La Comparution/The Compearance

Abstract

The postmodem has already come to closure; perhaps it never happened. More accurately, that which this term may have described or reflected (not without a certain degree of accuracy) appears to have been only the brief and inverted appearance of another occurrence. The defined itself as a strained relationship, with a mixture of anguish and gaiety, a relationship to a general unpresentation (impresentation) such that neither sense nor truth nor a foundation could any longer be presented. The leading target was, of course, any common substantiality, any subject for human history and the body politic all therefore. Nothing in fact situates the postmodern better than the polymorphic constellation of all the ends of communism, whether communism be taken as community-subject or as a kind of organicism or as Rousseauism. However, at the same time, the common human condition turns up everywhere, more manifest and bare than ever. Indeed, it is manifest because stripped bare, and vice-versa. The common condition is at the same time the common reduction to a common denomination and the condition of being

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