ABSTRACT
POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism is often understood in opposition to modernism, as a corrective movement that comes after-‘post’—modernism. As Derrida notes, ‘If modernism distinguishes itself by striving for absolute domination, then postmodernism might be the realisation or the experience of its end, the end of the plan of domination.’1 Not all, however, would accept this temporal distinction between modernism and postmodernism. Jürgen Habermas, for example, criticizes the prefix ‘post’ as being not only misguided in its ‘rejection’ of the past, but also weak in its failure to give the present a name. Meanwhile, for Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge remains a seminal work of postmodernist theory, the postmodern is precisely part of the modern. It amounts to a moment of recuperation within a cyclical process which leads to ever new modernisms.
