Let’s face it up front: some words are intimidating. Although we hear them a lot in the debate – as if everyone knew what was going on – they nonetheless remain for most of us, poor mortals, from obscure continents. And we say to ourselves, vaguely self-conscious: “One day, I will look into it.” For example, the adjective “post-modern”. The grammar, of course, is quite obvious but, when we think about it: what can “what comes after modernity” mean? It’s a bit like Persil which washes “whiter than white”: what’s next? The Post-Modern Momentwhich is being published these days by Gallimard, signed Bénédicte Delorme-Montini, dissects this notion.
To begin, let’s try to outline its outlines in broad strokes. With this sentence from Nietzsche which, according to the historian, best sums up the inspiration of what would later be called “post-modern”: “There are no facts, there are only interpretations.” This way of seeing things, taken up and deepened by the school of French Theory (and its desire to deconstruct everything) has spread little by little in the West over the last sixty years, and generated numerous shifts in the fields of culture, art, politics, or society. Practical case: the evolution of the feminist movement. Bénédicte Delorme-Montini details the different stages as follows: “While the first wave fought for equal rights between the sexes and the second sought to challenge the stereotypes that conditioned the distribution of social roles, the third wave rejects the very idea of “a model of femininity for the benefit of the individualization of sexual identifications.” Thus the famous feminist philosopher Judith Butler theorizes in GenderTrouble “a permanent destabilization of identities, which makes them fluid”. There are no men or women; there is no biology. Only interpretations.
One of the most interesting chapters dissects the political effects of the shift into the post-modern era. Namely: the phenomenon of depoliticization, which is not a lack of interest in politics as is often believed, but the advent of another relationship to politics: “From now on, the approach aimed at changing society is no longer acceptable by taking power, points out the historian Where classic citizenship was defined by individual responsibility for public questions relating to the overall direction of collective existence, the new depoliticized citizenship brings it to the fore. the private or intimate concerns of individuals, to raise them to the political level This privatization of politics driven by a flowering of new social movements has brought to the fore the new range of public questions, from gender to race – a phenomenon reflected in the term. of ‘societalization'”. For the historian, one of the effects of this depoliticization was to undo the organic links between individuals and society, and between society and power: “nations fragment into tribes, masses and classes dissolve , the moral and intellectual authority claiming to be based on reason recedes in favor of emotions. This is a major change; a shift whose effects we have not yet finished seeing.
The book does not venture into the terrain of geopolitics; but let’s go for him. Because THE Post-modern moment opens perspectives for analyzing the tightening of relations between the West and what is now commonly called the “global South”. One of the keys to reading – there are others! – is that we live, they and we, in disconnected philosophical and cultural worlds. The concepts do not cover the same thing. We don’t breathe the same air of the times. Full of its expiatory passion, the West believes it is only facing the anger of the wronged. From its overhang, it sees these countries either as eternal victims of humiliations for which we are responsible (colonization, unequal distribution of wealth, etc.), or as backward nations which do not understand the benefits of progress and liberal democracy. (but who would agree if we explained it to them better).
There is clearly a clash of models and aspirations. But perhaps we are also missing a key to interpretation which has more to do with political and cultural philosophy: the metallic gaze that the leaders of the Global South cast on post-modernity, which they see it as a weakness. Understanding it does not mean excusing it or espousing these views. But at least it gives us a relevant additional analysis to think about the widening fractures in the world, and to refine the means to counter them.