A brief Introduction to Postmodernism

Why a worn-out label tells us more about academic fashion than about philosophy.

*This piece was originally written in 2024 to an Israeli audience (hence, the ending section) to introduce some much-needed caution in the usage of the term in public discourse.

There is no consensus in the scholarly literature regarding the meaning of the term “postmodernism” or even regarding the scope of the phenomena this term purports to describe. For these and other reasons, there are serious doubts among scholars who have dealt with this term as to whether it possesses any validity whatsoever. Nevertheless, since the term is indeed in everyday use, there may be some positive value in clarifying the meanings that sometimes attach to it and the general problematic inherent in it. This article will deal primarily with what might be meant by the heading “postmodern thought” and its history—that is, mainly French philosophy of the 1960s,[1] though it will also briefly examine cultural phenomena.

One can say with relative confidence that postmodernism as an intellectual phenomenon generally signals a methodological skepticism toward overarching theories and grand political programs. At the historical level, it is more or less agreed that postmodernism is a phenomenon that emerges at the earliest after World War I and reaches the height of its power with the student revolts in France and the United States in 1968. In Israel, it is mainly an academic fashion from the 1990s, led primarily by students of French thinkers—whom we shall discuss further—and it has relatively faded since the 2010s. In popular culture, the term “postmodernism” seems to refer mainly to a skeptical climate of opinion against the background of positions such as “cultural relativism” and “epistemic and moral subjectivity.” The popular position of cultural relativism would deny the possibility of a descriptive or normative standard shared across different cultures, with the justifications for this position being far from unambiguous. The popular position of epistemic and moral subjectivity would generally include a denial of the ability of a person to establish any normative standard whatsoever that has binding validity beyond the selfhood of that person, and a denial of positions according to which we are capable of knowing “the truth,” in its broad and binding sense, on matters that are liable to generate cultural disagreement.

A typical demonstration of “cultural relativism” that one can still hear here and there among young people, usually from the more educated strata of society, is generally made within the framework of theoretical discourse. A famous example, albeit already an old one, is the one that Allan Bloom (1930–1992[2]), an American professor of ancient philosophy and a tenacious critic of postmodernism in academia—although the terminology of “postmodernism” itself was not popular then, as we shall see—gave in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987).

In the book, Bloom recounts his experience as a lecturer to the new generation (students of the 1980s) and the intellectual limitations he encountered among the young people. On the subject of cultural relativism, Bloom recounts an example in which he used to ask his students about a theoretical dilemma involving a British official in India:[3]

When the official served in India, he encountered a local custom of certain Indian women immolating themselves on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands. Bloom posed the following question to his students: In such a situation, would they intervene? In a way that might surprise us today, most of the students tried to evade the question—“What are the British doing there in the first place?”—and were unable to provide a direct answer or suggest relevant lines of thought for the problem that faced the official. The students, who may have held something we would today call popular (or folk) cultural relativism, were unable to think about cross-cultural dilemmas: they had been educated to believe that every culture has its own standards and that it is forbidden to judge it in terms of one’s home culture. It followed that not only did they hold a rather primitive conception of cultural relativism, but that it directly implied for them a form of what we have here called “moral subjectivity”—in this case, the absence of a practical standard shared between them—as the Indian official—and the locals subject to his authority.

A somewhat more common example can be given on the subject of moral subjectivity, which, again, usually in discussions with a theoretical flavor, is expressed in statements such as “everything is relative” and “everything is subjective” when the discussion revolves around matters of morality. The underlying assumption is that even insofar as there is a possibility of communication that is equally understood by both sides, there are no tools for conducting moral disagreements in a rational manner, and ultimately discussions of this kind will have to retreat to an ineffable personal position.[4] Here too, the maxim is not necessarily limited to our specific cultural climate, and one can find examples of it, for instance, in the apologetics of the British writer C. S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity (1941–1944), the first chapter of which addresses, among other things, precisely this issue: Lewis imagines several speakers who insist that every culture has its own standards, but more than that, in a decisive sense every person has his own standards, and therefore they are not obligated to do such and such a thing that they do not like.

I assume that at this stage of the inquiry the reader will more or less grasp the popular phenomenon under discussion. However, in this formulation of the issue, there are weighty reasons to ask what is new here. After all, in the first case, that of cultural relativism, these matters were already discussed among Enlightenment thinkers and to some extent even among theologians since at least the discovery of America, and all the more so by Enlightenment thinkers once a functioning relationship between China and Europe had been established. Relativistic cultural skepticism is not a new phenomenon, and it even characterizes—in a much more refined and fruitful version, of course—thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and later, of course, Herder. Furthermore, “moral subjectivity” as we have called it here is certainly not limited to our generation, or rather, to our parents’ generation. Anyone who has opened a Platonic dialogue, such as the Protagoras, or examined the figure of Thrasymachus in the Republic, will immediately recognize a fairly close variation of the moral skepticism—or at least moral relativism—that characterized Athenian youth no less than it characterized Bloom’s students. We find, then, that insofar as postmodernism is indeed limited to such phenomena that are at their root no more than off-the-cuff remarks of the kind we examined above, there is nothing new in it, and on the contrary: it seems to be precisely part of the long history of the human species, the beginning of which is shrouded in mist. The cyclicality, in the sense of these specific phenomena, appears strong.

Nevertheless, there are those who say that we live in a postmodern time. It should be noted that this claim is a historical claim; it pertains to the question of periodization—that is, the question of how we divide the various periods in history and understand our place within them. Postmodernism, as its name implies, comes after modernity. But is it a period?

Periodization and History

The origin of the term “postmodernism” itself belongs in all likelihood to the field of art criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term grew gradually within the thought of architects and literary critics who sought a new term to describe aesthetic trends that challenged the fundamental aesthetic principles of “modernism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in its various forms. While the genealogy of the term itself may be of interest, it does not necessarily or particularly interestingly belong to the development of the thought that came under the same name. The central use of the term, as we know it and the beginning of its popular use, began in all likelihood with the work of Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), The Postmodern Condition (1979). In his work, Lyotard describes postmodernism as a general condition that the sciences and Western culture have arrived at. In his view, this condition is characterized by two complementary definitions: the transition to a post-industrial economy[5] characterized as a knowledge economy, and a loss of faith in what he calls meta-narratives. In order to understand the second characterization, a brief clarification of the terms Lyotard employs is required.

Lyotard makes rather idiosyncratic use of the concept of “language games” to denote a model of data transmission between a sender (the primary speaker), an addressee (the speaker who is required to accept the statement, and implicitly, perhaps to reject it), and a referent (the object about which the primary speaker formulates information). He claims that learning in general is a subtype of a language game, and beneath the type of learning there are the language games that we designate by the title “science.” Lyotard offers a rather thin description of the scientific language game. In parallel, Lyotard examines the neo-liberal ideologies[6] that grew after World War II and were accepted, more or less, as the official policy of most Western powers, and shows how they too are marked by a unique language game of their own. According to Lyotard, meaning in its broad sense is constructed for us not from within the language games that characterize science or politics in themselves, but through reference to narrative (= story). He sees the “loss of meaning” that characterizes many of the statements of his time as an indication precisely of the loss of meta-narratives (stories about—) that would provide the language games of science with context. The narratives themselves are language games, but they differ from the language games of science: the language game of narrative places emphasis on what Lyotard calls the “rhythm” of the narrative—that is, its atemporal repetitiveness. A story does not “progress” in any meaningful sense. It is told again and again and does not question its own truth. By contrast, the language game that characterizes science is one in which every “game” of science involves a unique performance.[7] Science works, implicitly, in a form of linear temporality—it assumes prior knowledge, or a history of propositions, and builds upon them.

If we return to the elaboration of Lyotard’s thesis, its second characteristic of distrust in meta-narratives is connected to what Lyotard sees as the general crisis of legitimation that the West entered after World War II. According to Lyotard, scientific discourse by its nature requires legitimation (because it builds on prior propositions that would justify the current ones), and since World War II it has lacked such legitimation. Furthermore, the language games of politics also require legitimation, and they too find themselves facing a similar crisis, albeit one subordinate to the scientific crisis. According to Lyotard, the last condition in which science had legitimation was within the framework of German Idealism, which in effect created a grand narrative within whose framework the propositions of science were situated and from which they received their legitimation. Another grand narrative is that of the French Enlightenment, within whose framework science was supposed to play a role in educating humanity toward an egalitarian future for all. In any case, current science finds itself without metaphysics—which traditionally was part of the scientific language game that could confer legitimation upon science—and without a grand narrative in the style of German Idealism or the French Enlightenment that would justify scientific knowledge.

Lyotard apparently belongs to the very phenomenon he seeks to describe, and in the academic climate the temptation for him to try to aggrandize his theories as representing “the condition of the time as a whole” is too great.[8] To a large extent, the term “postmodernism,” or parallel terms that seek to capture the spirit of the age, are attempts by a small group of academics to acquire for themselves an aura of prophets-of-the-times that does not necessarily belong to them by right, as well as of “opponents” of this trend who sought for themselves a straw-man term to spar with. All this even if we set aside the fact that periodization characterizations such as “the Middle Ages,” “the Early Modern Period,” “the Classical Age,” and so forth require a certain historical perspective and cannot be made in real time. Nevertheless, the central problem with Lyotard’s analysis lies elsewhere. While his analyses of the economy and society sometimes border on genuine prophecy, especially regarding the information and computing industry, his analyses of scientific knowledge are very deficient. In fact, to the extent that his argument is based on an analysis of the internal dynamics of the need for justification of scientific language games—and it should be noted that his political argument regarding the crisis of legitimation also rests on the same square—it describes our time less, and is more subject to simple problems that can be identified in it. It seems evident that Lyotard, although he no doubt knew, if only superficially, the intellectual climate of analytic philosophy,[9] did not take fully into account how serious some of the currents that exist there are in providing metaphysical or logical legitimation to scientific knowledge. His disregard for figures as different from one another as Carl Hempel (1905–1997) on the one hand or Karl Popper (1902–1994)[10] on the other renders most of his argument an argument in vain, which ironically does not adequately meet one of the basic conditions he formulated for the scientific language game: bibliography. Specifically, many of his arguments regarding why it is not possible to confer legitimation on the language games of science are simply unsuccessful.[11]

In any case, the widespread adoption of the label “postmodernism” in intellectual thought and in popular jargon, especially from the 1990s onward, is credited more to the Marxist historian Fredric Jameson (1934–). In 1984 he published in the journal New Left Review an article titled “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”[12] Jameson’s article has the advantage of having been written by someone who is to some extent “external to the movement,” as well as in that Jameson is—primarily—a critic of art and culture, fields in which the label of postmodernism had a somewhat stronger hold than it does today. Jameson adopts an independent perspective in relation to postmodernism as a Marxist who sees the post-structuralist thinkers, within the limits of the dialectic, as rivals. He seeks to establish postmodernism as the “dominant culture” of late capitalism. As a Marxist, the periodization he makes of the late modern period revolves mainly around economic concepts, and it is worth pausing briefly on the economic background that in his view justifies the insight that “postmodernism” is a distinct historical period, and the post-structuralist thinkers its prophets.

For Marx, capitalism is defined by the concept of capital, which was defined primarily around the concept of “surplus value” of industrial production. Capitalism organizes factories so that the factory owners (the capitalists) receive into their wages all the profit from the sale of the goods the factory produces. Marx noted that the tendency of capital to concentrate in the hands of an increasingly narrow social stratum is part of the characteristics of capital. After the prediction of a global proletarian revolution failed to materialize and the October Revolution produced a communist government that was at best a parody of the Marxist vision, Vladimir Lenin developed Marx’s theory to include imperialist competition among the Western powers and Russia as part of capital’s tendency to expand into new markets. Mandel, on whom Jameson relies, expanded the Leninist interpretation of Marx in the wake of the Marxist disappointment with capitalism’s recovery after World War II to include the completion of capitalism’s expansion across the entire globe and the increasing use of financial markets. From Jameson’s perspective, the latest stage of capitalism (late capitalism) is one that has liquidated culture as an autonomous sphere, or expanded it to the point of identity with the entire capitalist system—something he identifies with the advertising industry and the rise of new information technologies.

For Jameson, then, the postmodern style is not merely one style among many, or limited to the aesthetic domain alone. This style is in fact the dominant culture that is created given the new material conditions. The central characteristic of postmodern culture, in his view, is the elimination of the critical distance—the distance that also enables interpretation—of the individual. Capitalist alienation has reached its peak such that the characterization of the period is “schizophrenic,”[13] in which the traditional distinction between inside and outside no longer holds. This stems, in his view, from the “totalizing” characteristic of late capitalism, which turns everything into a commodity and a subject for marketing.

The central shortcoming of Jameson’s article, which in due course also became a book, is that Jameson attempts to describe a historical period in the stages of its formation, and he lacks the historical perspective that could confirm his judgments as accepted. For example, many of the aesthetic phenomena that Jameson described as different from modernism can probably rightly be termed “postmodern,” but his broader cultural analyses, which were based on quasi-economic analysis as is customary among Marxists, have not survived the years well,[14] and his thesis that we live in “late capitalism” requires academics to propose an update and re-foundation every few years. It appears to be yet another Marxist response to the failure of the predictions of Marx and his successors regarding the fall of capitalism. An additional shortcoming, and perhaps no less conspicuous, is the particularly loose connection Jameson proposes between post-structuralist thought and the postmodern aesthetic climate, and this even taking into account that he shaped his views on postmodern aesthetics and the marketing culture of late capitalism to fit in advance the dimensions of the post-structuralist thinkers.

In any case, Jameson’s central analyses can be relatively easily affiliated with the Marxism of the Frankfurt School,[15] and as such they themselves reflect a kind of covert competition with the post-structuralist thinkers: Jameson’s motivations, despite his more developed historical sense, in describing “postmodernism” belong to a broader effort by Marxist thinkers to demonstrate how post-structuralist thought in fact validates the existing order of capitalism and does not allow for a meaningful revolution in the existing socio-economic order.[16] We will discuss this rivalry between the Marxists and the postmodernists further on.

Demonstrating the Problematic

The three levels discussed—namely, the intellectual, the historical, and the popular-sociological—maintain complex relations among themselves that are in no way unambiguous. In the absence of the possibility of a more systematic foundation, I will offer a brief case study that may be indicative of the negation of a simple convergence of these levels. The discussion of the case study will also serve as an initial presentation of the intellectual content identified with the movement. Accordingly, let us examine the seminar given by the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a philosopher not infrequently identified with the postmodern movement, at the University of California, Berkeley, under the name “Discourse and Truth” (1983).[17] The seminar constitutes part of the relatively late stages of Foucault’s thought, and it touches on a matter that has significant presence both for what we have called the popular-sociological level and for what we have called the intellectual level. The subject of the seminar Foucault delivered concerns the Greek public sphere, the parrhesia—and truth, which already then was marked as problematic in the academic, the popular, and the political-historical frameworks. In the first lecture of the seminar, Foucault sketches a sharp and richly sourced analysis of Greek parrhesia, its political meanings, the status of the speakers within it, the various pressures exerted upon it, and the significant place that truth occupies within the understanding of this institution.

At the end of the first lecture, one of the students—who for our purposes represents the popular-sociological level—asks Foucault, who represents for us the intellectual level, a question. Foucault had just finished making a point about the fact that a successful utterance of truth in Greek parrhesia meant that the speaker had succeeded in persuading the assembly of the truth of his words. The concerned student asks whether there is not an important distinction being missed in Foucault’s discussion of truth: persuading the assembly of the truth is one thing, but being persuaded that the truth is in your possession is something else entirely. The student argues that even if I have persuaded someone else of some truth, there may still remain a doubt in me as to whether it is indeed the truth. Finally, the student asks, “What is the test for truth?” Foucault barely understands the question. Insofar as Greek parrhesia is concerned, from his perspective, there is no presence of any test for identifying truth. The speaker in parrhesia must simply tell the truth. The problem facing him is whether he will succeed in persuading the assembly of the truth of his words or whether he will be punished for having tried to persuade them of it. There is no doubt whatsoever regarding whether truth is or is not in the speaker’s possession.

The student persists, and says that the speaker must be capable of asking himself how he knows that what he considers truth is indeed such. He must, in a certain sense, persuade himself of the truth as a precondition for persuading others. Foucault gives the problem the student raises the heading “the problem of the self-consciousness of the speaker in parrhesia.” But in fact Foucault dismisses the question with a straw. He has never found in any text by a Greek speaker in parrhesia a sign that the speaker was in doubt regarding the truth of his words, that truth was in his possession. From his perspective, this is the difference between “the Cartesian problem” (that is, the doubt that Descartes casts) and the approach of parrhesia. Foucault holds that the relationship of the speaker in Greek parrhesia to truth is one of “superposition” (a term he borrows from quantum physics): since the speaker has access (that is, accessibility) to truth, he possesses certain moral qualities. And when a person has moral qualities of this kind, he possesses truth. So from Foucault’s perspective, there is no problem at all.

Our student persists a second time. He sees how this problem could be equivalent to “the Cartesian problem,” but he asks whether it cannot be said that in a certain sense what we have here is simply a problem situated at the level of the speaker’s sincerity. Foucault responds that already at the beginning of the lecture he noted that the Greeks attributed to the speaker in parrhesia the quality of sincerity. The student asks how this is possible—might not the speaker face a doubt regarding his motivation for uttering the truth? From Foucault’s perspective, this is not a Greek problem at all.

This exchange is quite indicative. The student arrived with a certain preconception that can, in my opinion, be identified with relative confidence with the soft skepticism we said characterizes the sociological-popular level. It is even possible that his motivation for hearing Foucault stems from the fact that he expected to find in him sympathy and a deepening of this view of his. But for Foucault, in relation to the development of the concept of “publicness” that he is trying to carry out from the Greek texts in this seminar, there is no such sympathy. On the contrary. It is quite clear that Foucault is interested in the nuances of the Greek context precisely in order to escape the questions of classical modern philosophy and to propose that there is a concept of truth that is more interesting and important than the one the modern philosophers, such as Descartes, developed. In a certain sense, Foucault requires here an extensive development of a “historicist” position—that is, a position that tends to insist on the historical uniqueness of the phenomena it describes, at least at the methodological level. The crux of the matter is that Foucault is indeed a skeptic, but he is skeptical precisely regarding the fruitfulness of the questions of modern philosophy, and is interested in proposing an alternative.

(Shoes, 1886, Vincent van Gogh)

If so, we have seen that there is a certain gap between the intellectual level and the sociological-popular level. Beyond this, this story will serve us further on to understand in greater depth the political style of the thinkers identified with postmodernism. For now, we will turn to a brief survey of the intellectual movement most identified with postmodernism: post-structuralism. Due to the constraints of space, we will devote room for substantive discussion to only one of Derrida’s concepts, and the rest of the survey will deal more with a patently incomplete mapping of the movement that I hope will give the reader general coordinates rather than a comprehensive survey. It should be noted that even within the present framework, the list of thinkers omitted is larger than those mentioned, and those mentioned were mentioned on account of their belonging to the narrative framework, and not necessarily because of their intellectual dominance within the post-structuralist movement.

Structuralism, French Structuralism, and Deconstruction

One of the popular and intellectual terms alike that is associated with postmodernism is the concept of “deconstruction,”[18] which to a large extent can be spoken of—certainly at its inception—as a school of one man, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). However, until approximately 1965, Derrida was a French academic quite strongly affiliated with the “phenomenological” school that had developed in Germany. Derrida had to a large extent developed the central figures of his philosophy by then, but it is doubtful whether he had any significant public presence beyond the bounds of the specific academic discipline within which he worked. Furthermore, it should be noted that a philosopher of a concept perceived as so significant (“deconstruction”) for characterizing the movement does not gain wide dissemination of his ideas until nearly several decades after most descriptions of postmodernism begin their account—usually, the early twentieth century—raising serious concerns of historical anachronism. Moreover, it is interesting that the background of Derrida’s public entry into public consciousness in 1966 is one that in fact presupposes the strong presence of a multi-disciplinary school that by universal consensus is seen as fundamentally opposed to postmodernism: structuralism. A more precise affiliation of Derrida’s thought—that is, more precise than postmodernism—would be his affiliation with what is called in the literature “post-structuralism.” Accordingly, let us first examine structuralism and its influence, and then return to the breakthrough into public and academic consciousness of Jacques Derrida.

The school in question is “structuralism.” The story of structuralism is told in a way that at the historical level must be divided into two. Here we will distinguish between “latent structuralism” as a reference to theories that we can identify in retrospect as structuralist, and “French structuralism,” which we will attribute especially to the work of the renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009).

At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) developed a sociological theory with concepts such as function and structure at its foundation. Durkheim proposed viewing society as a sophisticated system capable of referring to itself within its own systemic framework. Thus, for example, he proposed that for certain shamanic societies, the “totem” constitutes a representation of the entire society for its individual members, because the society itself—the system—is too complex for an individual to relate to on his own. For Durkheim, social facts precede and to a large extent dictate the characteristics of individuals within society. Durkheim’s work significantly shaped extensive parts of the emerging discipline of sociology. A second significant figure that must be discussed in this context is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1853–1913). De Saussure proposed a theory of linguistic meanings, one of the implications of which was that the relationship between the “signifier”—the element in language or writing that points to a certain meaning—and the “signified”—the element in our shared mental thought to which the signifier may refer—is arbitrary. But more importantly, the meanings of “signifiers”—that is, their ability to point with sufficient consistency for them to be usable at various signifieds—depended, in his view, on the relationships that the signifiers maintain among themselves as part of the larger whole of language. In other words, for de Saussure too, the “internal logic” of language, of the structure, is what dictates the particulars and their nature. Important linguists such as Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) developed de Saussure’s theory into a full-fledged structuralist theory with a significant presence in the field of linguistics.

In order to thicken somewhat the skeleton of what we are calling here latent structuralism, we will very briefly examine how it took root, to some extent, in both psychology and philosophy. In psychology, the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is often considered the founder of structuralism in psychology.[19] Wundt, who is often considered the father of modern experimental psychology (the use of experiments in the study of psychology), was widely accepted as a structuralist who tried to explain consciousness as a whole through an analysis of it that would not lose in its components the encompassing whole. In philosophy, one can see in the Neo-Kantian philosophy that dominated Germany until the late 1920s a certain form of structuralism. Thus, for example, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) from the Marburg school of Neo-Kantians presented a philosophy that consistently placed its emphasis on the functional operation of the whole within every domain of knowledge, while subordinating the components to that whole without which, in his view, they remain devoid of meaning.

We find, then, that what we have here called “latent structuralism” is a general name for a group of loose intuitions that played a central role in the scientific climate of the early twentieth century. The rise of French structuralism was accomplished primarily through the work of Lévi-Strauss. For Lévi-Strauss, every society, with its knowledge, practices, and stories, is organized by means of a single structural principle that has the power to explain the variety of components of that society. The anthropological perspective he advanced, in contrast to the sociological or philosophical ones we examined, was far more ambitious. Unlike sociologists, Lévi-Strauss believed that the explanation of the “foundation” of a given society penetrates also into the forms of knowledge organization of that society, which become dependent on its central foundation. On the other hand, unlike philosophers, Lévi-Strauss held that the organizing principle could also explain the variety of practical practices that constitute the organization of the society. Accordingly, his central innovation was in taking existing concepts from a variety of fields, organizing a widespread intuition among the various sciences, and proposing by means of all these a systematic thesis for understanding a given human society. A further innovation in his thought was the insight that every society has a different organizing “foundation,” and in order to understand its forms of knowledge as well as its social organization, one must understand that foundation.[20] To a large extent, Lévi-Strauss’s thought supports a position of “soft” cultural relativism. Soft cultural relativism is an umbrella term for a variety of positions that all affirm to one degree or another different standards for different societies, yet suggest that there are certain common channels among human societies nonetheless. In the case of Lévi-Strauss, he undoubtedly believed that scientific research had the power to understand cultures different from the Western one, and therefore saw in science, and especially in understanding, a shared interface for all human cultures.

In 1966, an academic conference on structuralism was held in the United States. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and that of others had already become a more or less prominent movement in France, but in the United States, as noted, it was still at the stage we have called “latent structuralism.” The young academic Jacques Derrida participated in the conference and delivered a lecture titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida’s lecture presented a particularly incisive critique of structuralism as a concept and especially as a correct way to understand Lévi-Strauss’s work. In his lecture, Derrida provides numerous theoretical reasons for the claim that a system, social or otherwise, can never stabilize its center in a way that would allow an explanation of all components through reference to the center. Derrida’s lecture is somewhat abstract, so we will content ourselves with a brief example that illustrates the principle—not, however, from Derrida’s lecture itself.

In the lectures of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History” (1822–1830), Hegel gives an example of how history progresses from one period to the next by means of a single figure. This figure, in Derrida’s language, is called an “event.” According to Hegel, in the period of absolute monarchy across Europe, there was a relatively defined set of norms and social practices. Within this set, rebellion against the monarchy was perceived as one of the most severe forms of evil—and every good or bad thing was perceived in relation to this framework. In Derrida’s terms, we can refer to this set as the “structure” or “system” of European society of that time. But onto this arena there arrived a new man, Napoleon, who aspired to change the European structure from its foundations. Hegel calls him a “hero,” and the ambivalence of this title is quite clear to him: in the terms of the old European structure, Napoleon was a villain who tried to rebel against everything good. This would have been even more true had Napoleon not succeeded in bringing Europe to an era with a new social order. But from the side of the new order that Napoleon brought, Napoleon is righteous. In a certain sense, Napoleon is a kind of “event” that carries on his back the transition from one order to another.[21] Through Hegel’s prism, Napoleon and the development of European society from one structure to a more successful one is perceived as a good thing. But it is more than that: for Hegel, the very transition from one structure to another, especially when the second structure is considered more successful, is perceived as part of a story of progress and therefore ultimately part of a single structure.

The situation is completely different in Derrida’s understanding. For Derrida, the event unsettles the illusion of a stable center for the general structure. The event does not contain within itself—and cannot contain within itself—any guarantee of a new structure, certainly not of progress (which assumes partnership in a single structure) or the replacement of the existing structure. The event, as it were, plays with these possibilities, “touching and not touching.” The event is not itself a center from Derrida’s perspective; rather, it embodies within itself the very limitations of centrality as such. In relation to the example we gave, for Derrida, Napoleon is a signifier of the historical limitations of the European structure of absolute monarchy. He points to the fact that the structure cannot claim a complete explanation of the events that occur within its framework, just as he limits, as noted, the pretension of new structures that might grow upon the foundation of the event. The understanding of the event, in this sense, enables a “deconstruction” of the structurality of existing structures and opens new horizons and possibilities.

However, Derrida was not the only one in 1960s France who pointed to the limitations of structurality. Many of those who participated in that same seminar, structuralists, became known also as post-structuralists. Among them was Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who became famous for extending the critique of structurality to a critique of the author’s intention of a literary work as the authoritative source for understanding the meaning of a given work—a thesis to which he gave the name The Death of the Author. Another of those present at the seminar, Paul de Man (1919–1983), expanded his already relatively developed critique of the attempt for any given literary text to have a closed meaning. The central influence of these three on the field of critical literary theory at Yale was to expand further through the 2000s, and in not a few literature departments today their methods are still in use. Also present at the conference were Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968), who studied Hegel’s philosophy from directions known in the literature as having slightly anticipated post-structuralism. His influence was especially strong on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), an important scholar and philosopher in his own right, who is himself considered part of the post-structuralist movement and even gave an account of the phenomenon as a whole that we could not address here.[22] Finally, another figure who was part of the conference was Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), a psychologist who carried out a significant revision of Freud’s theories by means of the structuralist methods of linguistics and anthropology, and who influenced many philosophers—although the question of his belonging to post-structuralism still stands. The reason for this is that while his late theory of meaning in language certainly goes beyond the traditional frameworks of psychoanalysis and de Saussure’s theory, at the philosophical level his position remains uncommitted to the actual frameworks of his time, and he did not explicitly address these questions as far as the author of this article knows.[23]

Another borderline but dominant figure in the context of this school is Michel Foucault. Foucault’s thought maintains numerous connections with both post-structuralist and structuralist concepts—and indeed it seems that from the side of his philosophy, as it receives a certain representation in The Archaeology of Knowledge, his place is with the post-structuralists. On the other hand, most of his work has a pronounced character of historical work, something that both at the intellectual level and at the substantive level was to a large extent foreign to the thought of most post-structuralists. Furthermore, Foucault was known for his public and demonstrative disagreements with Derrida. Foucault and Derrida were rather public rivals who criticized each other’s thought until 1981, when they reconciled. While it initially seemed that Foucault was sympathetic to being placed together with the aforementioned thinkers in a school, later he emphasized more the importance of history as something of greater significance to thought than was accepted among these thinkers.

Competing Schools and the Politics of the Radical Left

In order to understand the context of the post-structuralists more successfully, a certain understanding of the intellectual climate in France in the years following World War II is required. The post-structuralists were not only founders of high-level critique of scientific practices but also active participants in the public and political arena. After World War II, the central thinkers of the French left adopted Marxism anew as their flagship philosophy.[24] In parallel, the new wars of decolonization that characterized the twentieth century met France through its rule over Algeria, which was a burning issue in the public sphere.

The commitment of the French left to Marxism took various forms. On the one hand, there were relatively orthodox Marxists who in France identified with the central line of the Communist-Stalinist party itself and with its center in Moscow; on the other hand, there were Marxists who integrated with new trends in politics and world history, such as Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), Louis Althusser (1918–1990), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Broadly, one can divide the renewed French engagement with Marx after World War II into two: on one side were the central thinkers of the international Communist party, such as Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948) and the party activists in France who followed his line; on the other side, thinkers who drew anew on earlier texts by Marx or placed renewed emphasis on Marx’s Hegelian background. The latter tended to engage more with themes such as alienation and personal consciousness, while the former tended more to engage in repeated attempts to apply materialist dialectics to political issues.

One philosopher whose influence on subsequent thought is difficult to faithfully gauge is Sartre. Sartre, whose thought was an unstable blend of commitment to radical political action, phenomenological influences, and a light Stalinist whiff, enjoyed a popularity in France and subsequently in England and the United States that is hard to find many rivals for in the twentieth century. However, as noted, some count him among the Marxist, or semi-Marxist, thinkers of the French left. It seems that if one does include him and Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) in this category, we would do well to distinguish them from thinkers like Althusser who were truly more committed to the interpretation and development of Marxist ideas. In any case, Sartre’s international stature influenced even the Anglo-American scene, which we will address shortly. Sartre himself promoted his school under the name “existentialism,”[25] which the post-structuralists found repugnant.

However one divides the French Marxists, the post-structuralists grew out of this political sphere and competed for its audience their entire lives—and of course, tried to position themselves as an integral part of the French left. Broadly, one can say that the post-structuralists mostly held an affection for revolutionary politics owing to the emancipatory potential they believed was inherent in it. Unlike the Marxists, they were skeptical of comprehensive programs for social change and preferred the uncertainty of political spontaneity, especially if it was violent. In this sense, the post-structuralists are to a large extent continuators of Sartre’s school within the French left and do not represent a significant innovation at this level. In addition, both Sartre and the post-structuralists placed great emphasis on the politics of decolonization, which, as noted, was occurring broadly throughout the twentieth century.

Parallel to the renewed rise of the French left, one should note the rise of the German Marxists, who came to be known as the Frankfurt School. The German Marxists paid almost no attention at all to the central line of the Communist party in Moscow, although they had a certain sympathy for parts of its policy. The central thinkers of the Frankfurt School—Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Jürgen Habermas (1929–)—reformulated a Marxism that largely abandoned the obsessive engagement with Marx’s writings and proposed various radical reformulations of his method. Their central engagement was with the critique of politics and popular culture. In time, the radical modernist tendencies of this school would also ripen into a systematic critique of post-structuralist thought by Jürgen Habermas, who to this day is considered perhaps the most important public intellectual in Germany.

In order to better understand the delimitation of the post-structuralists and ultimately their decline, we need to pay attention to geographical limitations. While, as we have seen, the post-structuralists constituted only one stratum among European schools, the Anglo-American world presented an entirely different dynamic. First, the English had their own established philosophical tradition and institutions that focused, even in the years preceding World War II, on “common sense,” the analysis of everyday language, the natural sciences, and logic. Central philosophers in this climate such as George E. Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) engaged in logic in a way that created between them and the Vienna Circle—a small but very influential group of European philosophers—a fraternity that ultimately led to the creation of an institutional and intellectual tradition called at the time “analytic philosophy,” to distinguish it from the methods and subjects of the philosophers on the Continent. The upshot is that philosophy of this kind developed, both for historical and for substantive reasons, relatively autonomously from philosophy in Europe itself. Both the domestic traditions and the unique emphases dictated by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) created an intellectual hothouse that would eventually take over most European faculties as well. Too many historians find various kinds of resemblance between the analytic engagement with language and the post-structuralist engagement. But of course, this is an illusion: structuralism and its methods never had an intensive hold in the Anglo-American world, and correspondingly most of the methods and subjects of Anglo-American philosophy were foreign to the Europeans.[26]

The politics that accompanied the analytic philosophers was diverse, but one can affiliate most of it—with significant exceptions, of course—with liberal ideology. Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), who was undoubtedly quite an odd bird in the Anglo-American world, represented for a certain generation of analytic philosophers the fundamental outlines of proper politics. In lectures he delivered at Oxford in 1958, Isaiah Berlin defended the venerable concepts of “negative liberty” and “positive liberty,”[27] and devoted his life and thought to a renewed defense of liberalism. His thought reflects a general epistemic modesty regarding the ability of individuals to dictate to other human beings how to live, alongside a defense of the autonomy of the individual and a defense of his fundamental liberties. Certain historians see a certain continuity between the liberal skepticism of people like Isaiah Berlin and the more fundamental skepticism of the post-structuralist thinkers, and while there is an abstract sense in which after World War II there was indeed a collective disillusionment with “grand ideologies” in the Western world that led to skepticism of this kind, the renewed defense of liberalism in the Anglo-American world should be understood precisely against the background of the Cold War, which re-founded the Anglo-American commitment to liberal ideals.

The Reception and Decline of the Post-Structuralists

One of the rather peculiar characteristics of the post-structuralists is that upon examination, it appears that the great majority of them became quite famous in the United States before they gained wide recognition in France. Thus, for example, the significant conference discussed above, at which Derrida delivered his lecture, was held at Johns Hopkins University. The seminar we examined by Foucault was held at Berkeley. In general, one can say that the influence of Foucault and Derrida on the American academy was massive, but not unlimited. For instance, the school of critical literary theory at Yale University from the 1960s onward became the bon ton for not a few literature departments in the United States, and there are departments that still teach post-structuralist methods as well, though in a far less conspicuous manner than before. There is significant presence of new disciplines such as gender studies and postcolonial studies that made and still make extensive use of the methods of the post-structuralist philosophers.[28] Gender studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory have all gained a strong and influential presence in the various humanities disciplines in the United States and to some extent even in broad areas of the social sciences.

Nevertheless, it appears that the post-structuralist philosophers themselves never gained a place of honor in Anglo-American philosophy departments. While one can undoubtedly point to several talented academics who engaged with their thought, the great majority come from literary studies, history, or smaller disciplines in the humanities. Attempts at meaningful dialogues between Anglo-American philosophers and post-structuralists have mostly failed, such as the famous public debate between John Searle (1932–) and Derrida. Of course, there were exceptions. Thus, for example, the American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (1929–2017) tried his entire life to translate twentieth-century European philosophy, including post-structuralist philosophy, into the academic language of the Anglo-American world. And while one can undoubtedly point to a certain success of Dreyfus and his successors that has a relatively small presence in philosophy faculties in the United States today (for example, the Pittsburgh School, or historians of philosophy), one can say that it greatly changed the form of the European philosophy it appropriated.

To a large extent, one can argue that beginning from approximately the 1990s, the schools that the post-structuralists spawned in the United States—such as gender studies, postcolonialism, and so forth—largely rendered superfluous the initial engagement with post-structuralist methods themselves. At the very least, there is no room in this brief article to survey these new trends, and there are, as we shall shortly see, reasons to doubt their belonging to the subject. Some identify these schools under the heading of “postmodernism,” but it seems that special caution should be exercised on this matter for two principal reasons. First, at the political level, the post-structuralists contended first and foremost, as noted, with the problems of the French left. Thus, for example, the commitment to a communist or communist-inspired program played a very strong role in shaping their thought. The political sphere played a very significant role in the thought of most of them, while finding in their work a word on a moral subject—which in Marxist intuitions was perceived as belonging to the ideological sphere of private life—is a nearly impossible task. The tone these thinkers adopted was a neutral tone borrowed from scientific discourse, sometimes combined with a tone of play. The engagement of the postmodernists with critique, the various Marxist schools rightly argued, was thin to nonexistent. Consider the exchange we analyzed in the context of Foucault—the difference between him and the new disciplines will become clearer.

At the substantive level, these disciplines typically deal with American problems such as interracial relations in a country that relatively recently granted equal civil rights to its Black population, or U.S. foreign policy toward Arab countries, gender, and so forth. The problems that engaged the post-structuralist thinkers—namely, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and so on—seem to have been relegated to the sidelines. It seems evident that the American temperament these schools adopted is fundamentally different from that of the French thinkers. We can suggest, while appropriating somewhat the aphorisms of the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), that what we have here is in fact a process of transition from nihilism to hyper-morality.[29] Thus, for example, while questions of personal morality barely concerned the post-structuralists in their thought, American academics engage with them obsessively: questions of performance, emotional disclosure, and identity preoccupy them, adopting a maternal tone, without cease. Questions of the ethics of cultural representation pertaining to the American cultural climate and issues of new media were also to a large extent foreign to most of the post-structuralists.[30] And finally, it seems that the skepticism of the American schools has been replaced by an unsystematic criticality[31] toward themes perceived as establishment. If we go a bit further with Gehlen’s distinctions, we can say that what appears here is criticality as the sole possible form of activity in the absence of institutional, scientific, or other standards to hold onto. The difference is not only at the level of method but at the very core: the new schools are moralistic in their orientation, sometimes to the point of preaching. In other words, to a large extent the American schools have developed dogmatic doctrines that are difficult to reconcile with the prevailing image of “postmodernism” that we sketched at the beginning of this article, whose popular emergence may have been characterized precisely by hesitant skepticism.

Beginning from the 1990s, the intellectual history discussed must be examined in terms of the globalization led by the United States. If before we spoke of the massive influence of European thinkers on the American academy, from approximately this point onward one must speak of the feedback of the American academy onto the European academy. To a large extent, all the trends we have seen occur in the United States spread back to the European continent—to such an extent that today most philosophy done in Europe within the university framework is effectively what we have called above analytic philosophy. The disciplines that grew out of post-structuralism also gained wide acceptance in Europe.

In Israel, as Adi Ophir (1951–), one of the central spokesmen of the “postmodern” philosophers in Israel, has written, post-structuralist thought arrived later,[32] and in hindsight one can say that both at the cultural level and at the academic level it enjoyed a relatively brief heyday—and declined together with its decline in the Western world as a whole. In the 1990s, postmodernism was bon ton in popular culture and not a few artists characterized their work as belonging to this framework. In academia, the fashion of studying the post-structuralist thinkers broke out, with not a few of their students gaining positions in the various philosophy faculties, especially at Tel Aviv University. Under the influence of the Americanization of those times, small gender studies faculties were opened and various departments in the humanities began to adopt post-structuralist methods. As noted, this brief renaissance of postmodernism faded considerably in the 2010s, and today in popular culture the term “postmodernism” is hardly used at all except in popular-political contexts intended mainly to attack academics and various trends in the Israeli left. The presumed reason for the decline, beyond the aforementioned global success of analytic philosophy and the rise of the new disciplines that drew on post-structuralism, is rather prosaic: the great post-structuralist philosophers grew old and passed away. The processes of Americanization deepened in Israel too, and today most philosophy faculties in Israel are analytic in one form or another. Post-structuralist philosophy is still taught, but usually in dedicated courses that are studied as history. There are special activities, such as those of the French Institute or of Resling publishing house, that try to preserve this legacy, but they are accompanied by a pronounced aroma of nostalgia and romanticism toward the period of the flowering of “postmodernism.” On the other hand, due to the Americanization that Israel underwent (as noted, together with the rest of the Western world), the trends of the schools that grew out of post-structuralism have a strong hold in Israeli academia. But in Israel in particular it is already difficult to identify their post-structuralist sources, and it seems that slowly these disciplines have developed independent methods of their own.

Brief Afterword

Without a doubt, thinking about the time in which we live is an exceptionally challenging activity. It is an activity that demands of us to try as much as possible to leave our comfort zones, to read and analyze a wide variety of texts, and to be especially attentive to the breadth of the new fashion prevalent in our time. Once upon a time, the name “modernity” (moderna) itself represented precisely this: moda, fashion. Thinking about the intellectual, cultural, or artistic fashion of our time cannot amount to a general survey of contemporary trends—it demands deeper thought. “Postmodernism” as a fashion, both in aesthetics and in culture, is passé. However, many terms that may have found their origins in the climate of post-structuralism are still with us. Anyone who looks at academic conferences will see that the topics of “hybrid identities,” “postcolonialism,” “Orientalism,” “gender,” and so on are still here. But most of these phenomena have developed in the twenty or thirty years since the exit of postmodernism from fashion a dynamic of their own.

Furthermore, the keen-eyed will notice that the broad commonality among the thinkers and phenomena surveyed here is their broad belonging to what might be called movements of the left. This is a common denominator far more stable and consistent than any affiliation with some new intellectual label. The unity of opinion among thinkers who would otherwise agree on nothing else is primarily political. But what the true politics of the left is—that is a question that arguably preoccupied nearly all the thinkers mentioned here and continues to preoccupy their heirs today. In any case, it seems that the label of postmodernism itself has worn thin, and the speaker whom the time interests would do well to examine the new phenomena of globalization, American culture, the “multi-polar world,” and the successor schools of the post-structuralists as reflecting more actual challenges than “postmodernism.”

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[1]For a more comprehensive and in-depth treatment from a humanist perspective, see: Luc Ferry, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, Boston 1990.

[2]Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.

[3]An issue that had historical traction, of course. Since this article offers an introductory survey of these topics, it is worth noting, in the context of the practice of sati, the British influences in shaping the practice as well as its place in local Indian traditions and the image of women in the debate surrounding the custom, the excellent article by the postcolonial scholar Lata Mani: Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”, Cultural Critique, No. 7, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II, (Autumn 1987): 119–156, Minneapolis.

[4]That is, a position that cannot be further described or justified—originally, one of the attributes ascribed to God in medieval theologies.

[5]That is, an economy based on mass production.

[6]A term used to describe both the thought and the policy of a group of liberal thinkers who, after the war, advised increasing the power of the state and opening the market as much as possible to competition.

[7]An analogy that may deepen understanding for our purposes: in the West, it is customary to regard the role of the composer, who determines the tempo and notes of a given work, as an important person. However, what is quite distinctive about Western culture is that a performance of a composed work—especially when it preserves all the technical conditions of the piece—is perceived as something unique and worthy of aesthetic appreciation in its own right. In a sense, we could say that the language game of narrative, taken ideally, reflects a culture in which there are a number of “shared” works that are repeated incessantly, and no special importance is attached to a specific repetition, whereas science is analogous to a culture in which what matters is precisely how a specific story is told.

[8]Regarding the irrelevance of analysts who belong to the very phenomenon they seek to analyze at the historical level, one could say something similar about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, in their work: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London 2004; Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2 vols., Paris 1972–1980. The clear advantage of these two is that their analysis is based to a large extent also on aesthetic fashions and the adoption of many themes from the Frankfurt School. They do not lay claim to the new term “postmodernism” and instead prefer to focus precisely on the capitalism of their time as an economy of desire in Freudian terms.

[9]More on this below.

[10]Whom he mentions at the end of his book but does not find it necessary to examine his case.

[11]I refer here specifically to the analogy he draws between Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the impossibility of complete scientific knowledge. Apart from the fact that there is, of course, no reason to assume that scientific knowledge has “strength” equivalent to an axiomatic system capable of describing Peano’s rules, even if one assumes that scientific knowledge has such strength or greater, the logician Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015), developer of epistemic logic, managed to develop a logical system that could serve at least in principle as a scientific organon overcoming this specific problem. On this point, what Lyotard described as the “internal limitations” of every logical system is simply not relevant. There are further weak points in his argument, specifically around the fact that he appears to invent an entire functionalist ideology for the validity of science and then sets out to demonstrate its limitations. And while it is possible that at some macro-sociological level his arguments of this kind have some descriptive validity, it is difficult to impossible to find scientists or philosophers who would hold the thesis that he invests so much energy in showing the limitations of. Of course, today there are even more diverse schools of philosophy of science that could challenge Hintikka’s assumption regarding the lack of legitimacy of scientific knowledge in our time.

[12]Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146, 1984, 53–92.

[13]A term he borrows in this context from Lacan. More on this below.

[14]For example, Jameson’s thesis about the death of national cultures, which was fashionable in the 1990s, in hindsight in the twenty-first century appears to have been mainly a confusion of reality with the wishful thinking of left-wing academics. The last twenty years are distinguished not by globalization, but by two other central elements: a “multi-polar world,” in the words of the theorist John Mearsheimer, within whose framework there is a return to imperialist competition among various great powers; and the “crisis of liberal democracy,” which was perceived by many as the final stage of human governance, and now faces political crises on many fronts. Furthermore, China as a great power has certainly developed an independent culture of its own that is very different from the American one that Jameson perceived as comprehensively dominant. It is possible, and likely, that even now we still lack the historical distance that would allow sufficiently critical examination of the twentieth century to enable periodization. To a large extent, many real-time historical judgments about a “period” include a certain forecast of the future—something very far from the caution and distance that the historian requires for his work.

[15]Specifically, his attempt to understand postmodern culture in a Marxist dialectical manner that includes both absolute negation and an understanding of the emancipatory potential it contains can easily be considered a specific application of Adorno’s thesis in Negative Dialectics.

[16]Although Jameson himself distances himself from this attribution to Marxist apologists, the dialectical account he gives of post-structuralist thought remains unconvincing and does not stand with the rest of the text he produced.

[17]The lecture is available on YouTube <

and of course was also published as a book: Michel Foucault, “Discourse and Truth” and “Parresia”, Chicago 2019.

[18]In fact, this concept originally develops in the work of the philosopher and phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), but for him this concept was not central and its role within the general framework of his system was fundamentally different.

[19]It is worth noting that the statements made here are true mainly regarding his reception, apparently due to the interpretation of his student Edward Titchener (1867–1927), who interpreted him as a structuralist and played a central role in disseminating his thought in the United States.

[20]As we shall see, Derrida in his lecture challenges to a large extent precisely this interpretation of Lévi-Strauss’s system.

[21]“Event” is also a phenomenological term that Derrida borrows from the thought of Martin Heidegger.

[22]See footnote 8.

[23]For example, one of the most prominent contemporary interpreters of Lacan’s thought is the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (1949–), who appears to succeed in explaining many of Lacan’s concepts with reference—albeit not strictly scholarly—to Hegelian concepts, which certainly cannot be affiliated with post-structuralism, although, as noted, his heterogeneous body of thought is diverse enough to allow such readings.

[24]For a different and more in-depth perspective on French Marxism, see: William Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, Maryland 2005.

[25]Sartre named his thought under this title inspired by Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s use of the term. He believed the term retroactively described philosophy of his kind together with the aforementioned philosophers. Despite the obvious historical anachronism, the fact that Heidegger conspicuously objected to this labeling, and the shaky basis for comparison on substantive grounds, this “school” has settled into the way these philosophers are taught in academia.

[26]There are, of course, borderline figures such as Richard Rorty (1931–2007), Umberto Eco (1931–2016), and Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), as well as significant interactions between Sartre’s thought and the Anglo-American world. However, in an article of this kind—introductory and general—one follows the rule.

[27]Negative liberty: the freedom from having anything imposed on me as an individual beyond the minimal necessity for shared life. Positive liberty: the freedom to realize some positive essence in one’s life.

[28]With, of course, a more pronounced influence of Anglo-American philosophy.

[29]Following a lecture delivered by Assaf Sagiv on March 14, 2024, at the “Hebrew Beit Midrash” under the title “Liberalism, Humanitarianism, and Terrorism: Conservative Reflections on the Immune Failure of Modernity.” Of course, the formulation of the basic intuition and its development here are solely my responsibility. For an expansion on Gehlen’s thesis in its original and more anthropological-historical context, see: Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: Eine pluralistische Ethik, Frankfurt am Main 2004, 141–167.

[30]With notable exceptions, such as Jean-François Lyotard, for instance.

[31]To distinguish it, for example, from Marxist criticality.

[32]Adi Ophir, “Postmodernism: A Philosophical Position,” in: Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (ed.), Education in the Era of Postmodernist Discourse, Jerusalem 1996.