With articles and books hailing a post-truth future multiplying across the English-speaking world, many attribute this change to ‘postmodernism’ or, even more loosely, to ‘French theory’. Not only is this historically inaccurate it completely misunderstands the project of the philosophers of 1960s Paris writes Tom Eyers.

Michiko Kakutani has a fearsome reputation as a reviewer of fiction at the New York Times. She recently published a book, ‘The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump’, that rehearses the no-doubt controversial case that truth is something to be valued. In the course of defending her position, Kakutani indicts what she calls ‘postmodernism’. It has devalued science, she says; it has reduced everything to narrative; and, ultimately, it has helped lead us to Trump. It is only the latest of a slew of books to suggest that our contemporary ills can be traced to the writings of a few philosophers and cultural critics, almost all of them working in Paris in the 1960s. It is the work of these philosophers – Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and others – that have been tagged as ‘postmodern’, and that have been arraigned for crimes against the present.

 But what does ‘postmodern’ mean? It is, most obviously, a period designation, a fact that has often eluded its critics, who have tended to take an historical diagnosis as if it were a battle cry. The boundaries of modernity, meanwhile, are hotly contested, but among historians, sociologists, and political theorists, there is a consensus of sorts that the post-war compact between industrial labor and capital in the rich North ended with the Reagan administration in the US, and the Thatcher regime in the UK. What followed is a very different economic and social reality: a ‘post-modern’ economy hitched not to production, but to consumption and consumer debt; a culture that had finally smudged the line between high and low art; and an explosion of media such that the public sphere had been increasingly privatized, unable to produce even the illusion of a shared culture.

This movement is better characterized as a late if vital expression of the modernist impulse

I labor this point about ‘postmodernism’ because the argument I will make now about what has been called ‘post-structuralism’, and what I have presumed to call instead ‘post-rationalism’, assumes its importance only in the face of a significant misunderstanding, one that the Right in the United States have exploited to no end: namely, that the term ‘postmodern’ has any application to the efflorescence of philosophical, literary, and political experimentation that characterized intellectual life in Paris in the run up to the riots and strikes of May 1968.

In my understanding, this movement is better characterized as a late if vital expression of the modernist impulse, this to be understood in all of its literary, philosophical, and political valences, and in light of all of its uneasy political contradictions. Jacques Lacan’s ‘Écrits’, for all their political ambivalence, are kin to Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ but also to Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, and indeed to Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’.