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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #postmodern
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. ↗
We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion. ↗
#morality #postmodernism #presuppositions #religion #worldview
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith. ↗
In this atmosphere of general discouragement, it is tempting to attack something that is sufficiently linked to the powers-that-be so as not to appear very sympathetic, but sufficiently weak to be a more-or-less accessible target (since the concentration of power and money are beyond reach). Science fulfills these conditions, and this partly explains the attacks against it. ↗
Lacan’s defenders (as well as those of the other authors discussed here) tend to respond to these criticisms by resorting to a strategy that we shall call “neither/nor”: these writings should be evaluated neither as science, nor as philosophy, nor as poetry, nor ... One is then faced with what could be called a “secular mysticism”: mysticism because the discourse aims at producing mental effects that are not purely aesthetic, but without addressing itself to reason; secular because the cultural references (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, mathematics, contemporary literature ... ) have nothing to do with traditional religions and are attractive to the modern reader. ↗
The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of 'legitimation.' Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim - and by 'science' we simply mean the notion of a universal, autonomous reason. Science, then, is opposed to narrative, which attempts not to prove its claims but rather to proclaim them within a story. ↗
What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible. ↗
An diesem Punkt gibt es keinen einzigen ihrer »Werte« [der Zivilisation des Westens] mehr, an den sie noch auf irgendeine Art zu glauben vermöchte, und jede Affirmation wirkt auf sie wie eine schamlose Tat, wie eine Provokation, die man besser zerlegen, dekonstruieren und in den Zustand des Zweifels zurückführen sollte. Der westliche Imperialismus heute, das ist der des Relativismus, des »Das ist deine Ansicht«, das ist der kleine Seitenblick oder der verletzte Protest gegen all das, was dumm genug, primitiv genug oder selbstgefällig genug ist, um noch an etwas zu glauben, um noch irgendetwas zu behaupten. Es ist dieser Dogmatismus der Infragestellung, der in der gesamten universitären und literarischen Intelligenzija komplizenhaft mit dem Auge zwinkert. Unter den postmodernistischen Geistesgrößen ist keine Kritik zu radikal, solange sie ein Nichts an Gewissheit umhüllt. Vor einem Jahrhundert verursachte jede ein wenig lärmmachende Negation einen Skandal, heute liegt er in jeder Affirmation, die nicht zittert. ↗
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant. ↗
