ABSTRACT
Culture is the one concept that is missing in the modernist as well as the postmodernist discourses. The unconscious reason why so many thinkers from the fin de siecle are invoked in contemporary discussions of postmodernism is that they fill the lacunae of today's dismally one-sided social theory. Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to observe that suicide becomes a problem for modern humans not only despite their enlightenment and bourgeois comfort, but because of them. Scholars seem to assume routinely that modernity, Enlightenment, and the postmodern circulation of fictions are self-begotten, that they exist a priori, and that they are not rooted in any sort of cultural tradition. Unlike Jean Baudrillard, Emile Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen ground reality in habits, collective representations, and the collective consciousness, in a word, culture. The Parsonian version of Durkheim shall be countered with the original, fin de siecle Durkheim.
