also furnishes a certain pretext. I should like to conclude my essay,
therefore, with four short observations about the tropic-concept of
dissemination as it appears both inside and outside Derrida’s essay,
“Dissemination” [in Dissemination 287-366]. My first observation is
that the major difficulty with this essay surfaces in its tendency again
to construct its argument around a binary opposition that imposes
a logic of supplementarity in which the relationship between dis-

20. Nizamis, K. Dissemination//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor

and Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 103.

23
 Postmodern Philosophy

semination and power is occluded. In “Dissemination,” for example,

Derrida distinguishes between scission and dissemination. Scission
is defined as a necessary violence (castration) performed upon a text
in order to open discourse anew. Dissemination is what can hap-
pen after scission: it is defined as a material transfer of the products
of scission to new discursive contexts in the interest of proliferat-
ing meanings and making reference problematic. Derrida does not
claim, however, that dissemination is the only thing that can happen
after scission, for scission itself is said to be capable of perpetuation
in the form of mimesis. So it is that, on the one hand, scission seems
to belong to dissemination because of its role as the necessary condi-
tion for dissemination and, on the other hand, scission seems not to
belong to dissemination because of its role as the binary opposite of
dissemination. In a textual economy in which scission is made to sig-
nify violence, and dissemination simultaneously is made to signify
violence and the negation of violence, it is indeed difficult to avoid
the conclusion that scission establishes a power that dissemination
seeks to relinquish.”21

Hyperreality
“The term ‘hyperreality’ was coined by the French theoris Jean Bau-
drillard to describe the condition whereby imitations or reproduc-
tions of reality acquire more legitimacy, value, and power than the
originals themselves. Baudrillard’s early work attempts to articulate a
neo-Marxist position than more accurately reflects the current post-
modern consumer society. In Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Bau-
drillard articulates his theory of hyperreality as the theoretical state
wherein distinctions between a representation and its original refer-
ent no longer exist. He argues that commodities no longer contain
use-value as defined by Marx, but must be understood as signs as de-
fined by Saussure. This line of analysis brought Baudrillard to even-
tually conclude that the postmodern condition has erased all signs
from their associated referent. Postmodernity, or the new postindus-
trial age, decisively severed such connections with its new forms of

21. Lewis, T.E. Reference and Dissemination: Althusser after Derrida//Diacritics.

Marx after Derrida. Vol. 15, No. 4, 1985. P. 54.

24
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

communication, information, and media technology. Hyperreality

is constructed out of what Baudrillard calls models or simulacra
which have no reference to reality, but exist within a series of replica-
tion that has no historical meaning. Simulacra challenges objectiv-
ity, truth, and reality by feeling its existence; yhe ‘reality’ reproduced
within the hyperreal appears more real than reality itself. According
to the logic of hyperreality, there is no ‘reality’ but only simulacra.
Because these simulations appear real and, in fact, acquire aspects
of reality, they are never merely fictional. Fiction, because it relies on
an authentic or real object, is incommensurable with this theory of
hyperreality.”22

Jean Baudrillard:
“Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and
every objective, they turn against power the deterrent that it used so
well for such a long time. Because in the end, throughout its history
it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referen-
tial, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction
between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical
law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. Capital
was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deter-
ritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the real-
ity principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all
use value, all real equivalence of production and wealth, in the very
sense we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of
manipulation. Well, today it is this same logic that is even more set
against capital. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous
spiral by secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a
last glimmer of power, it does nothing but multiply the signs and ac-
celerate the play of simulation.
As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power
played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradic-
tions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger
comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of

22. Chaput, C. Hyperreality//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V.  E.  Taylor

and Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 182-183.

25
 Postmodern Philosophy

signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufactur-

ing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a
question of life and death. But it is too late.”23

Repetition
“Repetition is the inscription of difference ir otherness within iden-
tity. The postmodern conception of repetition is best understood as
part of a general critique of the traditional Western assumption that
identity is alwys stable, complete, and atemporal. It is most closely
associated with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Der-
rida, although it is important for many discourses concerned with
identity, including the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the so-
cio-cultural and literary theories of such writers as Jean Baudrillard,
Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler (…).
Deleuze posits a ‘comlex’ or ‘true’ repetition which drives com-
mon-sense repetition, inserting difference and dynamism into its
very heart. Complex repetition is not the return or representation of
some prior or fundamental sameness in superficially different guises
or masks; rather, it is the continual presentation of singularities that
are alwys radically new and that cannot be subsumed under any gen-
eral concept. For Deleuze, complex repetition allows the emergence
of identity itself, even if, insofar as the identity of repetition involves
constant self-differentiation, the very idea of ‘identity’ must now in-
volve an internal difference or heterogeneity. He writes: ‘bare, mate-
rial repetition (repetition of the Same) appears only in the sense that
another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and consti-
tuting itself in disguising itself’ (Difference and Repetition p.21). In
such an irreducibly temporal process, identity is seen as fluid, dy-
namic, and self-different.
Like that of Deleuze, Derrida’s philosophy of repetition compli-
cates our common-sense assumptions of what constitutes identity by
inscribing difference or alterity within sameness. For Derrida, any
singularity or uniqueness has as its structural condition of possibility
what he calls ‘iterability’, a word he finds preferable to ‘repeatability’

23. Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation. – Michigan: University of Michigan

Press, 2006. P. 22.

26
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

because it is etymologically linked to the Sanskrit for ‘other’. Derrida

argues that no original can appear or be present except insofar as it
could be repeated; thus the concepts of originality and presence are
themselves put into question (…).”24

Gilles Deleuze:
“On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. How-
ever, law determines only the resemblance of the subjects ruled by it,
along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from
grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would re-
main impossible for pure subjects of law – particularrs. It condemns
them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form
of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost
of their mvn change. No doubt there are as many constants as vari-
ables among the terms designated by laws, and as many permanenc-
es and perseverations as there are fluxes and variations in nature.
However, a perseveration is still not a repetition. The constants of
one law are in turn variables of a more general law, just as the hardest
rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions
of years, So at each level, it is in relation to large, permanent natural
objects that the subject of a law experiences its own powerlessness
to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained
in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself
condemned. Law unites the change of the water and the permanence
of the river. Elie Faure said of Watteau: ‘He imbued with the utmost
transitoriness those things which our gaze encounters as the most
enduring, namely space and forests.’ This is the eighteenth-century
method. Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Heloise, made a system of it: the
impossibility of repetition, and change as a general condition to
which all particular creatures are subject by the law of Nature, were
understood in relation to fixed terms (themselves, no doubt, vari-
ables in relation to other permanences and in function of other, more
general laws).”25

24. Pagano, D. Repetition//Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor and

Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 338.
25. Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. – New York: Columbia University Press,
1994. P. 2.

27
 Postmodern Philosophy

Jacques Derrida:
“A signifier is from the very beginning the possibility of its own
repetition, of its own image or resemblance. It is the condition of its
ideality, what identifies it as signifier, and makes it function as such,
relating it to a signified which, for the same reasons, could never be
a “unique and singular reality.” From the moment that the sign ap-
pears, that is to say from the very beginning, there is no chance of en-
countering anywhere the purity of “reality,” “unicity,” “singularity.”
So by what right can it be supposed that speech could have had, “in
antiquity,” before the birth of Chinese writing, the sense and value
that we know in the West? Why would speech in China have had
to be “eclipsed” by writing? If one wishes really to penetrate to the
thing that, under the name of writing, separates much more than
techniques of notation, should one not get rid, among other ethno-
centric presuppositions, also of a sort of graphic monogenetism that
transforms all differences into divergences or delays, accidents or de-
viations? And examine this heliocentric concept of speech? As well
as the resemblance of the logos to the sun (to the good or to the death
that one cannot look at face to face), to the king or to the father (the
good or the intelligible sun are compared to the father in the Repub-
lic, 5o8 c)? What must writing be in order to threaten this analogical
system in its vulnerable and secret center? What must it be in order
to signify the eclipse of what is good and of the father? Should one
not stop considering writing as the eclipse that comes to surprise
and obscure the glory of the word? And if there is some necessity of
eclipse, the relationship of shadow and light, of writing and speech,
should it not itself appear in a different way?”26
Rhizome
“The rhizome is a concept from botany used by Deleuze and Guat-
tari as a model of immanent, nonexclusive connection, in contrast to
the transcendent, hierarchical structure of the tree (the arborescent
model of thought), which dvelops through binary opposition. A rhi-
zome like crabgrass grows horizontally bysending out runners that
establish new plants which then send out their own runners and so
26. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. – Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1997. P. 91–92.

28
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

on, eventually forming a discontinuous surface without depth (and

thus without a controlling subject) or center (and thus free of lim-
iting structure). Deleuze and Guattari provide six principles they
claim are characteristic of rhizomes:
1 connection: any point of a rhizome can and must be connected
to any other, whereas the tree model establishes a hierarchy and or-
der of connection that arbitrarily limits its possibilities.
2 heterogeneity: the points or plateaus of intensity which consti-
tute the rhizomatic chain are not necessarily linguistic but may also
be drawn from perceptual, political, gestural or other registers. Lin-
guistic structure, the dialectic of signifier and signified, is not priv-
ileged in a rhizome, in which no determining universal structure
remains stable.
3 multiplicity, a difficult but key term in Deleuze and Guattari’s
work: a multiplicity is not a collection of stable units of measure or
unified subjects but a set of dimentions and lines of connection that
changes in nature when it increases in number, the unity of a tree
structure arises only when a multiplicity has been overcoded or im-
mobilized by a master signifier or a subject operating in a supple-
mentary dimention that claims to transcend the flat plane of the
multiplicity or rhizome.
4 asignifying rupture or aparallel evolution: although rhizomes
may contain structures of signification (which Deleuze and Guattari
call ‘territorializations’), they also contain lines of flight that rupture
or deterritorialize these substructures. For example, by mimicking
the wasp’s coloring, the orchid deterritorializes in order to attract
it and the wasp reterritorializes on the orchid’s image, but then the
wasp is deterritorialized by becoming part of the flower’s reproduc-
tive system and the flower is reterritorialized when its pollen is trans-
ported to other flowers. Rhizomes pas through binarisms and struc-
tures but are not reducible to them.
5 cartography: the rhizome is a map, oriented toward experimen-
tation in contact with the real, rather than the tracing of a genetic or
structural model organized around a pre-established, limiting center.
6 decalcomania: the reductive tracings of structural models (such
as psychoanalysis) must be put back on the map that is the rhizome
in order to reactivate their foreclosed lines of flight.
29
 Postmodern Philosophy

In summary, the rhizome is an acentered, non-hierarchical and

non-signifying system in a constant state of becoming, a middle
without beginning or end, and rhizomatics, the art of following rhi-
zomes, is another word for schizoanalysis.”27

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

“Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: un-
like trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other
point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same
nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even
nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the
multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three,
four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which
One is added (n + 1). It is composed notof units but of dimensions,
or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but
always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.
It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither
subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consisten-
cy, and from which the One is always subtracted (n  – 1). When a
multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes
in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure,
which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary rela-
tions between the points and biunivocal relationships between the
positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity
and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterri-
torialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity
undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These lines, or linea-
ments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type,
which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions.
Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: nei-
ther external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction
as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term
memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expan-
sion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, draw-
ing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map
27. Murphy, T. S. Rhizome // Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor
and Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 346.

30
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable,

connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and
exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the
map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) sys-
tems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished
paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying
system without a General and without an organizing memory or
central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is
at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality – but also to the
animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and
artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all
manner of “becomings.””28

Simulacrum
A simulacrum is an image, likeness, or reproduction. In common
contemporary usage, the term ‘simulacrum’ means ‘image, likeness;
a vague representation, semblance; a mere pretense, sham.’ In post-
modern theory, however, at least three different theories of the simu-
lacrum have been proposed.
The term was first employed as a technical concept by the French
writer Pierre Klossowski, who developed the notion in the 1940s and
1950s in the context of his studies of Hellenistic myths and religious
practices, particularly as they appeared in writers such as Tertullian,
Hermes Trigemistes, and Varro. During the late Roman empire, the
term ‘simulacrum’ was used to refer to the statues of the gods that
frequently lined the entrance to a city. What the sculptor was thought
to ‘simulate’ (Latin simulare) in such statues, however, was less the
external likeness of the gods than their internal demonic (or divine)
power, which was thereby made accessible to the viewer.
Klossowski adopted this Latinate terminology in his own theory
of art and philosophy, replacing the language of divine power with
that of the internal ‘impulses’ of the human body, with all their
fluctuating intensities (manic rises, depressive falls…). Though in-
dividuals are obviously constrained by their impulses, what marks

28. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. –

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. P. 21.

31
 Postmodern Philosophy

the ‘unexchangeable singularity’ of an individual is more precisely

something that Klossowski terms a phantasm; an obsessional image
produced instinctively from the life of the impulses, which is in itself
incommunicable and nonrepresentable. A simulacrum, in turn, is a
willed reproduction of a phantasm (for instance, in a literary, picto-
rial, or plastic form) that ‘simulates’ this invisible agitation of the
soul. (…)
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, under Klossowski’s influence,
proposed a slightly different notion of the simulacrum in a num-
ber of seminal texts written in the late 1960s (notably ‘Plato and the
Simulacrum’ and Difference and Repetition), which focus primarily
on the Nietzschean question of the ‘overturning of Platonism’. The
essential distinction in Plato, Deleuze argues, is more profound than
the famous speculative distinction moves between the model and its
copies, or the Idea and its images. The deeper, more practical distinc-
tion moves between two kinds of images (or eidolon): true ‘copies’
(eikones), which are legitimated by their internal resemblance to the
Idea; and false ‘simulacra’ (phantasmata), which elude the order that
Ideas impose, but obtain the same results or effects through ruse or
trickery. (…)
Platonism can be defined by its will to track down and eliminate
simulacra in every domain; its goal is a kind of ‘iconology’, the tri-
umph of iconic copies over phantastic simulacra. A Christian variant
of this project was established by Augustine, who aimed at the de-
struction of the reign of cupidity (simulacra) in favor of the reign of
caritas (copies). For Deleuze, the overturning of Platonism requires
that the simulacrum be given its own concept, not merely as a degrad-
ed image, but as having an autonomy of its own (as an image without
resemblance; based on a model of difference rather than identity; ap-
prehended in a ‘problematic’ mode; and so on). Deleuze largely aban-
doned the concept of the simulacrum in his later works, where it was
replaced by the concept of the agencement (‘assemblage’).
By far the most influential thinker of the simulacrum is the
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who in the late 1970s and early
1980s developed an entire social theory around the proliferation of
simulacra. The ‘postmodern’ world, according to Baudrillard, is a
world in which the (Marxist) model of production has been replaced
32
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

by the cybernetic model of simulation, a ‘cybernetization’ of society.

Baudrillard defines the simulacrum, quite simply, as a copy or re-
production of the real, and traces the steps by which it progressively
assumes an autonomous status, divorced from the real (…).”29

Jean Baudrillard:
“So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representa-
tion. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the
real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fun-
damental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of
this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as
value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every refer-
ence. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpret-
ing it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of
representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representa-
tion is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appear-
ance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an ap-
pearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in
the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to sign-
swhich dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turn-
ingpoint. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which
the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age
of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to
recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from
false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is al-
ready dead and risen in advance.

29. Smith, D. Simulacrum // Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V.  E.  Taylor

and Ch. E. Winquist. – London and New York: Routledge, 2001. P. 367–368.

33
 Postmodern Philosophy

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes

its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs
of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There
is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of
the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And
there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential,
above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how
simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the
real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of
deterrence.”30

Questions and tasks:

1. Why is the concept of “absence” important for the postmod-
ern discourse?
2. Explain the difference between the concept of “absence” used
by Lacan, Lyotard and Derrida in provided examples.
3. What characterizes the concept of “Arche-writing”?
4. What is the difference between Derrida’s concept of “decon-
struction” and Hedegger’s concept of “destruction”?
5. What does Derrida want to distinguish by offering the con-
cept of “différance”?
6. Using the material provided, describe the concept of “dissem-
ination”.
5. What is the difference between hyperreality and “ordinary re-
ality”?
6. What kind of repetition do Deleuze and Guattari speak about?
7. Define in your own words the concept of “rhizome”, explain
its meaning.
8. Explain the principle following which Baudrillard distin-
guishes four stages of the image.

30. Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation // Baudrillard, J. Selected Writings. –

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. P. 170–171.

34
 Main Concepts of Postmodernism

Literature:
1. Baudrillard, J. Selected Writings. – Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1988.
2. Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation. – Michigan: University
of Michigan Press, 2006.
3. Caputo, J.D. Radical Hermeneutcs. Repetition, Deconstruction,
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Indiana University Press, 1987.
4. Caputo, J.D. Temporal Transcendence: The Very Idea of à venir
in Derrida // Transcendence and Beyond. A Postmodern Inquiry.
Ed. by J. D. Caputo and M. J. Scanlon. – Bloomington and India-
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5. Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition.  – New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
6. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
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7. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology.  – Baltimore and London: John
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8. Ecyclopedia of Postmodernism. Ed by V. E. Taylor and Ch. E. Win-
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