A post on the post: Is there anything more profoundly hegemonic than the proclamation to inaugurate a new era? The grandiose and always self-aggrandizing claims about the new, the post-this or that, or the end of this or that, in this sense, is no different from the tiresome announcements of the unforeseeable to-come. So you say that this will forever change the way we look at things, that there will be a before and an after of this argument or this book, that nothing will ever look or feel or smell the same? Regardless of whether they are exuberantly apocalyptic, weakly messianic, or somber gloom-and-doom statements of fact, and no matter if the playing field is merely one petty corner of academia or the fate of the Western world at large, the effect of such claims is nothing if not one of repetition, quick commercialization, and predictable obsolescence in the wake of the next round of declarations about the end and the post-this or post-that which today is sold as the most urgent, the most burning, and the most groundbreaking of novelties. It makes me want to hug all those poor souls relegated to the dark caves of the pre- and the primitive: the “pre-critical,” the “critical but pre-deconstructive,” the Hegelians who are “not even pre-Kantian”, and so on.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:57:50 +0000
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