Whether we realize it or not, we live in the shadow of postmodernism. Contemporary philosophy is a response to the postmodernist challenges to Enlightenment thought. And yet, nearly all the proposed alternatives fail to go beyond the postmodernist framework. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm shows why philosophy has failed to overcome postmodernism and proposes his own alternative.  

Despite recent polemics, postmodernism’s philosophical heyday has long passed. While “postmodernism” was once indeed important, the iconic works that made the term popular focused on artistic and intellectual movements of the 1970s and 1980s that have since become outmoded. It has been a long time since Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, or Philip Glass were among the most influential in their respective fields. Likewise, the theorists most routinely associated with postmodernism as an academic paradigm, such as Lyotard (born 1925), Foucault (born 1926), Derrida (born 1930), and Irigaray (born 1930), were all older than Elvis (born 1935); and even if some constellation of their disparate philosophies was once dominant, the current moment is better seen as a squabbling match between postmodernism’s presumptive successors.

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The opposition to postmodernism gave it more coherence as an alternative to positivism. The formation of postmodernism was less a “French invasion” than an Anglophone bricolage construction.

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