ABSTRACT
In chapter 1 we saw that Sokal and Bricmont describe postmodernism as ‘an intellectual current that is supposed to have replaced modern rationalist thought’.1 In this account postmodernism represents the end of the Enlightenment project, a descent from reason to irrationality, from consensus to irreconcilable difference, from the prospect of assured knowledge to a nightmare of free play and unsupported opinion, from civic and ethical responsibility to an anarchic, subject-less domain of irresponsible relativity. According to this view, postmodernism answers Kant’s first question, ‘What can I know?’, with a flippant, ‘Not much’.
