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AIDS, Benedict Anderson, Cornell University, COVID-19, gender, generations, identity, Jacques Derrida, Jerry Seinfeld, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Nicholas Harris, postmodernism, race, television
I never imagined I’d say this, but I miss postmodernism.
I was a foe of postmodernism back when it was still at the centre of intellectual life, and my criticisms of it – for its self-contradictory relativism as well as its political self-undermining – still stand. Yet for all those flaws, I sometimes find myself pining for the days when postmodernism ruled the intellectual roost.
Postmodernism was terrible at achieving political change – in contrast to the Social Justice movement, which did make valuable change around gender (even as it failed around race). But sometimes political change isn’t the most important thing.
In postmodernism’s heyday I took a course on nationalism at Cornell with the late Benedict Anderson, where we read Jacques Derrida’s piece on declarations of independence. What I’ll always remember from that course was the context that Anderson gave to Derrida’s work: growing up in Algeria under Vichy France, the young Derrida was expelled from his high school for having Jewish ancestry. Anderson added, “and this gave him a lifelong antipathy to being” – he paused for emphasis – “classified.”
If you know Derrida’s thought at all, you know a hostility to classification is one of its central motifs – always insisting the world is more complex than that. And these days I keep returning to the biographical point that inspired it all, on how Derrida himself hated being classified. Because boy do I relate.
Derrida and I both bristle at having an identity forced upon us based on our ancestry. I’m no more Indian than I am white, but North American racial discourse has always refused to see that. In postmodernism’s heyday, being classified as “Indian” was a rare and minor annoyance to me. But in the 2010s, the binaries of the Social Justice movement put it front and centre, dividing everything between the white villains who are the agents of history and the “people of colour” who are their passive victims – and, in order to preserve that binary, following the segregationist one-drop rule that slots all mixed people on the coloured side. Derrida would never have stood for that! His postmodernism was all about subtlety, nuance, and above all breaking down binaries – in a way that we could really use today. Race is a dumb category; we need to deconstruct it, whether in its white nationalist or black nationalist expressions, and I miss those who put that deconstruction at the centre of their philosophies.
Foucault, too, rejected a politics based on identity: while public about his gay sexual experimentation, he did not align himself with the gay rights movement because he saw what a recent historical construction was involved in the idea of being gay, of gay identity. More generally, in speaking of power Foucault rejected the binary “model of domination” where power is a structure that one villainous agent (a race, a gender, a class, an individual) exercises over another. Instead – Saba Mahmood’s paraphrase on Politics of Piety page 18 – “power is to be understood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses.” That more diffuse conception of power is antithetical to standpoint theory’s rigid division between privileged and marginalized, where being marginalized makes you see better. Foucault got that power is complicated.
So, these days, we could really use a strong dose of Foucault’s and Derrida’s rejection of binaries. And that’s not the only thing I miss about postmodernism. Closely related to the rejection of binaries was their emphasis on subversion and transgression.
The 2010s and 2020s left defined itself by enforcing rules, usually in the name of safety – rules against taboo words, rules against speaking controversial ideas… and also, rules around disease prevention. Left-wing spaces prided themselves on their rigid enforcement of rules against COVID transmission; where I live, some of these rules still persist to this day. Contrast all that to Foucault, who very much practised the subversion he preached: he loved the dangerous anonymous sex provided in gay bathhouses… and as a result, came to die of AIDS.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone to follow Foucault’s example. Please try to avoid getting AIDS! Yet while Foucault’s foolhardy approach was one kind of unvirtuous excess, the 2020s have been dominated by excess in the opposite direction: an emphasis at every turn on safety. People in my world insisted on mask-wearing long after vaccines were available to everyone. My town of Somerville, one of the most left-leaning places in the country, was also one of the last to reopen schools – leading to inevitable learning loss. One Massachusetts lesbian bar still generally requires KN95 masks of its patrons even now – and just a couple weeks ago, many of those patrons howled with outrage when the bar decided to make masks optional one night a week. Foucault would have found no common cause with those lesbian patrons. He reminds us that being left-wing doesn’t have to be all about safety. It just happened to turn out that way in this passing decade.
The point is relevant to transgender issues as well. Trans people have often been inspired by the postmodern philosopher Judith Butler, who wrote influential works in the ’90s about crossing gender boundaries. Yet for Butler, part of the excitement of that crossing was the very subversion involved. That’s a different world from the world where DEI offices and HR departments punish employees for using the wrong pronoun. Foucault would have understandably hated those offices, viewing them as one more form of social control.
And on this point, I think young people are starting to come around. The student protesters of 2015, who brought the Social Justice movement mainstream, could reasonably have been described as young fogeys: in sharp contrast to the usual pattern of youth revolt, they wanted more rules, more restrictions. This is understandable when sexual harassment was among the movement’s biggest issues: I recall the protest sign that crossed out the second “boys” in “boys will be boys”, replacing it with “held accountable for their actions”. But that battle seems to me to have been mostly won: tighter constraints on sexual harassment now seem firmly in place, and more frequently enforced. And, perhaps in part in consequence, the undergrads of today are very different from the ones ten years ago.
Among undergrad-age people today there is a notable rise in risky behaviours like tanning beds and possibly even cigarette smoking. As with Foucault’s risky sex, I don’t think these are good things, and would discourage people from engaging in them. But what nevertheless feels potentially heartening to me about these phenomena is how they signify the pendulum swinging back away from the ideal of safety at all costs, which caused its own harms. Young people are starting to act like young people again: chafing against the rules imposed on them by earlier generations, perhaps even the ones just ten years older than them.
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Tellingly, the post-COVID generation are also watching Seinfeld – a show that was often described as postmodern in its heyday, with its underlying philosophy of “no hugging, no learning”. Like Derrida, Seinfeld subverted the very idea of having a message. One young writer, Nicholas Harris, specifically used the term “postmodern” in discussing why his generation loves the show: “The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism.” He notes rightly that recent years have been characterized all too much by moralism, by sanctimony: an urge to fit complex reality to match simple ideals, in line with standpoint theory’s binaries. But Seinfeld, like Foucault and Derrida, rejects all such moralizing – and that makes it a breath of fresh air to the new generation that grew up knowing only restrictions and rules.
Postmodernism made everything over-complicated. Standpoint theory – and much more so the movements infused with it – makes everything oversimplified. And in this era, simple moral certainty has caused far more problems than the lack of it. (That goes for the right wing even more than the left: a right less wedded to certainty would have noticed how its leaders so dramatically undercut its own ideals.) In this environment, I welcome the return of Seinfeld. Perhaps Foucault and Derrida won’t be far behind him.
Setting aside the labels to which you seem attached, I would like to point out that postmodern thought has expressed—and continues to express, now more than ever—the most rational mindset currently available to us.
Postmodernism as a mere fad or “radical-chic” label may well have faded, but the shift in mindset it brought about has not.
It would be difficult for me to summarize here the arguments underpinning these assertions.
I can only refer you to my book, *La filosofia che conviene. L’opportunismo critico come strategia di esistenza* (Armando Editore, Rome 2026), which rigorously demonstrates how the postmodern mindset has permeated the open society, transforming its mental processes. We are all postmodern now. And your article does not seem to contradict this.
I remain at your disposal.
Thanks for this comment, and welcome. I have limited time for reading at the moment and I don’t know Italian, so I’m afraid I can’t read your book at present. That said, I find it pretty strange to claim that “postmodern thought has expressed… the most rational mindset” when thinkers like Derrida took themselves as explicitly critiquing reason and rationality. And a long time ago I did write a response to the claim that we are all postmodern now.
It is true that—at least until the early 1980s—many postmodern thinkers conceived of their philosophy as a deconstruction of reason and championed the idea of a crisis of reason, thereby muddying the waters; nevertheless, as Habermas has often reiterated (notably in *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*), no critique or deconstruction can take place outside the use of reason itself. The evident conclusion is that, by employing critical thought, they targeted Enlightenment reason—or more precisely, the absolutist reason that sought to order everything, claiming the ability to place every single thing definitively in its proper place. This is the form of reason that, in the 19th century, evolved into positivism within the scientific realm and idealism within the philosophical one.
To meet you halfway, I will now briefly outline the arguments of my book—which, my dear friend, may strike you as odd—as it attempts to show that postmodern thought is the solution to relativism (in the classical sense: the kind Plato challenged in Protagoras and which has historically been positioned as the antithesis of metaphysics).
Let us see how.
My book argues that, in the post-Kantian condition, postmodern thought represents the most rational mental stance one can adopt, and it rigorously sets out the reasons for this.
In the first part, the text clearly outlines a study of the “mental shift” that particularly defined the 20th century. This research has already garnered initial feedback from academics of diverse philosophical persuasions, such as Santiago Zabala, Franca D’Agostini, Ádám Tamás Tuboly, and Gaetano Licata.
In the second part, the focus shifts from academic discourse to letters and responses to reviewers—engaging in direct dialogue with actual philosophers who have read the work and raised objections. In this way, the book offers an initial test of the theses advanced by the author.
Stemming primarily from Kant’s philosophy—which encouraged the belief that reality depends on us, as we are the ones who give it meaning—the idea has gained ground that we ought to become uninhibited seekers of opportunity. Specifically, the conviction has taken shape that it is more rational to think this way: one should never say “never,” because anything might be possible. This is the new opportunism, according to which it is legitimate to orient one’s life toward infinite possibilities—driven by personal fulfillment and individual inclinations—and to turn everything into a quest for opportunity. This uninhibited mindset paves the way for the “will to power” that Nietzsche endorsed precisely because of the consequences of the post-Kantian condition: an opportunism understood as free self-expression and self-realization.
Yet, alongside these values of anthropocentric freedom, modernity has fostered another human trait that has long been a cornerstone of philosophy: critical thinking. Today, in the face of the uninhibited, opportunistic, and subjective visions of the post-Kantian era, the transition from the subjective world to the “objective” one relies on rational, critical public discourse; it is there that we collectively decide which elements of these subjective visions might truly prove beneficial to the community. While individuals tend to assert their own points of view, an open society publicly embraces only what survives the test of continuous, rational criticism from others. Any uninhibited personal calling escapes solipsism only if it transforms into a public opportunity through honest, democratic, egalitarian, and informed dialogue; conversely, those who avoid exposing themselves to potential refutation by others are playing an unfair game. This view is supported by the postmodern hermeneutics of Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, as well as—in one of the essay’s most original moves—by Karl Popper’s falsificationism: once freed from the principle of verisimilitude (which Popper himself acknowledged to be refutable), it functions just as well and converges on the same collective critical stance—one that does not discover truth but negotiates it honestly, subjecting every proposal to public refutation. This is not relativism; it is the only form of rationality available following the crisis of foundations.
It no longer makes sense, therefore, to treat relativism and nihilism as problems specific to our era: any personal view is entitled to a recognized, provisional objectivity once it passes the consensual scrutiny of critical thought—including any potential re-evaluation of metaphysics and its foundations.
In a freely organized open society, the risk of relativism—understood in the classical sense of “indiscriminate arbitrariness”—is mitigated. Every public view rests on the community’s critical and rational recognition; the community provisionally identifies points of agreement regarding an “objective reality,” understood as a shared vision that is continuously subjected to the test of discussion. The right to freely formulate subjective views remains confined to the private sphere, though this sphere always retains the opportunity to publicly demonstrate its arguments through “reasoning and experience”—that is, through critical inquiry. This is not a matter of “majority relativism,” for the latter would presuppose an ultimate criterion—a vision or foundation immune to criticism—placed outside the debate to justify the validity of majority consensus, thereby falling into circular reasoning.
In short, “critical opportunism” suggests an “existential strategy”: an uninhibited openness to the prospect of infinite possibilities, which are to be treated critically and rigorously through collective effort, relying on critical thought. Thus, the book proposes not a theory of knowledge or of being, but rather a possible philosophy of the situated and rational “what is expedient.” The philosophy of “what is expedient,” then, suggests that it is expedient (appropriate) to keep every view—no matter how self-evident or taken for granted—continuously under the spotlight of criticism. Having briefly outlined the central thesis of my essay, my dear friend, I would now like to show you how it can be used to focus on the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy—the very core that paved the way for postmodern thought.
To honor the evocative atmosphere of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I shall adopt a more evocative prose style in what follows.
—————-
This is the time of a specific type of humanity: the era of the critical opportunist.
It is the legacy left to us by Western philosophy: over two millennia of thought distilled into a single vision of humanity.
Who is the critical opportunist?
He is the *Übermensch* (Overman) foreshadowed by Nietzsche—his fulfillment, and the only model of the Overman that is both admissible and rationally viable in our society. It is a condition wherein every person is granted the freedom to determine their own destiny and create their own worldviews—existential opportunities—even those completely opposed to pre-existing ones; yet, they are also required to move these visions beyond the individual realm—beyond solipsism—and expose them to the critical judgment of others, stripped of any claim to prior authority.
Society thus becomes a consensual, collective construct whose truths—including the existence of God—are not authorities imposed from without, but rather opportunities proposed by individuals and critically debated within the community. It is no longer the Word of God that shapes society from the outside; instead, it participates in the discussion from within—like any other subjective proposal—contributing to the realization of individual and collective opportunities.
In this way, critical opportunism today unveils the mystery behind the pronouncement that defined our age: “God is dead.” It is a mystery Nietzsche left to posterity, believing the still overly “metaphysical” mindset of his time incapable of grasping its true meaning. Today, the times are ripe. “God is dead” does not mean that God does not exist; rather, it means that His possible existence is a matter for debate, just like any other opportunity.
This is the era of the Overman—the era of the critical opportunist.
___________
(Source: G. Schiava, “La filosofia che conviene. L’opportunismo critico come strategia di esistenza”, Armando Editore, Rome 2026)
Thank you. I agree in principle with the idea that everything should in some sense be up for debate, though that means different things in different contexts. I would be less likely to call that idea postmodern, let alone relativist – and, as you say, the latter is not a problem specific to our era. I think there’s an admirable premodern precedent in Jewish thought, where even the Talmud itself is full of internal debate.
Giovanni, thanks for summarizing your book. What you’ve said includes many familiar themes from the past century of philosophy. However, I agree with Sandhya that I wouldn’t use the term postmodern to label the mindset you described. Your use of the term postmodernism is at odds with canonical definitions of the term in major English-language encyclopedias: the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), and English Wikipedia. The Britannica defines the term as “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” The SEP and English Wikipedia both describe Habermas as a critic of postmodernism and therefore in some sense a modernist. Popper as well strikes me as modernist, in accord with most of the modernist criteria in the Britannica.
However, the SEP notes that there are major linguistic and cultural differences between French and Italian postmodernism, with Vattimo being a representative of the Italian type of postmodernism; in contrast, the postmodernism described in the Britannica and English Wikipedia articles seems to be largely influenced by the English-speaking reception of the French type, with no mention of the Italians. Vattimo seems to be a major reference point for you, Giovanni, whereas I have no knowledge of Vattimo, and I would guess that most English-speaking North Americans like me are much more familiar with the French type and largely ignorant of the Italian type, so it may be that you and Sandhya are representing different linguistic and cultural types of postmodernism to some degree, whatever your other individual differences.
As I said at the start of my comment, what you wrote contains many familiar themes from recent philosophy, whichever term we use to label the mindset that you describe. But to me, as an English-speaking North American who knows (what the SEP calls) the French type of postmodernism but who does not know the Italian type, it seems very odd to call postmodern a mindset that includes Habermas and Popper. In my view, a more appropriate term for the mindset you describe is some variant of constructivism, such as dialectical constructivism or whatever, as in your sentence (emphasis added): “Society thus becomes a consensual, collective construct whose truths—including the existence of God—are not authorities imposed from without, but rather opportunities proposed by individuals and critically debated within the community.” I am also reminded of the term pancritical rationalism, coined by William Warren Bartley III as a revision of Popper’s critical rationalism.
Another issue in what you wrote is that the emphasis on “infinite possibilities” seems to ignore those constraints that are known in the natural sciences and those that are evident in everyday life! But perhaps you addressed this issue in your book.
Thank you, Natan, for sharing your opinion.
Let me offer a brief reply.
Naturally, in my previous post, I could only touch upon the central theme of my book without delving into the details or the development of the topics addressed within the text. I should mention, however, that the book is short—only one hundred pages—yet very dense. Consequently, for any in-depth exploration, I must unfortunately refer you back to the book itself.
I make no secret of the fact that the text aims to present a reinterpretation of the evolution of 20th-century philosophy and, in doing so, to reposition certain prominent figures. Therefore, your citations of works that rely on institutional definitions of the terms “postmodern” or “postmodernism” miss the point of my book, which is to offer a fresh perspective on postmodern thought and shed new light on the subject.
In fact, I extend the meaning of the “postmodern condition” to encompass the entire post-Kantian historical period—so much so that I prefer to speak of a “post-Kantian condition,” regarding the former definition as incomplete and reductive. Essentially, my volume examines the mental reconfiguration of the West that began in the modern era.
My goal is precisely to demonstrate (through solid argumentation) that—contrary to the institutional view—post-Kantian thought has led us, between the 20th and 21st centuries, to the most rational mental stance currently available to us. For this reason, I invite you to explore my proposal further if possible (though, unfortunately, there is not yet an English translation of the book).
In my previous post (which you may have missed), I had already clarified that, starting with Nietzsche, postmodern authors themselves (especially the French ones) contributed to muddying the waters by labeling themselves “irrationalists.” However, they did nothing but use rationality to critique the absolutist reason inherited from the Enlightenment. In this regard, I did not claim that Habermas is a postmodernist; rather, I clarified that—despite being a critic of postmodernism—he demonstrated that Nietzsche and the postmodern deconstructionists themselves were actually only able to deconstruct by means of critical rationality; that is, they could not dispense with the rigor of reason.
The postmodern thought I am considering here is the final stage in the evolution of the post-Kantian condition—what the Canadian scholar Grondin terms “postmodern hermeneutics.” This is represented by two authors, the American Richard Rorty and the Italian Gianni Vattimo, who, starting in the 1980s, converged on an increasingly unified philosophical vision, eventually sharing a single philosophical perspective.
Furthermore, while it is obvious that Popper was not a postmodernist in the traditional sense, he was a post-Kantian (like the others); I include him—supported by rigorous argumentation—within that process of “repositioning the post-Kantian mindset” which I have conventionally termed “critical opportunism” in my book.
For these reasons, the key authors informing my perspective are Popper, Rorty, and Vattimo.
Finally, the emphasis on “infinite possibilities” is not my own personal interpretation but rather the prevailing interpretation of the post-Kantian condition—as clearly explained by the French philosopher Meillassoux. In this regard, I quote here a brief excerpt from my book:
«This shift in mindset—of which the twentieth century is the primary protagonist—is described by Meillassoux in these terms: radical post-Kantianism has led us to believe that “we cannot rule out *a priori* a reality completely different from the one currently given to us. […] Nothing can be said to be absolutely impossible, not even the unthinkable. […] I cannot think the unthinkable, but I can think that it is not impossible for the unthinkable to exist.”»
Thanks, Giovanni, that is clearly stated (leaving aside the part at the end about “infinite possibilities”, of which I remain skeptical; I will come back to that in a moment).
To connect this conversation back to the original post, a mindset of public critical rationality like what you described—and, I would add, which manifests politically as deliberative democracy—is basically the antidote to the normative oversimplification and ideological indoctrination that Sandhya attributes to what he calls the Social Justice movement. Along with “I miss postmodernism”, Sandhya could have added, “and I miss public critical rational deliberation.” Sandhya wouldn’t call that public critical rational mindset “postmodern”, but Sandhya’s “postmodernism” and your “postmodern condition” share a critical and self-critical attitude that is lacking in the kind of oversimplified ideological indoctrination that Sandhya criticized and that unfortunately has not disappeared today. Because it has not disappeared today, I doubt that “we are all postmodern now” even in the sense of your “postmodern condition”. Not everyone is a scholar of post-Kantian political epistemology!
This blog has occasionally discussed Meillassoux in the past, if I’m not mistaken, but I’ve never read him. He is never cited in the science-adjacent scholarship that I usually read, and I’ve never found a good reason to read him, so the fact that your conception of “infinite possibilities” comes from him does not clarify much for me. I’m more inclined to theoretically ground rationality in biology, as in Australian philosopher C.A. Hooker’s scholarship (Jean Piaget, for example, is a precursor of this approach), for example: C.A. Hooker, “Rationality as effective organisation of interaction and its naturalist framework”, Axiomathes, 2011, 21(1), 99–172. This conception of rationality helps us to see the continuities of rational problem-solving across cultures, time periods, and even biological species.
Sandhya, sorry about the pronoun slip in my previous comment. Fortunately I can count on you not to excommunicate me for that transgression!
Let me answer point by point.
1) I agree that we cannot yet define ourselves all as postmodern. However, I urge you to bear in mind that my personal interpretation subsumes postmodernism within a broader condition—spanning both a longer timeframe and a wider range of content—which I term “post-Kantianism.”
2) I must correct you here. My concept of “infinite possibilities” is not derived from Meillassoux; you have misread the text. It belongs both to my interpretation of the post-Kantian condition and to the prevailing view within the field of study. In short, an analysis of this condition reveals that—particularly following Kant’s transcendentalism—the idea took hold that it is man who gives meaning to the world, rather than the other way around. It is essentially the crisis of metaphysics and absolute values—brought to light by Nietzsche—that entails specific interpretive consequences: the lack of certainty regarding a world “out there” (to use Rorty’s phrase) waiting to be discovered. This shift in mindset—from a metaphysical to a “non-metaphysical” outlook—means we cannot rule out any potential possibility. It is more rational to remain open to the idea that it “pays” (the philosophy of what “pays off” or is advantageous) never to say “never,” because anything might be possible. Therefore, it is advantageous not to foreclose “opportunities for new realities”—even those completely at odds with previous ones—but rather to subject them to the strictest critical scrutiny in the broadest public forum, guided by principles of honesty, democracy, and competence. “Critical opportunism” is not a theory of knowledge or being, but a philosophy of what “pays off”—an existential strategy that embraces the post-Kantian mindset. It is a mindset toward which liberal democracies have gravitated.
Giovanni, thanks for the response, and I’m sorry that I have repeatedly misread you. I’m grateful that you have taken time to correct me. I went and skimmed your short paper “Critical Opportunism: The Philosophical Legacy of the Second Millennium”. You said in that paper and in your latest comment that the mindset you describe is “not a theory of knowledge or being”. It sounds like you are basically arguing for, to use a common English word, open-mindedness. And indeed that seems very congruent with what Sandhya wants in this blog post. In your paper you also call it an “ethics of the mind”. I agree that open-mindedness is an important part of an ethics of rationality in deliberative democracy. You should consider writing about this open-mindedness in terms of virtue ethics, another subject that Amod/Sandhya has often written about in this blog. Open-mindedness has been written about as a moral and intellectual virtue in English; you might look into that literature if you’re not familiar with it. I think that talking in terms of virtue ethics would be a fruitful approach for you because it would more clearly separate your critical opportunism from theories of knowledge and being. When you situated critical opportunism in relation to thinkers like Kant, Popper, and Habermas, I was erroneously led to think that you were formulating a theory of knowledge. Of course, you can still situate critical opportunism in relation to those thinkers, but it would be clearer that critical opportunism is not a theory of knowledge if you spoke of it as a theory of intellectual virtue. I think we still need theories of knowledge and being, but that is not what your critical opportunism is.
Thank you for the valuable suggestions and observations—of which, naturally, I was already partly aware; however, I prefer to avoid pigeonholing “critical opportunism” into conceptual categories. The name itself is my own proposal, though others might well suggest a more fitting term.
Test
Funny how we can miss things we hate; hate those we love…
Indeed!